The following description of this scene of desolation, as it first broke upon Behring's eye, is due to the imagination of Eugene Sue:--"The month of September," he says, "is at its close. The equinox has come with darkness, and sullen night will soon displace the short and gloomy days of the Pole. The sky, of a dark violet color, is feebly lighted by a sun which dispenses no heat, and whose white disk, scarcely elevated above the horizon, pales before the dazzling brightness of the snow. To the north, this desert is bounded by a coast bristling with black and gigantic rocks. At the foot of their Titanic piles lies motionless the vast ice-bound ocean. To the east appears a line of darkish green, whence seem to creep forth numerous white and glassy icebergs. This is the channel which now bears the name of Behring. Beyond it, and towering above it, are the vast granitic masses of Cape Prince of Wales, the extreme point of North America. These desolate latitudes are beyond the pale of the habitable world. The piercing cold rends the very stones, cleaves the trees, and bursts the ground, which groans in producing the germs of its icy herbage. A few black pines, the growth of centuries, pointing their distorted tops in different directions of the solitude, like crosses in a churchyard, have been torn up and hurled around in confusion by the storm. The raging hurricane, not content with uprooting trees, drives mountains of ice before it, and dashes them, with the crash of thunder, the one against the other.