5. Even in the month of July, the weather was generally gloomy and unsettled. We had several times two or three inches of snow, and the showers were mingled with mist, rain, and snow, as had been the case in June. The winds were generally from the west; the mean temperature of the month was 34·7° F.; on the 8th of July, the black-bulb thermometer marked 108° F., and the temperature in the shade at the same date amounted to 34° F. But neither wind nor temperature made any change in our position. The sun on which our liberation depended was seldom visible; and the winds on which we had counted failed to blow. For weeks we watched for the formation of fissures round the ship. Fissures indeed were formed, but at such a distance that they were utterly useless to us. On the 16th of June, one opened towards the south-east; but it was at least two miles distant, and in the middle of July it was only half a mile nearer to us. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was to be seen from the deck but ice, and Klotz, coming down one day from the top-sail yard, described our position with a melancholy laconic brevity: “Nix als Eisch, und nix als Eisch, und nit a bisserl a Wosser. (_Nothing but ice, ice everywhere, and not a patch of water._)” Amid such impressions all hope gradually left us. The drifting of the ice ceased to animate our hopes. Even the approach of a fissure on the 29th of July to the distance of three-quarters of a mile, in consequence of heavy gales from the south and west, ended in miserable disappointment. A movement in the ice which began a little way off on the 6th of August resulted only in the diminishing of our floe. There was no essential change in the remainder of this month, except that the monthly mean temperature fell to 32·7° F. We had the greatest extreme of heat on the 4th of August, 41·9° F.; but on the last day of the month we had 5·7 degrees of cold.