There is a dreamy stillness in the air, in spite of the frequent stirs of wild life, and a charming touch of colour to the sea, the ice, and the land, though the sky is dull, gray, and gloomy. At first glance all seems white and black, and we are impressed with the weight of the awful snowy solitude into which we are entering. A sense of chilly loneliness is more and more forced upon us by the passing panorama of snow, and ice, and deserted rocks. But, critically considered, after the first pangs of desolation have passed, there are a few of us who find some cheer and colour in the harmony of the perennial chilliness before us. This morning there was a break in the clouds, and through this came a flood of yellow light which made the bergs and the icy cliffs of Alexanderland stand out like walls of gold. Shortly after noon a pale blue was thrown over the white glitter of the pack, which increased the high lights, darkened the shadows, and made the moving mass of whiteness, as it rose and fell with the giant wave of the sea, a thing of gladness. [Illustration: OSGOOD ART COLORTYPE CO., CHI. & N. Y. Midnight At Midsummer Over The Antarctic Mainland] At four o’clock in the afternoon we had made a rough outline of the new land before us. It proved to be a group of islands (Alexander Islands) about twenty-five miles long and from ten to fifteen miles wide. There is one large central island, about eighteen miles long, with a high ridge of mountains running approximately from east to west. In this ridge there are three peaks not less than four thousand, five hundred feet in altitude. These are quite pyramidal in form and are covered with snow to their summits, with only an occasional bare, perpendicular rock. This ridge of mountains tapers gradually towards the west and terminates abruptly in the east. Running parallel to this central ridge, about four miles southward, there is a lesser chain of mountains about two thousand feet high, whose sides sink almost perpendicularly into the sea. There is also a similar ridge to the southward. The two valleys between these three ridges of mountains are filled with great sheets of glacial ice. We had a splendid view of these glaciers as we passed about twenty miles off the western end of the island. The northern valley was rough, much crevassed, and generally irregular, extending its tongue out over the sea for several miles. The valley south of the central ridge appeared like a great plain with easy slopes toward the sea, where the frozen mass seemed to project over the waters for a short distance. Around this one large island were a number of small islands, angular rocky masses, mostly covered with caps of glacial ice. These, from a greater distance, appeared to be a part of the main central land mass. The vast number of icebergs to the eastward of the land gave it, also, from a greater distance, the appearance of being connected with some larger land eastward; but from our various