The days passed half-idly with tasks and diversions. One night a member of the crew came down to report a more than usually glorious appearance of the aurora borealis, and the rest of them went up to observe it. “No words can depict the glory that met our eyes,” Nansen wrote. “The glowing fire-masses had divided into glistening, many-colored bands, which were writhing and twisting across the sky both in the south and north. The rays sparkled with the purest, most crystalline rainbow colors, chiefly violet-red or carmine and the clearest green.”
On the Christmas of 1893, Nansen thought of the families who would be worrying over his and the crew’s well-being. “I am afraid their compassion would cool if they could look in upon us, hear the merriment that goes on, and see all our comforts and good cheer,” he wrote, and then he reported the day’s menu:
1. Ox-tail soup;
2. Fish-pudding, with potatoes and melted butter;
3. Roast of reindeer, with peas, French beans, potatoes, and cranberry jam;
4. Cloudberries with cream;
5. Cake and marchpane (a welcome present from the baker to the expedition; we blessed that man).
In January he wrote of a plan that he had brooded on for some time and that was now beginning to possess him: to depart from the ship with a companion and on sledges try to reach the pole. “It might almost be called an easy expedition for two men,” he wrote. The plan kept him awake, so that a day later he wrote, “Perhaps my brain is over-tired; day and night my thoughts have turned on the one point, the possibility of reaching the Pole and getting home. Perhaps it is rest I need—to sleep, sleep! Am I afraid of venturing my life? No, it cannot be that. But what else, then, can be keeping me back? Perhaps a secret doubt of the practicability of the plan. My mind is confused; the whole thing has got into a tangle; I am a riddle to myself. I am worn out, and yet I do not feel any special tiredness. Is it perhaps because I sat up reading last night? Everything around is emptiness, and my brain is a blank. I look at the home pictures and am moved by them in a curious, dull way; I look into the future, and feel as if it does not much matter to me whether I get home in the autumn of this year or next. So long as I get home in the end, a year or two seem almost nothing. I have never thought this before.”
Two days later he dreamed that he had reached the pole but had seen only ice, and when people asked what it was like, “I had no answer to give,” he wrote. “I had forgotten to take accurate observations.”
As the new year bore on, he found his thoughts interrupted by images of home. Sometimes when he was absorbed in work, he would hear the dogs bark, then think, Who is coming? before he remembered where he was, “drifting out in the middle of the frozen Polar Sea, at the commencement of the second long Arctic night.”
The sybaritic life of the crew led Nansen to wonder what would happen if they actually had to retreat. He began having every man snowshoe for two hours, then one day they tried hauling a sledge weighing 250 pounds. When one of the men pulled it, “he thought it was nothing at all; but when he had gone on for a time he fell into a fit of deep and evidently sad thought, and went silently home. When he got on board he confided to the others that if a man had to draw a load like that he might just as well lie down at once—it would come to the same thing in the end.”