CHAPTER XII. BETWEEN THE POLAR CIRCLE AND THE ICE WALL. Since the Halbrane has passed beyond the imaginary curve drawn at twenty-three and a half degrees from the Pole, it seems as though she had entered a new region, “that region of Desolation and Silence,” as Edgar Poe says; that magic person of splendour and glory in which the Eleanora’s singer longed to be shut up to all eternity; that immense ocean of light ineffable. It is my belief—to return to less fanciful hypotheses—that the Antarctic region, with a superficies of more than five millions of square miles, has remained