The shadows of midnight and those of midday were the same. The sun made a circle about the heavens in which the eye detected no difference in its height above the ice, either night or day. Throughout the twenty-four hours there was no perceptible rise or set in the sun's seeming movement. Now, at noon, the shadow represented in its length the altitude of the sun—about twelve degrees. At six o'clock it was the same. At midnight it was the same. At six o'clock in the morning it was the same.
At a latitude about New York, a man's shadow lengthens hour by hour as the sun descends toward the horizon at nightfall.
At the North Pole, a man's shadow is of equal length during the entire twenty-four hours, since the sun moves spirally around the heavens at about the same apparent height above the horizon throughout the twenty-four-hour day.
A picture of the snowhouse and ourselves, taken at the same time and developed a year later, gives the same length of shadow. The compass pointed south. The night drop of the thermometer had vanished. Let us, for the sake of argument, grant that all our instrumental observations are wrong. Here is a condition of things in which I believed, and still believe, the eye, without instrumental assistance, places the sun at about the same height for every hour of the day and night. It is only on the earth's axis that such an observation is possible.
There was about us no land. No fixed point. Absolutely nothing upon which to rest the eye to give the sense of location or to judge distance.
Here everything moves. The sea breathes, and lifts the crust of ice which the wind stirs. The pack ever drifts in response to the pull of the air and the drive of the water. Even the sun, the only fixed dot in this stirring, restless world, where all you see is, without your seeing it, moving like a ship at sea, seems to have a rapid movement in a gold-flushed circle not far above endless fields of purple crystal; but that movement is never higher, never lower—always in the same fixed path. The instruments detect a slight spiral ascent, day after day, but the eye detects no change.
Although I had measured our shadows at times on the northward march, at the Pole these shadow notations were observed with the same care as the measured altitude of the sun by the sextant. A series was made on April 22, after E-tuk-i-shook and I had left Ah-we-lah in charge of our first camp at the Pole. We made a little circle for our feet in the snow. E-tuk-i-shook stood in the foot circle. At midnight the first line was cut in the snow to the end of his shadow, and then I struck a deep hole with the ice-axe. Every hour a similar line was drawn out from his foot. At the end of twenty-four hours, with the help of Ah-we-lah, a circle was circumscribed along the points, which marked the end of the shadow for each hour. The result is represented in the snow diagram on the next page.
