the long twilight which succeeds an arctic day, our little
train of eleven sledges drew near the place where, from Chukchi
accounts, we expected to find the long-exiled party of Americans. The
night was clear, still, and intensely cold, the thermometer at sunset
marking forty-four degrees below zero, and sinking rapidly to -50 deg.
as the rosy flush in the west grew fainter and fainter, and darkness
settled down upon the vast steppe. Many times before, in Siberia and
Kamchatka, I had seen nature in her sterner moods and winter garb;
but never before had the elements of cold, barrenness, and desolation
seemed to combine into a picture so dreary as the one which was
presented to us that night near Bering Strait. Far as eye could pierce
the gathering gloom in every direction lay the barren steppe like a
boundless ocean of snow, blown into long wave-like ridges by previous
storms. There was not a tree, nor a bush, nor any sign of animal or
vegetable life, to show that we were not travelling on a frozen ocean.
All was silence and desolation. The country seemed abandoned by God
and man to the Arctic Spirit, whose trembling banners of auroral
light flared out fitfully in the north in token of his conquest and
dominion. About eight o'clock the full moon rose huge and red in the
east, casting a lurid glare over the vast field of snow; but, as if it
too were under the control of the Arctic Spirit, it was nothing more
than the mockery of a moon, and was constantly assuming the most
fantastic and varied shapes. Now it extended itself laterally into a
long ellipse, then gathered itself up into the semblance of a huge red
urn, lengthened out to a long perpendicular bar with rounded ends,
and finally became triangular. It can hardly be imagined what added
wildness and strangeness this blood-red distorted moon gave to a scene
already wild and strange. We seemed to have entered upon some frozen
abandoned world, where all the ordinary laws and phenomena of Nature
were suspended, where animal and vegetable life were extinct, and from
which even the favour of the Creator had been withdrawn. The intense
cold, the solitude, the oppressive silence, and the red, gloomy
moonlight, like the glare of a distant but mighty conflagration, all
united to excite in the mind feelings of awe, which were perhaps
intensified by the consciousness that never before had any human
being, save a few Wandering Chukchis, ventured in winter upon these
domains of t