4. For some days we had entered into a world utterly strange to most of us on board the _Tegetthoff_. Dense mists frequently enveloped us, and from out of the mantle of snow of the distant land the rocks, like decayed battlements, frowned on us inhospitably. There is no more melancholy sound than that which accompanies the decay and waste of the ice, as it is constantly acted on by the sea and thaw, and no picture more sad and solemn than the continuous procession of icebergs floating like huge white biers towards the south. Ever and anon there rises the noise of the ocean swell breaking amongst the excavations of the ice-floes, while the water oozing out from their icy walls falls with monotonous sound into the sea; or perhaps a mass of snow, deprived of its support, drops into the waves, to disappear in them with a hissing sound as of a flame. Never for a moment ceases the crackling and snapping sound produced by the bursting of the external portions of the ice. Magnificent cascades of thaw-water precipitate themselves down the sides of the icebergs, which sometimes rend with a noise as of thunder as the beams of the sun play on them. The fall of the titanic mass raises huge volumes of foam, and the sea-birds, which had rested on its summit in peaceful confidence, rise with terrified screams, soon to gather again on another ice-colossus. 5. But what a change, when the sun, surrounded by glowing cirrus clouds, breaks through the mist, and the blue of the heavens gradually widens out! The masses of vapour, as they well up, recede to the horizon, and the cold ice-floes become in the sunlight dark borders to the “leads” which gleam between them, on the trembling surface of which the midnight sun is mirrored. Where the rays of the sun do not directly fall on it, the ice is suffused with a faint rosy haze, which deepens more and more as the source of light nears the horizon. Then the sunbeams fall drowsily and softly, as through a veil of orange gauze, all forms lose at a little distance their definition, the shadows become fainter and fainter, and all nature assumes a dreamy aspect. In calm nights the air is so mild that we forget we are in the home of ice and snow. A deep ultramarine sky stretches over all, and the outlines of the ice and the land tremble on the glassy surface of the water. If we pull in a boat over the unmoved mirror of the “ice-holes,” close beside us a whale may emerge from its depths, like a black shining mountain; if a ship penetrates into the waste, it looks as weird as the “Flying Dutchman,” and the dense columns of smoke, which rise in eddies from her funnel, remain fixed for hours until they gradually melt away. When the sun sinks at midnight to the edge of the horizon, then all life becomes dumb, and the icebergs, the rocks, the glaciers of the land glow in a rosy, effulgence, so that we are hardly conscious of the desolation. The sun has reached its lowest