At about eight o'clock we were, as I reckoned, about five miles distant from the nearest elbow of the ice. But though a tall sea still ran, giving the hull the lofty motions of a stately dancer, the wind was sensibly taking off. A frightful time was this! for if the hull struck on the hurl of such a surge as still roared under us, she would go to pieces in the twinkling of an eye. I was constantly looking over the side, reckoning to find us setting on to some detached mass of drift stuff, flat, but not the less deadly for being awash, but saw none. Suddenly I perceived a light upon the horizon right over the bows. I fancied my vision deceived me, that the trend of the ice was not as I imagined it to be in that darkness, that the light was some burning mountain far past the barrier, and that a shift of wind or change of stream or tide had altered the bearings: this I conceived and rushed headlong for a bull's-eye, which I flashed upon the compass; but no! the indications were as before. What, then, was that light ahead? Miss Otway had followed me when I fled up the companion steps with a lighted bull's-eye. 'What is it?' she cried. 'What's that?' I exclaimed, pointing ahead in the starlight. But now, looking, I beheld a luminous arched cloud: it soared, always arched, increasing in brightness till the brow of it stood about twenty degrees above the horizon: the brightest of the stars shone wanly through it: then, whilst we watched, flashes of fire, darting like lightning, leapt from it; they changed into spiral columns of the brilliance of sunlight, scores of them, and they went twisting and streaming out of the cloud with the look of the rush of the Milky Way to the Zenith, whirling and winding their strands of fire into a very rope of flame, whose end seemed to search the furthest stardust. This wonderful, beautiful, sublime scene of joyous dancing, inwreathing lights, faded, but was quickly followed in the same quarter where the fiery curved cloud had shone by rich, straw-coloured arches of flame, linking and sinking and soaring, changing on a sudden with a vast spread of light, exactly fan shaped, and jewelled with colours manifold as the rainbow, as though it reflected some giant prism. 'What is it?' said Miss Otway, standing close beside me and speaking in a voice subdued by awe and astonishment. 'The Aurora Australis,' I answered, knowing it must be that by descriptions I remembered. We lost all sense of time in watching. In some of the sublimest recesses of that show of fire it was as though the heaven of God were opening: one held one's breath not knowing what the next revelation would be, what spectacle of winged spirit shapes would glance upon one's mortal vision out of those chasms of splendour which looked, with the glory that burned in them, to have been cloven to the very Throne.