re made, we chafed more and more at the delay, for it was very plain
that the prospect of visiting Point Hope grew less and less; but this is
a great country for teaching patience and resignation.

[Sidenote: PARASELENAE]

Some of the weather during that two weeks' wait was of quite exceptional
severity. One night is fixed for ever in my memory. It is a very rare
thing for the wind to blow in the "strong cold," but that night there
was a wind at 58 deg. below zero. And high up in the heavens was a sight I
had never seen before. The moon, little past her full, had a great ring
around her, faintly prismatic; and equidistant from her, where a line
through her centre parallel with the horizon would cut the ring, were
two other moons, distinct and clear. It was a strangely beautiful thing,
this sight of three moons sailing aloft through the starry sky, as
though the beholder had been suddenly translated to some planet that
enjoys a plurality of satellites, but no living being could stand long
at gaze in that wind and that cold. A perfect paraselene is, I am
convinced, an extremely rare thing, much rarer than a perfect parhelion
("moon-cats" my companion thought the phenomenon should be called,
saving the canine simile for the sun), for in seven years' travel I have
never seen another, and the references to it in literature are few.

The next day at noon, the sun not visible above the distant mountains,
there appeared in the sky a great shining cross of orange light, just
over the sun's position, that held and shone for nigh an hour and only
faded with the twilight. It is not surprising that these appearances
should deeply impress the untutored mind and should be deemed
significant and portentous; they must deeply impress any normal mind,
they are so grand and so strange. The man who has trained his intellect
until it is so stale, and starved his imagination until it is so
shrivelled that he can gaze unmoved at such spectacles, that they are
insignificant to him, has but reduced himself to the level of the dog
upon whom also they make no impression--though even a dog will howl at a
great aurora. Of course we know all about them; any schoolboy can pick
up a primer of physical geography and explain the laws of refraction,
and the ugly and most libellous diagram of circles and angles that shows
just how these lustrous splendours happen; but the mystery beyond is not
by one hair's breadth impaired nor their influence upon the sp