We rested on the oars while Racovitza and Arctowski did the honours of the expedition; we tried to follow them with our glasses as we rocked about in the boat, but soon lost sight of their movements in the darkness. We were able to locate Arctowski by the dull echo of his hammer, and we were able to trace Racovitza by the chorus of penguins which greeted him from rock to rock. The alternate interchange of the music of the hammer and the war song of the penguins was an entertainment which to Gerlache and myself, will be a long and weird remembrance. At about midnight we returned to the rocky ledge to pick up our companions with their loads of rocks and bags of game. The inhabitants did not like their visitors. The penguins assembled about us, picking at our feet; the gulls hovered threateningly about our heads; and even the harmless cormorants dashed to and fro over us, stretching their long necks to ask our mission. Worst of all the sea-leopards clambered over the rocks near us, snorting and defiantly showing their teeth and rolling their large, glassy eyes. As we left it was too dark to see the movement of an animal one hundred yards from shore, but the peculiar whiteness which rested on the scene made it possible to take a photograph of the island with good details. During the few hours of night we rested under easy steam, and in the morning we found ourselves well into the bight (Hughes Inlet) which we had entered. The land before us retreated and offered even greater hopes of a passage southward. At five o’clock the sun had already risen over the snowy heights of the east and was under the banks of black clouds which sailed out of the west. There was a solitude and restfulness about this sunburst, and the new world of ice under it which is difficult to describe. Our position at this time was in the centre of a wide waste of water, about twelve miles away from the nearest land. We were too far from the rocks to see birds, and except for an occasional spout of a whale there was nothing to mar the dead silence. A strange pang of loneliness came over us as we paced the deck. There were indications of channels to the south and west, but from the distance at which we reviewed the lands every projection seemed a continuous mass of impenetrable crystal solitude. Could there be a place more desperately silent or more hopelessly deserted? CHAPTER X DISCOVERIES IN A NEW WORLD OF ICE (CONTINUED)