Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/372

 beasts at this present moment. The wretches would eat us up if we gave them the least chance. Knorr stumbled among the pack yesterday, while feeding them, and, had not McDonald pounced upon them on the instant, I believe they would have made a meal of him before he could rise.

The hour is exactly midnight, and, for the first time since starting, I write in the open air. The temperature is only one degree below zero, and a more beautiful sunshine never was beheld. This vast sea of whiteness, this great wilderness of glittering peaks, possesses a stern, quiet sublimity that is wonderfully imposing. The mountains before us, unlike those of the Greenland coast, stand up in multiplied lines of heaven-piercing cones, looking like giant stacks of cannon-balls, sprinkled with snow. The midnight sun streams over them from the north, and softens their outlines through tinted vapors which float from the eastward. Oh! that I was across the barrier that separates me from that land of my desires! Those mountains are my "delectable mountains,"—the fleecy clouds which rest upon them are the flocks of the "city" of my ambitious hopes—the mystic sea which I am seeking through these days of weariness and toil.

I have had some fine sights and excellent solar bearings from a position determined by solar altitude, and am now firmly convinced that a Sound opens westward from Smith Sound, overlooked by me in 1854; and that the whole coast of Grinnell Land was placed by me too far south.

May 5th.

A perfectly killing day, and I have little progress to record. Our affairs look rather blue. Jensen