south he did not see it at all; but on returning he had, on March 6th,
when one degree south of the equator, a memorable view of it.

It was a bright, clear night, and the Zodiacal Light was
extraordinarily brilliant -- brighter than he had ever seen it
before. The Milky Way was not to be compared with it. The brightest
part extended 75° from the sun. There was a faint and much narrower
extension which they could just make out beyond the Pleiades along
the ecliptic, but the greater part of the Zodiacal Light showed as
a broad truncated column, and it did not appear nearly as conical
as he had before seen it.

When out of the brief twilight of intertropical lands, where the sun
drops vertically to the horizon and night rushes on like a wave of
darkness, the Zodiacal Light shoots to the very zenith, its color is
described as a golden tint, entirely different from the silvery sheen
of the Milky Way. If I may venture again to refer to personal
experiences and impressions, I will recall a view of the Zodiacal
Light from the summit of the cone of Mt Etna in the autumn of the year
1896 (more briefly described in Astronomy with the Naked Eye). There
are few lofty mountains so favorably placed as Etna for observations
of this kind. It was once resorted to by Prof. George E. Hale, in an
attempt to see the solar corona without an eclipse. Rising directly
from sea-level to an elevation of nearly eleven thousand feet, the
observer on its summit at night finds himself, as it were, lost in the
midst of the sky. But for the black flanks of the great cone on which
he stands he might fancy himself to be in a balloon. On the occasion
to which I refer the world beneath was virtually invisible in the
moonless night. The blaze of the constellations overhead was
astonishingly brilliant, yet amid all their magnificence my attention