ady at Cape Columbia,
with a good store of fresh meat for the winter, and our party all in
good health, we entered the Great Dark with fairly contented hearts. Our
ship was apparently safe; we were well housed and well fed; and if
sometimes the terrible melancholy of the dark clutched for a moment at
the hearts of the men, they bravely kept the secret from each other and
from me.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE LONG NIGHT

It may well be doubted if it is possible for a person who has never
experienced four months of constant darkness to imagine what it is.
Every school boy learns that at the two ends of the earth the year is
composed of one day and one night of equal length, and the intervening
periods of twilight; but the mere recital of that fact makes no real
impression on his consciousness. Only he who has risen and gone to bed
by lamplight, and risen and gone to bed again by lamplight, day after
day, week after week, month after month, can know how beautiful is the
sunlight.

During the long arctic night we count the days till the light shall
return to us, sometimes, toward the end of the dark period, checking off
the days on the calendar--thirty-one days, thirty days, twenty-nine
days, and so on, till we shall see the sun again. He who would
understand the old sun worshipers should spend a winter in the Arctic.

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

ILLUMINATION OF THE ROOSEVELT IN WINTER QUARTERS ON A MOONLIGHT NIGHT

Showing the Ice Pressure Close to the Ship]

Imagine us in our winter home on the _Roosevelt_, four hundred and fifty
miles from the North Pole: the ship held tight in her icy berth, a
hundred and fifty yards from the shore, the ship and the surrounding
world covered with snow, the wind creaking in the rigging, whistling and
shrieking around the corners of the deck houses, the temperature ranging
from zero to sixty below and the ice-pack in the channel outside
groaning and complaining with the movement of the tides.

During the moonlit period of each month, some eight or ten days, when
the moon seems to circle round and round the heavens, the younger
members of the expedition were nearly always away on hunting trips; but
during the longer periods of utter blackness most of us were on the ship
together, as the winter hunting is done only by moonlight.

It must be understood that the arctic moon has its regular phases, its
only peculiarity being the course it appears