Outside the scene was beautiful, the sun was in the south, low on the horizon, spreading golden rays over thin stratus clouds to the zenith. In the north the moon was high, and though somewhat paled by the sun it was bright, and stood out in the cold, cloudless blue like a ball of lustreless silver. The endless sea of ice under us was ridged by a line of pressure, at right angles to the line of force, which was from south-west to north-east, and separated by inky lanes of water parallel to the lines. The entire ice was a mass of quivering blue. It was thus midnight and midsummer, and New Year’s Day, and to this series of strange contradictions we owe the peculiar phenomenon of seeing both the sun and the moon at the same time, and that at a nocturnal scene. [Illustration] CHAPTER XXIX FREED FROM THE ICE-EMBRACES--RETURN TO CIVILISATION January 5.--We are satisfied with the success of our mission to the present. We should like to terminate our campaign with a striking sweep of discoveries, such as marked our beginning last year, but such a hope is now quite beyond the range of possibility. Our provisions are nearly all used, and to penetrate again into another part of this ice-strewn sea, with our present equipment, would be injudicious. We are inclined to bundle our results, and quit the under-world of ice as soon as the ice breaks enough to give us freedom. [Illustration: Curious Weather-worn Icebergs, 300 Feet High.] Indeed, we ought to be contented with the unparalleled series of scientific records which are now written in our journals. Beginning with Tierra del Fuego, we have secured ethnological data of a race of primitive people, scientifically unknown; there we have also read the story of two vanishing American races; while the naturalist and geologist have worked out facts and gathered specimens unique in value and usefulness. We have sounded the unknown seas between the terminating point of South America and the antarctic land. In the new regions south of Cape Horn we have discovered many islands, and several hundred miles of the coast of a great country. Passing into the pack-ice we have drifted thousands of miles over the bed of a virgin sea; have discovered a great submarine bank, and have collected skeletons and skins of a curious life, previously almost unknown. Racovitza has hundreds of bottles of odd-looking specimens of creatures in alcohol, and his notes record, for the first time, the life story of antarctic fauna throughout the year. Arctowski has a record of hourly meteorological observations taken systematically, night and day, during one year. This, too, is a valuable record, for previously we have had only a few short notes on the climate of the summer months of the antarctic. Lecointe has made a painstaking series of magnetic observations, which will be useful in making valuable deductions for the compass, in the southern hemisphere. There are many studies