November 25.--Latitude 70° 25′, longitude 83° 27′. For more than a week the sun has sailed around our heavens without setting, and thus we have entered upon our summer nightless days. We should have seen its warm glow at midnight and at midday, but we have not seen it at all, not even for one hour, during this time. By this I do not mean that it is dark; in fact, it is quite the contrary. It is too light. The sky has been constantly lined with thick clouds, and there has been an endless period of fog and snow; but under all of this opacity the light, by refraction from the cold mist and by reflection from the dazzling whiteness of the unbroken snow, has been so great that all who have not worn goggles have complained of incipient snow-blindness. At night, or during the sleeping hours, the men are compelled to hang black cloths over the ports to gain sleep and rest from the diffused, piercing light. Nearly every one is suffering, more or less, from insomnia, and the cases which have been mentally deranged before show new signs of disturbance. Thus, though the light, even during cloudy days, is too strong for our eyes, and at night too piercing to permit sleep we long, with an intensity impossible to describe, to see the unobscured face of the sun, and we hunger for its warm, life-giving rays. November 26.--At last we have had a little direct sunshine, and what seems very strange is that this has come to us with continued northerly winds. Without exception thus far, the wind from this direction has been warm and humid, bringing clouds, snow, rain and everything to make life uncomfortable. We can only come to one conclusion, which is that we have been steadily driven south against the main body of a closer pack. The pack before us towards the open sea, of which there is perhaps not less than three hundred miles, has been driven together. With such a condition of things we might suppose that the wind would not be so thoroughly charged with pack vapour. But this is a hypothesis. The fact is that we have fair weather, which is unusual with wind from any direction but south, and we are feasting our souls on direct sunny rays, the first in weeks. [Illustration: On January 1st, 1899, the _Belgica_ was still Hopelessly Held in a Field of Ice Two Miles in Diameter, while within Two Thousand Feet there was a Long Open Expanse of Navigable Water.]