I think I mentioned before that Georgina Harding's The Solitude of Thomas Cave concerns a group of whalers who have traveled to Arctic waters in search of their quarry. At the end of the season a bet results in one of the men remaining there alone with enough provisions to see him through until the next season. That's his expectation, at least. No man is known to have survived alone in such extreme conditions.
Somehow this description sounded sort of nice on a hot day like today.
"The changes in the weather here come as sudden and total transformations. At once, a blizzard, swirling, obscuring every single thing, and then as suddenly it abates and there is a stillness and clarity as if all before one's eyes is made from glass. The change of the season however has followed a steady doom-laden progression despite tempests and the fluctuations of wind and temperature. Those creatures with whom I have shared the island appeared to understand this. All through the past six and more weeks I have observed the departure of the birds that in the first days of my solitude flocked so densely in the sky along the strand and about the cliffs. Gulls, auks, petrels, guillemots, kittiwakes, others whose names are unknown to me, have grouped and taken off for the south, one species after another until not a screech nor a wing can be heard overhead and the silence begins to deafen. Day by day the appearance of the sun has been limited to a noticeably briefer time until days came when its orb, big, coloured and strangely flattened in form, hovered scarcely a few minutes over the southern horizon through the red glow from it might persist for a long period across a wide band at the foot of the sky. Ice filled the bay with similar inevitability, appearing first prettily as distant ships with sails, sometimes white, sometimes blue, sometimes tinged with pink and lilac as touched by the vanishing light, receding, returning, then becoming permanent as the water about them first steamed then congealed and froze into a hard crust."
"It has become my habit to climb each day to a lookout on the mountain behind the beach to catch what best view I can have of the retreating sun--so often that itis possible now in the twilight to pick out the clear path that my feet have trodden in the snow. The last few days the sight of it was so slight that I did not know how much of it existed only in a trick of the eye or the delusion of my imagination, but on this day, the fifteenth of October, not even the finest slip of it did appear. I know that for this year I have now seen the last of the sun. The great cold is coming."