University of Virginia Library

I named the great stars that seemed to perch on the peaks and steeps close at either hand as we ascended the ice floor of the Yukon, “Cathedral stars” simply because they looked it at the time, although ordinarily they seemed to be normal stars, except that they were incredibly large and their five horns far brighter than rays of the sun. But when a seam or stream of flame would burst from the edge of the river's bed and suddenly take possession, for a few seconds, of heaven and earth, they would flare up like things of life, their five horns of gold pointing straight up like cathedral spires. Then as suddenly all would be black, umber, amber, cobalt, and the great, glittering stars again would be normal. I had, to my dismay, as a hired scribe when trying to get from Klondike to the Bering sea by way of the Yukon— 1897—found the river closed at the edge of the Arctic circle. It was nearly two thousand miles to the sea, all ice and snow, with not so much as a dog-track before me and only midnight 'round about me. There was nothing to do but to try to get back to my cabin on the Klondike. In the line of my employment I kept a journal of the solitary seventy-two days and nights—mostly night—spent in the silent and terrible ascent of the savage sea of ice. But enough; a tithe of the scenes, the colors, the unnatural phenomena in these lines would be weary work and dreary reading. Nor have I time or disposition, even in this note, to explain, urge or argue. I have resorted to this form of expression only to give a few facts in a matter of which I was forced to see much, and should know a little something worth noting.

Briefly, then, “The Borealis race,” as seen even by Burns in Scotland, is a substance. It is not only visible and varied, but it is tangible and subject to the law of gravitation, although a certain sort of electricity. It is born of friction; yet it is as cold as the electric force which we have harnessed is hot; and I believe that a full charge of it, when suddenly bursting from a rent or fissure in the ice, is deadly; else why do the dogs fall down and whine when they hear and see it shoot up too near at hand?

I can no more account for the manifold colors than I can for the little gathering of cardinal hues when you smite the transparent ice covering a lake or river. I can only say that it would take the keen eyes of a Lyons silk-weaver to distinguish and name the colors that burst up through the ice from the groaning, grinding waters of the Yukon; but the prevailing color is positive; that is, red, yellow, saffron, crimson and so on. And these seem most forceful if they do not burst forth at an angle and collide and carrom and burnish the walls 'round about. They seem to influence the stars, as they leap up, up and up. But the colder colors seem more slow and heavy. I once saw a slanting, steel-colored column break overhead and fall to pieces right in my path. It lay like a dull, mobile smoke on the snow for some seconds. As the dogs sat down and whined, I jerked off a glove and tried to take some of it in my hand. I may have fancied it, but it seemed to sting and tingle like a little battery; and it surely was as cold as death.

I spent some time with the Bishop of Selkirk, on Mission Island, trying to get some light on all this, for he had been hereabouts for near thirty years; but the good man seemed to depend on what he had read, rather than what he had seen, contenting himself with admiring the works of God and the glory of it all. He gave me his London book, “The Bible Under the Northern Lights,” from which I have pilfered generously.

When I told him that I had come to a positive conclusion on the points set down, he said: “Well, maybe it all comes from friction, but you must know that the same phenomena is seen at Great Slave Lake, as well as on the seas of northern Greenland. No, it is as well to say that it is all the glory of God.”

I can only answer that the ice is groaning and grinding in the rise and fall of tides around Greenland and like seabanks to the north, quite as well as along the Yukon, only there the forces are not confined, and so appear only in the heavens in variable bodies, instead of in sudden bursts and shafts, as here. But it is not so easy to account for the Lights on Great Slave Lake. I must leave the phenomena there for those who care to look further.