CHAPTER XXXIII



The days grow gray. The sun has lost its warmth, and each noon, at
meridian, it is lower in the northern sky. All the old stars have
long since gone, and it would seem the sun is following them. The
world--the only world I know--has been left behind far there to the
north, and the hill of the earth is between it and us. This sad and
solitary ocean, gray and cold, is the end of all things, the falling-
off place where all things cease. Only it grows colder, and grayer,
and penguins cry in the night, and huge amphibians moan and slubber,
and great albatrosses, gray with storm-battling of the Horn, wheel
and veer.


"Land ho!" was the cry yesterday morning. I shivered as I gazed at
this, the first land since Baltimore a few centuries ago. There was
no sun, and the morning was damp and cold with a brisk wind that
penetrated any garment. The deck thermometer marked 30--two degrees
below freezing-point; and now and then easy squalls of snow swept
past.

All of the land that was to be seen was snow. Long, low chains of
peaks, snow-covered, arose out of the ocean. As we drew closer,
there were no signs of life. It was a sheer, savage, bleak, forsaken
land. By eleven, off the entrance of Le Maire Straits, the squalls
ceased, the wind steadied, and the tide began to make through in the
direction we desired to go.