5. On the forenoon of the 1st of November, the land lay to the north-west of us in the twilight. The lines of rocks were so clearly and distinctly seen, that we were convinced that it could be reached without endangering our return to the ship. There was no room for hesitation; full of energy and wild excitement, we clambered over the ice-walls lying to the northward, which consisted of barriers, fifty feet high, of huge pieces of ice recently forced up amid the pressure. These passed, we came on a broad surface of young ice, which showed that there had been open water there a short time before. Over the surface of this young ice we now ran towards the land. We crossed the ice-foot and actually stepped on it. Snow and rocks and broken ice surrounded us on every side; a land more desolate could not be found on earth than the island we walked on; all this we saw not. To us it was a paradise; and this paradise we called Wilczek Island. 6. So great was our joy at having reached the Land at last, that we bestowed on all we saw an attention which, in itself it in no way merited. We looked into every rent in the rocks, we touched every block, we were ravished with the varied forms and outlines which each crevice presented. We talked in grand style of the frozen slopes of its hollows as glaciers! Nothing was of greater moment in these first hours than the question of its geological character, and great was our surprise to find here the same rocks, with which we had become acquainted at the Pendulum Islands during the second German North Polar Expedition. The columnar conformation of these Dolerite rocks singularly resembled those of Griper Roads and Shannon Island. The vegetation was indescribably meagre and miserable, consisting merely of a few lichens. The drift-wood we expected to find was no where to be seen. We looked for traces of the reindeer and the fox, but our search was utterly fruitless. The land appeared to be without a single living creature. We then ascended a rocky height on the southern margin of the island, whence we had a view of the frozen ocean extending some miles beyond the ship. There was something sublime to the imagination in the utter loneliness of a land never before visited; felt all the more from the extraordinary character of our position. We had become exceedingly sensitive to new impressions, and a golden mist which rose on the southern horizon of an invisible ice-hole, and which spread itself, like an undulating curtain, before the glow of the noontide heavens, had to us the charm of a landscape in Ceylon.