STRANGE YULETIDES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 December 1938, Page 7

STRANGE YULETIDES

STORIES OF EXPLORERS. The records of explorers contain many stories of strange Yuletides. Dr. Kane, the famous American explorer, tells of one Christmas Day theatrical performance, which surely is without a parallel. “The ship’s thermometer outside,” he says, “registered 78 degrees of frost. Inside, the audience and actors, by the aid of lungs, lamps and hangings, got as high as minus 30 degrees —only 62 degrees below freezing point, perhaps the lowest atmospheric record of any theatrical representation.

“It was a strange thing altogether. The condensation was so excessive that we could barely see the performers; they walked in a cloud of vapour. Any extra vehemence of delivery was accompanied by volumes of smoke. Their hands steamed.”

Of a later Christmas Day, Dr. Kane records, “While walking my beard and moustache became one solid mass of ice. I inadvertently put out my tongue, and it instantly froze to my lips. When I put up my mittened hand to ‘blow hot,’ and thaw the unruly member from its imprisonment, my mitten was itself a mass of ice in a moment, It fastened on the upper side of my tongue and flattened it out like a bat-ter-cake between.the two discs of a hot girdle. It required all my care with the bare hand to realise it; and then, not without laceration.”