11. Monotonous beyond all monotony is life in the long night of a Polar winter, and exile can never on earth be so entire as here under the dreadful triumvirate—darkness, cold, and solitude. In such a life, the man who surrenders himself to idleness, or even to sleeping during the day, must necessarily be utterly demoralized. In fact, nothing can be more destructive to an expedition wintering in the Arctic regions than the indulgence of mental or bodily lassitude. The real ground of the failure of the attempts made in earlier times to winter in Jan Mayen and other places in the far North was probably the utter want of discipline. There is, however, a widely spread, though mistaken view, that the long day of Polar lands is oppressive to man. Nothing is more untrue; for not continual light, but constant darkness, is distressing. Continual daylight heightens the energies and vital powers; and yet, in our own first winter, it was less the darkness which wore us than the perpetual anxiety; when our greatest consolation was found in the Arabic proverb, “_In niz beguzared_” (_This too will pass away_), inscribed on our cabin wall. 12. After supper, before going to bed, we smoked our cigars in the shed over the cabin steps, with a thermometer from 25° to 37° below zero C., and talked pleasantly over bygone days, though our thoughts were not unmixed with gloomy forebodings, as we heard ever and anon the ominous sounds that issued from the moving ice. Existence on board a straining and groaning ship resembles life over a volcano. It was only after we had been some time in this ice-covered wooden grotto that the temperature rose, through our own heat, a few degrees, and it was certainly some testimony to the excellence of my down-quilted clothes that I could wear them in the cabin without being distressed by the heat, and yet I was able to sit the whole evening in this freezing hole without suffering from cold. A train-oil lamp sends out almost more smoke than light, and when the snow drifted, we had to contend with the importunities of the dogs, who seemed to regard the deck shed as a great dog-kennel. With a sudden rise of the outer temperature this shed became utterly uninhabitable, for its coating of ice then melted and fell down like rain.