We are now doomed to remain, and become the football of an unpromising fate. Henceforth we are to be kicked, pushed, squeezed, and ushered helplessly at the mercy of the pack. Our first duty is to prepare for the coming of the night, with its unknowable cold and its soul-depressing effects. Aboard, the crew are re-storing coal and re-arranging the store of provisions. The scientific men are making plans for a year of observations, while the cook is racking his brain to devise some new dishes to appease our fickle appetites. His soups are full of “mystery,” and the “embalmed meats” are on every tongue for condemnation. Outside there has been a rapid transformation. The summer days of midnight suns are past, and the premonitory darkness of the long night is falling upon us with marvellous rapidity, for in this latitude the sun dips below the southern skies at midnight late in January. This dip increases, and sweeps more and more of the horizon every day until early in May, when the sun sets and remains below the horizon for seventy-one days. When we first skirted the pack-ice in February there were a few hours, at midnight, of bright twilight. The darkness then was not sufficient to prevent navigation throughout the night; but now it is really dark for eight hours. The temperature, too, is falling rapidly. We have been led to believe by the experiences of previous antarctic explorers that the temperature, compared with arctic, would be more moderate; but in this we are disappointed. An icy wind comes from the south, brushing the warm, moist air seaward and replacing it by a sharp, frigid atmosphere. The temperature falls to ten degrees below zero, then to twenty (and later it descends to thirty, forty, and finally forty-five). [Illustration: Racovitza at the Microscope.] [Illustration: Arctowski in the Laboratory.] Soon after we entered the main body of the pack a fortnight ago, it was discovered that we drifted with the ice in a south-westerly direction. We concluded, at that time, that we were in a current. The shallow sea and the speed with which we moved were in favour of this theory; but now we are drifting north-westerly, and we begin to doubt the existence of a current. The ease with which the entire horizon, with its numerous mountains and fields of ice, sails over the invisible sea makes us anxious as to our destiny. If we remain here, on this blank space of the globe, where will we find ourselves a year hence? Will it be north, south, east or west? In this drift it is possible that the ship may be dragged over a submerged reef, and it is also possible that we may be carried onto a rocky shore, or against the formidable land-ice. In each case destruction of our vessel and a miserable death for all must be the inevitable result.