iry balls upon the
snow. Away beyond the limits of the camp stretched the desolate steppe
in a series of long snowy undulations, which blended gradually into
one great white frozen ocean, and were lost in the distance and
darkness of night. High overhead, in a sky which was almost black,
sparkled the bright constellations of Orion and the Pleiades--the
celestial clocks which marked the long, weary hours between sunrise
and sunset. The blue mysterious streamers of the aurora trembled in
the north, now shooting up in clear bright lines to the zenith, then
waving back and forth in great majestic curves over the silent camp,
as if warning back the adventurous traveller from the unknown regions
around the Pole. The silence was profound, oppressive. Nothing but
the pulsating of the blood in my ears, and the heavy breathing of the
sleeping men at my feet, broke the universal lull. Suddenly there rose
upon the still night air a long, faint> wailing cry like that of a
human being in the last extremity of suffering. Gradually it swelled
and deepened until it seemed to fill the whole atmosphere with its
volume of mournful sound, dying away at last into a low, despairing
moan. It was the signal-howl of a Siberian dog; but so wild and
unearthly did it seem in the stillness of the arctic midnight, that
it sent the startled blood bounding through my veins to my very
finger-ends. In a moment the mournful cry was taken up by another dog,
upon a higher key--two or three more joined in, then ten, twenty,
forty, sixty, eighty, until the whole pack of a hundred dogs howled
one infernal chorus together, making the air fairly tremble with
sound, as if from the heavy bass of a great organ. For fully a minute
heaven and earth seemed to be filled with yelling, shrieking fiends.
Then one by one they began gradually to drop off, the unearthly tumult
grew momentarily fainter and fainter, until at last it ended as it
began, in one long, inexpressibly melancholy wail, and all was still.
One or two of our men moved restlessly in their sleep, as if the
mournful howls had blended unpleasantly with their dreams; but no
one awoke, and a death-like silence again pervaded heaven and earth.
Suddenly the aurora shone out with increased brilliancy, and its
waving swords swept back and forth in great semicircles across the
dark starry sky, and lighted up the snowy steppe with transitory
flashes of coloured radiance, as if the gates of heaven were opening
and cl