I can imagine nothing more despairing than a storm on the edge of the pack. At best it is a cold, dull, and gloomy region, with a high humidity and constant drizzly fogs. Clear weather is here an exception. Storm with rain, sleet, and snow, is the normal weather condition throughout the entire year. During the day of the twenty-eighth we are unable to get a glimpse of the sun, and are in consequence in doubt as to our actual position. There is something about the sea and sky which promises a night of unusual terrors. The wind comes in a steady torrent from the east, and with it come alternate squalls of rain, sleet, and snow. Hour after hour it blew harder, and before night it brought with it a heavy sea studded with icebergs--moving mountains of blackness. The _Belgica_ runs westerly before it, almost under bare poles, and edges closer and closer toward the fragments of ice to the south, where the sea is easier. The sky to the north and east is smoky and wavy, as if a number of huge fires were there sending out gusts of smoke, and on the southern sky there is a bright pearly zone. This is an ice-blink, a reflection of the ice beyond our horizon upon the particles of watery vapour suspended in the air. As night comes upon us it becomes necessary to choose between the forbidding blackness of the north and the more cheerful, but less hospitable, whiteness of the south. With icebergs on every side, always in our course, coming as suddenly out of the thickening darkness as if dropped from the skies, it is not wise, or prudent, either to move out of, or to rest in, our position. To be more friendly with the ice, or to rid ourselves entirely of its companionship, is plainly our duty. We have decided to seek the harbouring influence of the pack, as an experiment, to ride out the increasing fury of the tempest. The _Belgica_ is headed southward, and quickly plows through the trembling icy seas. But the noise and commotion which come to a climax every time she rises to the crest of a great swell, are terrible. The wind beats through the rigging like the blasts out of a blowpipe, the quivering masts sweep the sky with the regularity of a pendulum, and the entire ship is covered with a sheet of ice. As the eye drops over the side of the ship the sea glitters with the brightness of a winter sky. This brightness of the sea, with the sooty blackness of the heavens above it, formed a weird contrast, never to be forgotten. Here and there are sparkling, semi-luminous pieces of ice which spring from the darkness with meteoric swiftness, and are again as quickly lost in the gathering blackness behind us. These fragments increase in number and in size as we press poleward; but the _Belgica_ strikes and pushes them aside as easily as a broom removes dust.