458           A    BACE    OF    PALE    FACES.
"December 21, Saturday. To-day at noon we saw, dimly looming up from the redness of the southern horizon, a low range of hills; among them some cones of great height, mountains of a character differing from the naked table-lands of the northern coast. The land on the other side of Croker's Bay, with one high headland, supposed to he Cape Warrender, is in view. From all of which it is clear that we are drifting regularly on toward Baffin's Bay.
"An opening occurred last night in the ice to the northward. It is not more than a hundred yards from us, and it is already seventy wide.
" Our men are hard at work preparing for the Christmas theatre, the arrangements exclusively their own. But to-morrow is a day more welcome than Christmas —the solstitial day of greatest darkness, from which we may begin to date our returning light. It makes a man feel badly to see the faces around him bleach-ing into waxen paleness. Until to-day, as a looking-glass does not enter into an Arctic toilet, I thought I was the exception, and out of delicacy said nothing about it to my comrades. One of them, introducing the topic just now, told me, with an utter unconsciousness of his own ghostliness, that I was the palest of the party. So it is, 'All men think all men,' &c. Why, the good fellow is as white as a cut potato!"
In truth, we were all of us at this time undergoing changes unconsciously. The hazy obscurity of the nights we had gone through made them darker than the corresponding nights of Parry. The complexions of my comrades, and my own too, as I found soon afterward, were toned down to a peculiar waxy paleness. Our eyes were more recessed, and strangely clear. Complaints of shortness of breath became general.