The air is cold and bracing, bringing with it a wine of action which is opposed to fatigue. With it we seem to require little sleep, keeping at hard physical and mental work from early morning till midnight. With the much lower temperature the air is now getting glassy, the fog is dispersing, and the sky shows signs of clearing, with considerable colour. Mirages were seen to-night for the first time. All along the horizon, from the north-east to the south-east, there are elongated, raised and distorted masses of ice, with their bases resting upon the water. There seem to be no inverted images, as in the arctic regions. The sun set in the south-south-west to-night at 7:30. We rarely have a sky at the edge of the pack permitting a view of this phenomenon, but we can notice that the days are rapidly getting shorter, and the light is progressively fading. Only two weeks ago we could take instantaneous photographs until ten o’clock, but now, a picture taken at eight is very feeble. With the sun almost perpetually screened by a black icy mist the sky has remained cheerless and depressing, but southerly winds seem to brush aside this gloomy curtain. Along the southern sky to-night there is a streak of gold, fringed with orange and a suggestion of carmine. At best, however, colours are sparingly distributed along the outer fringe of this antarctic pack. We have seen the stars and the moon but once since entering the Pacific, and, to the present, there have been no auroras visible. [Illustration: Lecointe Making Observations. The Nautical Observatory.] [Illustration: Dobrowolski Measuring the Depth of the Snowfall.] February 22, 8 A.M.--During the night we have rested easily in a triangular space of water, which was surrounded by large pans of ice. At about midnight a half gale of wind came out of the south-south-east and rushed through the masts with a bitter howl, but the sea remained quiet, and in our position we rested as peacefully as if in a sheltered harbour. This changed direction and augmented force of the wind separated the pack and sent it drifting northerly over the boundless sea. Taking advantage of this favourable loosening of the grip upon us, we got up steam at six A. M. and started in a renewed effort to push southward. The navigation, at best, is extremely difficult. We go ahead squeezing through breaks in the ice until our headway is barred by a floe, then we go astern to give the ship time for a new onslaught. In this way we batter and ram the ice until it seems as though every timber must break; but excepting the bruising, scraping, and polishing of her sides, the _Belgica_ receives no hurts. She complains and groans and cracks and shivers, but she goes on cutting great pans of ice five feet thick, and pushing aside floes two hundred feet in diameter. She is ploughing the ice-littered sea like something animate.