“In the Antarctic Circle, summer has begun. It is now light twenty-four hours a day. The sun disappears only briefly near midnight leaving a prolonged, magnificent twilight. Ice showers lend a fairy tale atmosphere to the scene. Millions of delicate crystals, thin and needle-like, descend in sparkling beauty through the twilight air.”

—Sir Ernest Shackleton; the last entries in his shipboard diary, 1915; Endurance: Shackletons Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. Quoted by Andr Gregory in Bone Songs, 2006.