of
astonishment and exclamations of "God have mercy!" from the startled
natives, these innumerable bars began to move back and forth, with a
swift dancing motion, along the whole extent of both arches, passing
one another from side to side with such bewildering rapidity that
the eye was lost in the attempt to follow them. The whole concave of
heaven seemed transformed into one great revolving kaleidoscope of
shattered rainbows. Never had I even dreamed of such an aurora as
_this_, and I am not ashamed to confess that its magnificence for a
moment overawed and almost frightened me. The whole sky, from zenith
to horizon, was "one molten mantling sea of colour and fire;--crimson
and purple, and scarlet and green, and colours for which there are no
words in language and no ideas in the mind--things which can only be
conceived while they are visible." The "signs and portents" in the
heavens were grand enough to herald the destruction of a world;
flashes of rich quivering colour, covering half the sky for an instant
and then vanishing like summer lightning; brilliant green streamers
shooting swiftly but silently up across the zenith; thousands of
variegated bars sweeping past one another in two magnificent arches,
and great luminous waves rolling in from the inter-planetary spaces
and breaking in long lines of radiant glory upon the shallow
atmosphere of a darkened world.

With the separation of the two arches into bars the aurora reached its
utmost magnificence, and from that time its supernatural beauty slowly
but steadily faded. The first arch broke up, and soon after it the
second; the flashes of colour appeared less and less frequently; the
luminous bands ceased to revolve across the zenith; and in an hour
nothing remained in the dark starry heavens to remind us of the
aurora, except a few faint Magellan clouds of luminous vapour.

The month of February wore slowly away, and March found us still
living in Anadyrsk, without any news from the Major, or from the
missing men, Arnold and Macrae. Fifty-seven days had now elapsed since
they left their camp on the lower Anadyr, and we began to fear that
they would never again be seen. Whether they had starved, or frozen
to death on some great desolate plain south of Bering Strait, or been
murdered by the Chukchis, we could not conjecture, but their long
absence was a proof that they had met with some misfortune.

I was not at all satisfied with the route over which we had pa