So much to be done, so few brief weeks to do it in, that the ardent arctic summer was working overtime. The long, long months of sunless night and unimaginable cold were to be undone—the months of black and shrieking storm, of intolerable winds death-cold from the voids of space, of intolerable stillness when the ghost-lights danced low above the endless, naked ice and death of the Roof-of-the-world. The sun, in haste to console after his long forgetfulness, was circling in the sky throughout the whole twenty-four hours, never quite disappearing below the hazy pink horizon. Under the unremitting pour of his eager beams, icy pinnacles cracked and crumbled; deep fissures of ineffable sapphire opened in the icewalls of eternal glacier, and ran with sharp reports along the tumbled fields of the floe. Here and there appeared wide patches of green and dancing water, with narrow lanes leading out to the open sea, where it chafed incessantly at its shrinking boundaries.
Shoreward, low ridges, and raw, jagged teeth of rock, black and slate-blue and rust-red, came
