CHAPTER XVIII.
THE LONG NIGHT It may well be doubted if it is possible for a person who has never experienced four months of constant darkness to imagine what it is.
Every school boy learns that at the two ends of the earth the year is composed of one day and one night of equal length, and the intervening periods of twilight; but the mere recital of that fact makes no real impression on his consciousness.

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.
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY FREDERICK A.STOKES COMPANY ILLUMINATION OF THE ROOSEVELT IN WINTER QUARTERS ON A MOONLIGHT NIGHT Showing the Ice Pressure Close to the Ship] Imagine us in our winter home on the _Roosevelt_, four hundred and fifty miles from the North Pole: the ship held tight in her icy berth, a hundred and fifty yards from the shore, the ship and the surrounding world covered with snow, the wind creaking in the rigging, whistling and shrieking around the corners of the deck houses, the temperature ranging from zero to sixty below and the ice-pack in the channel outside groaning and complaining with the movement of the tides.
During the moonlit period of each month, some eight or ten days, when the moon seems to circle round and round the heavens, the younger members of the expedition were nearly always away on hunting trips; but during the longer periods of utter blackness most of us were on the ship together, as the winter hunting is done only by moonlight.
It must be understood that the arctic moon has its regular phases, its only peculiarity being the course it appears to travel in the sky.

When the weather is clear there is starlight, even in the dark period; but it is a peculiar, cold, and spectral starlight, which, to borrow the words of Milton, seems but to make the "darkness visible." When the stars are hidden, which may be much of the time, the darkness is so thick that it seems as if it could almost be grasped with the hand, and in a driving wind and snowstorm, if a man ventures to put his head outside the cabin door, he seems to be hurled back by invisible hands of demoniacal strength.
During the early part of the winter the Eskimos lived in the forward deck house of the ship.

There was always a fire in the galley stove, a fire in the Eskimo quarters, and one in the crew's quarters; but though I had a small cylindrical coal stove in my cabin, it was not lighted throughout the winter.