March 27.--During the night we had a striking auroral display. It began shortly after eight as a luminous patch, seemingly a part of an arc. This brightened and faded, and at nine it disappeared entirely. A half-hour later a complete arc was visible with a ragged patch of a second arc under it. At ten o’clock bunches of rays converging towards a common centre alternately brightened and faded over the steady luminosity of the arc. This gave the phenomenon an appearance of movement. At eleven o’clock the aurora was very bright and the sky under it seemed much darker. Later the fantastic displays settled into a plain white arc, with a steadily fading glow. The wind this morning is still light and southerly. The sky has a brisk wintry look--a quivering high pale blue, lined by a few orange-tinged and violet alto-stratus clouds near the horizon, which seem to be placed there for the express purpose of striking a contrast and a line of division between the azure of the heavens, and the blue of the surface snows. The ice has separated much northward and westward. The leads running south-west and north-east have a general breadth of sixty feet and are mostly covered by a green sheet of new ice. Nearly everybody is out on _ski_ for recreation to-day. Some are on hunting excursions, others are visiting icebergs for toboggan and _ski_ sports, but all are trying to have a royal good time, as they generally do on Sundays when the weather will permit. Gerlache, Danco, and I went on a long journey due north to examine the ice and, if possible, visit a huge tabular iceberg which we estimated was eight or nine miles away. We found the ice very much crevassed, but there was everywhere a tendency for the floes to unite and assemble into a larger conglomerate sheet, which we call a field because from one edge we cannot see its termination. The snow was hard and fairly even, making excellent _ski_ travelling except at the pressure angles where the fields pommelled each other, raising rough uneven ridges. Most of the leads were covered with new ice sufficiently strong to bear our weights on _skis_. We saw little life. There were many penguin tracks on the snow with a general northerly direction, from which we concluded that the little creatures with good sense had migrated northward. We saw also some blow-holes of seals, but no life except a few snow petrels. The whole white world about us was deserted. The berg was a much greater distance from the ship than we had estimated, for after we had wandered over the ice six miles the great wall seemed as far away as ever. We should have continued our journey, but Danco found himself unable to follow because of “shortness of breath.” At the limit of our journey, looking north-westerly, we saw a series of low yellow clouds, and under these a vague, irregular outline which had the appearance of land.