it was not the ice that stopped our travellers—it was the soft snow. Some idea of its fleecy lightness may be gathered from the fact that ten measures of it could easily be pressed into one, and that one melted into only one-tenth its bulk of water. Everyone noticed the beauty of its crystals; they were delicate eighteen-rayed stars, rayed not in one plane, but in all. In British Columbia and other parts of Canada, when such soft snow interferes with travelling, it is usual to camp for a day or so—perhaps under a comfortable tree—and, when the snow has hardened a little, make a firm path for the sledge, or long tobbogin, by tramping in advance on snow-shoes. But we might have waited till permanent darkness set in before our snow hardened. Our sledges, perfect as they were for their own work, were not suited for land travelling over soft snow; and as snow-shoes had never been used by Arctic Expeditions, we had but two pairs in the ship. There are two causes that tend to harden and cake the surface of snow—the first is wind, and we had comparatively little of that; the second is a contrast in temperature between the earth below and the air above the snow. When the lower part of the snow is twenty or thirty degrees warmer than the upper, evaporation takes place from the one, and condensation in the other. At Floeberg Beach the earth was permanently cold. Even in midsummer only a few inches of the surface thawed, and during the whole winter it remained close to zero, so that it was not until the intensely cold weather of spring that any marked contrast was established. [Illustration: INSIDE THE UNIFILER HOUSE.] Two days before the return of the last autumn party the sun sank below the south horizon, not to return for nearly five months. We climbed Cairn Hill to have a last look at him, but the high land southwards hid him from view. His refracted rays still lit up the ice of the northern horizon, but Floeberg Beach and the pack, for a mile outside the ship, lay in the shadow of the land. Away southwards to the right, the sides of the Greenland hills caught the sunlight, and through the gaps in their undulating outline a distant horizontal plain of _mer de glace_, the northern termination of Greenland’s continental ice, was yet distinguishable at intervals.