The weather is unendurable, the temperature is -30° C. and an easterly gale is burying us in a huge drift of snow. With a high wind, an air thick with flying snow, and a temperature such as we have had for the past three days, ranging from -28° to -30°, it is utterly impossible to exist outside in the open blast. In calm weather such a temperature causes delight, but in a storm it gives rise to despair. I think it is Conan Doyle who says, “What companion is there like the great restless, throbbing polar sea? What human mood is there which it does not match and sympathise with?” I should like Mr. Doyle to spend one month with us on this great, restless, throbbing sea, under this dense, restless, throbbing blackness of the antarctic night. I am sure he would find conditions to drive his pen, but where is the companionship of a sea which with every heave brings a block of ice against your berth making your only hope of life, the bark, tremble from end to end. Where is the human being who will find sympathy in the howling winds under the polar night? For several days our beloved companion Danco has been failing. From nearly the very first day of his sickness I saw that, coming upon him as it had done in the dusk, it must prove fatal during the long antarctic night. To pass through a polar night, with its prolonged and awful cold, and remain well is a very difficult matter even for a man with sound organs. One who has not these, and perfect health, always fares badly in these sunless and lifeless polar days. Danco has had, unconsciously, for years a serious heart defect. For a time the heart walls increased in strength and thus a safe equilibrium was established; but to keep an even or compensatory balance, mild exercise was necessary in the open air with an abundance of sunlight. The sun has now been entirely absent for more than a fortnight, and for forty days its light has been of no physiological service. The atmosphere has been so constantly filled with snow and ice-crystals that, at best, the sun shone with less brilliancy than the moon, and that only for a few moments at midday. During all of this time Danco has not felt well; his manly courage, however, is such that he will not complain. But as the darkness becomes blacker, and the frigid night advances he has been compelled to surrender himself a candidate to the sick list. June 4.--The ice is again breaking and the pressure of the floes, as they ride over each other, makes a noise converting the otherwise dark quietude into a howling scene of groans. It is again snowing and the wind keeps veering from the north-west to north-east.