“Why, the ice must be quite half an inch thick!” cried Steve. “No wonder I felt cold.”
“Yes, sir, it’s freezing hard; the winter has begun, though of course it will be warm in the fine days. But look; there’s a sure sign of the cold weather coming.”
He pointed to the northward, where the Great Bear shone with a brightness foreign to that which he would have seen at home.
“What am I to look at?” said Steve; “that soft light? It’s the Milky Way.”
“No, sir, the aurora. There it goes; it is spreading right along.”
“Then it’s the sun going to rise!” cried Steve.
“In the north-west, sir? No, it’s the aurora; you will see it stream up in rays right away to the Pole Star soon. Yes, I thought so;” for, even as he was speaking, sheaves of thin pencils of soft lambent light streamed right away up toward the zenith, then sank, wavered about, and then streamed up once again.
“Finer than I should have expected, sir,” said Johannes, as the glow near the horizon increased till it was now pale white, now of a delicate blush, while the pencils of light flickered up and streamed and waved, and looked in their delicate, dawn-like colouring like the spirits of fire or light flying upward from earth to heaven.
“What is it?” said Steve at last, after gazing at the wondrous phenomenon for a long time.
“Ah, sir, you must ask some one wiser than I am to answer that question. All I can tell you is that cold weather generally comes after the sky has been lit up as if it was the inside of some great shell, and with as many colours, only more light and faint.”