The morning is perfect, as we regard weather. The thermometer is at -23° C. There is almost no wind, and every break in the pack is covered by a thick sheet of new ice. We expected cold, clear weather, but it was otherwise yesterday and last night. The wind howled, the ice was again torn into small pieces, and there was a great amount of pressure evident in the lines of hummocks running easterly and westerly. Either we have come against some obstruction southward, or the northerly pressure is extraordinary. During the night we were anxious about the safety of the _Belgica_; for, as the fury of the wind rushed over us, the ice was broken and the vessel was subjected to a great amount of pressure. The ice is heaped up around the _Belgica_ in huge walls from five to twenty feet in height. The floes are turning, giving the good old ship hard jabs in her ribs. She takes the savage blows with an agonizing moan. Although the pressure has been such that we packed our kits and were prepared to try the hospitality of the pack, there has been no real injury which we can discover. We were extremely glad, this morning, to find that the broken ice had been reunited, and we soon learned that the raised walls about would prove an effective embankment in future battles with the storms. At noon there was a faint show of a dawn. The sky in the north was touched with light fiery clouds. The snow had upon it not the slightest suggestion of this red, but remained a dull gray, while the sky above was a smoky blue. One not familiar with the freaks of polar day would have thought the sun would surely rise, or that it had just sunk under the snow, but we know only too well that we are doomed to see it make a fainter and fainter display at noon for three more weeks. Precisely at twelve o’clock a strange rectangular block of fire appeared in the east-south-east. Its size was that of a small tabular iceberg, but it had a dull crimson glow which made the scene at once weird and fascinating. Its base rested on the horizon and it seemed to rise, brighten, and move northerly. The sky here was a purple, thinly veiled by a light smoky haze, caused by icy crystals in the lower stratus of atmosphere, but there was not another speck of redness on this side of the heavens except the orange bow usually seen over the twilight zone. We watched this with considerable awe and amazement for ten minutes before we could determine its meaning. It passed through several stages of forms, finally it separated, and we discovered that it was the moon. It was in fact a sort of mirage of the moon, but the strange rectangular distortion, the fiery aspect, and its huge size, made a sight long to be remembered.