The equinox has brought with it darkness and Northern storms, and night
will quickly close the short and dismal polar day. The sky of a dull and
leaden blue is faintly lighted by a sun without warmth, whose white disk,
scarcely seen above the horizon, pales before the dazzling, brilliancy of
the snow that covers, as far as the eyes can reach, the boundless
steppes.

To the North, this desert is bounded by a ragged coast, bristling with
huge black rocks.

At the base of this Titanic mass lied enchained the petrified ocean,
whose spell-bound waves appear fired as vast ranges of ice mountains,
their blue peaks fading away in the far-off frost smoke, or snow vapor.

Between the twin-peaks of Cape East, the termination of Siberia, the
sullen sea is seen to drive tall icebergs across a streak of dead green.
There lies Behring's Straits.

Opposite, and towering over the channel, rise the granite masses of Cape
Prince of Wales, the headland of North America.

These lonely latitudes do not belong to the habitable world; for the
piercing cold shivers the stones, splits the trees, and causes the earth
to burst asunder, which, throwing forth showers of icy spangles seems
capable of enduring this solitude of frost and tempest, of famine and
death.

And yet, strange to say, footprints may be traced on the snow, covering
these headlands on either side of Behring's Straits.