The sharp, rough angles of the hard ice project like the ribs of a famished animal, making a picture quite as melancholy in the feeble light of winter and early summer. Snow, deep, soft snow, has upon this coarse framework an effect like that of fat on the animal. It covers the ugly open rifts, pads the sharp corners, and it gives a smooth, pleasant, rounded surface to the pack in general. It buries the unpleasant ruggedness and the gloomy blackness under a velvety covering of white, which is always pleasing to the eye. It gives to the pack a face at once suggestive of warmth and fertility. It is only within the past few days that we have had sufficient snow at one time to give to our moving sea of ice this much-to-be-desired aspect. Snow has fallen in great quantities; not softly and without wind, but noisily and with the never-ceasing gale which is so characteristic of this region. The quantities, however, have been sufficient to bury the _Belgica_ in a huge drift, and the bare ridges, hummocks and irregularities, are softened by the most beautiful crystal drift in which the sunbeams play like kittens. December 16.--There appears to be a promise in the air and in the quick rising of the barometer which bespeaks a tempest, and how we long for it! Almost the entire year has been one long monotonous series of tempests, but now that we need one to break asunder the floe which retains us as prisoners, and open navigable leads of water, it is tardy in making its appearance. For nearly two months the barometer has been steady, and only spasmodic jerks or varying breezes have driven us about. If we had had but one of the many tempests which, during the winter, made life so miserable, we might have been freed. The temperature is rapidly rising; now generally about -2° C., at midday slightly above zero, and at midnight from -6° C. to -10° C. We thus have our greatest diurnal range. The snow on the pack is melting with a surprising rapidity, and about the ship there is a zone of water in which she sits in her natural environment. The pack everywhere is breaking into small pans, but our old floe holds together with a surprising tenacity; it is about seven miles in circumference, and is lessening very slowly along its fringe, but apparently the snow which the masts have swept and condensed out of the winds holds it with unnatural firmness, for it is certainly the largest floe in our neighbourhood. We watch every new piece which is torn off its edge with a pleasure and an assumed confidence of an early liberation, but if the _Belgica_ were now in free water she could do nothing but wait. The ice is so closely packed that progress would be absolutely impossible.