A Diary and Journal from the Second Grinnell Expedition

247

Tuesday Jany 9

I don't know what is the matter with me I can no longer give by the pen a picture of the foreground, so hard worked and care beset am I that I cease to be impressed by the present in thinking of the future. Those little every day touches which make the sketch pass by me. The same to a greater or lesser extent pervades our company. Ohlsen has lost his memory "Cant keep his tools" Petersen cannot catch the words of our Smith's Sound dialect. Wilson Brooks and Morton complain of enfeebled eyesight, and a scant vocabulary.

Yesterday in recording the execessive cold I gave no idea of the impression which it ought to make on us, or would make upon others. In spite of the choking darkness you absolutely see the cold Nature wears – shrouded as she is – a different aspect – and the sounds of contracting solids, ice and wood work, and hummock ridge and terraced shore, fill the ear with rustling, cracking ticking, and groaning. The great ice foot sends out explosive wreaths of condensed vapour. Evaporated by the sudden rupture of some large ice admitting a momentary contact of air and water. These resemble [peals?] of musketry.

Yet I walk in this disguised region with almost as little inconvenience as I would once have encountered at -30°. The sole appreciable distinction which I am able to discover between continued exposure to -30° and -63° (the mean of our lowest recorded minima) is that the air passages become, in the latter, oppressively