Arctic night

“ And yet there is in the Arctic night much that is attractive to the lover of Nature. There is in the flashing Aurora, in the play of the moonlight upon the hills and icebergs, in the wonderful clearness of the starlight, in the broad expanse of the ice-fields, in the lofty grandeur of the mountains and the glaciers, in the naked fierceness of the storms, much that is both sublime and beautiful. ”

“ It was heavenly, after our Arctic life. The country, too, boldly undulating, with fir-forested hills, green and warm in the sunshine, and wild, picturesque valleys sunk between, shining in their covering of snow, charmed us completely. Again we saw the soft blue of the distant ranges as they melted away behind each other, suggesting space, and light, and warmth. Give me daylight and sunshine, after all! Our Arctic trip seems like a long, long night full of splendid dreams, but yet night and not day. ”

“ When the moon was for a moment veiled behind a heavy cloud, the gloom of the Polar landscape became still more awe-inspiring, and before her mind's eye rose a vision of the caravan of men and women struggling across these vast solitudes in the midst of hurricanes, snow-storms, avalanches, and in the thick darkness of the Arctic night! ”

“ But across his mind came an insistent memory of the long and bitter Arctic night, when the world would seem to snap under the deadly intensity of the cold, and there would be no birds but a few ptarmigan in the snow, and the fat lemmings would be safe beneath the frozen roofs of their tunnels, and his cleverest hunting would hardly serve him to keep the keen edge off his hunger. ”

“ I complain of Arctic voyagers that, they do not enough remind us of the constant peculiar dreariness of the scenery, and the perpetual twilight of the Arctic night. So he whose theme is moonlight, though he may find it difficult, must, as it were, illustrate it with the light of the moon alone.
Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a very different season. Take a July night, for instance. About ten o’clock,—when man is asleep, and day fairly forgotten,—the beauty of moonlight is seen over lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding. On all sides novelties present themselves. ”

“ No footfall of living thing breaks on the longing ear. No cry of bird enlivens the scene; there is no tree, among the branches of which the wind may sigh and moan. And hence it is that one who had travelled much, and seen many dangers, and witnessed Nature in many phases, was led to say that he had seen no expression on the face of Nature so filled with terror as the silence of the Arctic night. ”

“ The snows would melt in the glens yonder, avalanches would fall thundering into the valleys beneath, the tides would break the ice around; yonder mountain berg, which had loomed ghost-like all through the everlasting night of winter, would move seawards and away; then a week of mist, which would lift at length, and reveal hills already patched with the yellow and red of lichens and the green of mosses, soft and tender. For summer comes quickly in the Arctic. ”

“ We all feel now that the veil of night is lifting, that the cloud is passing away, that the heavy load of darkness is being lightened. The people have exhausted their means of amusement; the newspaper has died a natural death; theatricals are impossible; and there is nothing new to break the weariness of the long hours.
But we shall soon have no need to give thought to these things. There will be ere long neither time nor occasion for amusements. The Arctic night will soon be numbered with the things of the past. We are eager that it shall have an end, and we long for the day and work. ”

“ An unbroken sleep for the whole winter would, undoubtedly, be a blessing to the Arctic navigator, and the most energetic among us resigned himself to slumber for a few hours in the afternoon—the profane time of the day for all zones of the earth—especially after the coming in of the New Year, when the long unbroken night is intensely felt. ”

“ Not a man now, except Pierre and Morton, is exempt from scurvy; and, as I look around upon the pale faces and haggard looks of my comrades, I feel that we are fighting the battle of life at disadvantage, and that an Arctic night and an Arctic day age a man more rapidly and harshly than a year anywhere else in all this weary world. ”

“ There is indeed in a still arctic night, whether in the winter or summer, a sublimity which one does not feel in a night elsewhere. We passed through many groups of icebergs, and in the moonlight their shapes, at all times full of strange suggestions, were converted into objects of the most fantastic description. ”

“ The peculiar other-world feeling of the Arctic regions—a feeling so singular that if you have once been there the though of it haunts you all your life—is due largely to the perpetual daylight. Night seems more orange-tinted and subdued than day, but there is no great difference. ”

“ Nothing can exceed the magnificence of an Arctic sunset, clothing the snow-clad mountains and the skies with all the glories of color, or be more serenely beautiful than the clear star-light night, illumined by the brilliant moon, which for days continually circles around the horizon, never setting until33 she has run her long course of brightness. The uniform whiteness of the landscape and the general transparency of the atmosphere add to the lustre of her beams, which serve the natives to guide their nomadic life, and to lead them to their hunting-grounds. ”

“ All night we kept a careful watch and came through without a mishap, in spite of the fog’s remaining as thick as burgoo. When the starboard watch, my watch, came on deck at six o’clock the next morning, the fog was beginning to burn off and slowly the visibility increased mile by mile. Suddenly a bit of a breeze ruffled the surface of the sea; the fog curtain suddenly lifted, as in a theatre, and the whole glorious panorama of glaciers, mountains, and fiords burst upon our startled gaze. This coastal scenery on “The Greenland” is as magnificent as any Alpine scenery. ”

“ And the experiences of Arctic voyaging are always of a nature to require the highest courage and the sternest fortitude. The long Arctic night is in itself as severe a test of true manhood as can well be devised. The miner works under conditions for less laborious than those to which the Arctic explorer submits, for he enjoys an alternation of light and darkness ”

“ Could there be a more melancholy, a more maddening, or a more hopeless region than this? We are passing rapidly into the polar summer, the time when, in other zones, all Nature smiles;—even the sister zone, the arctic, has striking attractive features at this time. The birds fill the air with music, new animals make their appearance, and on land even flowers and mosquitos serve to make life interesting; but here, in this icy antarctic wilderness, the charm of Nature is dead. We see the sun so seldom that it is, indeed, a surprise when its unobstructed rays fall upon the frosted whiteness. ”

“ This is the strongest wind we have had the whole winter. If anything can shake up the ice and drive us north, this must do it. But the barometer is falling too fast; there will be north wind again presently. Hope has been disappointed too often; it is no longer elastic; and the gale makes no great impression on me. I look forward to spring and summer, in suspense as to what change they will bring. But the Arctic night, the dreaded Arctic night, is over, and we have daylight once again. ”

“ The sun stands much lower now; it was 9° above the horizon at midday. Winter is rapidly approaching; there are 141⁄2° of frost this evening, but we do not feel it cold. To-day’s observations unfortunately show no particular drift northward; according to them we are still in 78° 50′ north latitude. I wandered about over the floe towards evening. Nothing more wonderfully beautiful [252] can exist than the Arctic night. It is dreamland, painted in the imagination’s most delicate tints; it is color etherealized. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A Helpless Ship in a Hopeless Sea of Ice.
The grayness of the first days of the night has given way to a soul-despairing darkness, broken only at noon by a feeble yellow haze on the northern sky. I can think of nothing more disheartening, more destructive to human energy, than this dense, unbroken blackness of the long polar night. In the arctic it has some redeeming features. There the white invader has the Eskimo to assist, teach, and amuse him. ”

“ The sun sinks below the horizon, and it is not seen again for months together; darkness is around him, and one dreary mass of snow covers the face of nature. The intense cold prevents him often from venturing beyond the shelter with which he has surrounded his vessel; or if he is tempted to do so, frost-bites may attack his hands and his feet, and deprive him of their use. Sometimes the Arctic explorer has had to journey for weeks together across the barren waste of ice or snow-covered ground, dragging his sledge after him, and sleeping night after night under the thin roof of a canvas tent ”

“ We, of course, who were unaccustomed to the constant light, were restless and unable to sleep; but the inhabitants of these regions, as well as the animals, retire to rest with as much regularity as is done in more southern climes; and the subdued tints of the heavens, as well as the heavy banking of clouds in the neighbourhood of the sun, gives to the arctic summer night a quietude as marked as it is pleasant. Across Baffin's Bay there was ice! ice! ice! ”

“ There is also the Arctic drowsiness to contend against, that overpowering desire to sleep that it is almost impossible to fight off. If this overtook a solitary traveler it would mean his almost certain death in some drift.
“The freezing of the waters of the rivers comes on very suddenly. Sometimes in a night. The only warning that you get is the glow of the sun-dogs—like little suns—scattered all round the central luminary. ”

“ But if the Arctic night can be endured with little strain upon the physical, it is, nevertheless, a severe trial both to the moral and the intellectual faculties. The darkness which so long clothes Nature unfolds to the senses a new world, and the senses accommodate themselves to that world but poorly. The cheering influences of the rising sun which invite to labor ”

“ Now if the theory of the Arctic origin of the eight stories be the true one, this is just what we should expect; on any other it is inexplicable. For the six weeks’ winter night on a given latitude is a definite period, not merely in theory, but in practice, and one that would indelibly stamp itself upon the primitive savage mind, with the dark misgivings of a perfectly reasonable terror—for there was to the people of those days no logical reason of any validity why the sun should re-appear after its winter death. ”

“ Voyagers during the Arctic summer day require sleep as much as at other times, though often it has to be obtained at very unequal intervals. Having been awake for the best part of twenty hours, I had turned in—I don’t know whether to call it one night or one day—when I was aroused by a tremendous blow on the ship’s bows, which made her quiver from stem to stern. I was rushing on deck with my clothes in my hands, not knowing what might happen, when I found that she was forcing her way through a stream of ice, and that ice surrounded her on every side. ”

“ During the day the glare is too great but a moonlight night on a frozen sea is the grandest sight possible. The weird sounds caused by the ever restless ice are a fitting accompaniment. On this Friday night, the sounds caused by the ever increasing sea, crunching the pack up, were rather startling at times, but we kept pretty well out of it, so we were safe. There was quite a little motion on board, owing to the swell, and we steamed easy ahead all night, going full speed at daybreak, and by noon had the satisfaction of finding our seals. ”

“ The wonderful beauty of the tropical dawn has been told by every traveller in the equatorial regions, but in these regions only a few minutes elapses from the time it begins till the sun asserts its supremacy and dispels the brilliant colouring. In the sub-Arctic regions there is no193 such haste. When the glittering rays no longer reach us we can watch their reflection in the clear ethereal spaces above during the whole of that period we call night. ”

“ Nearly all writers upon the subject, whether those who have themselves experienced its effects, or those whose knowledge is derived from study, dwell with great force on the terribly depressing effect upon the physical organization of natives of the median zones caused by the long Arctic night whenever brought within its influence. ”

“ THE ARCTIC LANDS—FAUNA—FLORA—GREENLAND—ICELAND—NOVAIA ZEMLAIA—SIBERIA.
We have already pointed out that in the northernmost regions of the Arctic lands the year is divided into one prolonged and bitterly cold night of several months’ duration, and one glorious summer’s day extending over nine or ten weeks, which brings the scanty vegetation to a sudden maturity. We have indicated that even within the limits of perpetual snow the life of Nature is not altogether crushed out ”