A color suffusion is common throughout the entire Arctic zone. Light, pouring from the low-lying sun, is reflected from the ice in an indescribable blaze. From millions of ice slopes, with millions and millions of tiny reflecting surfaces, each one a mirror, some large, some smaller than specks of diamond dust, this light is sent back in different directions in burning waves to the sky. A liquid light seems forced back from the sky into every tiny crevice of this bejeweled wonderland. One color invariably predominates at a time. Sometimes the ice and air and sky are suffused with a hue of rose, again of orange, again of a light alloyed yellow, again blue; and, as we get farther north, more dominantly purple. Farther south, in our journey northward, we had viewed color effects in reality incomparably more beautiful than those in the regions about the Pole. The sun, farther south, in rising and setting, and with limitless changes of polarized and refracted light, passing through strata of atmosphere of varying depths of different density, produces kaleidoscopic changes of burning color.

At the Pole there were sunbursts, but because of the slight change in the sun's dip to the horizon, the prevailing light was invariably in shades running to purple. At first my imagination evoked a more glowing wonder than in reality existed; as the hours wore on, and as the wants of my body asserted themselves, I began to see the vacant spaces with a disillusionizing eye.

The set of observations given here, taken every six hours, from noon on April 21 to midnight on April 22, 1908, fixed our position with reasonable certainty.

These figures do not give the exact position for the normal spiral ascent of the sun, which is about fifty seconds for each hour, or five minutes for each six hours; but the uncertainties of error by refraction and ice-drift do not permit such accuracy of observations. These figures are submitted, therefore, not to establish the pin-point accuracy of our position, but to show that we had approximately reached a spot where the sun, throughout the twenty-four hours, circled the heavens in a line nearly parallel to the horizon.

With the use of the sextant, the artificial horizon, pocket chronometers, and the usual instruments and methods of explorers, our observations were continued and our positions were fixed with the most painstakingly careful safeguards possible against inaccuracy. The value of all such observations as proof of a Polar success, however, is open to such interpretation as the future may determine. This applies, not only to me, but to anyone who bases any claim upon them.

To me there were many seemingly insignificant facts noted in our northward progress which left the imprint of milestones. Our footprints marked a road ever onward into the unknown. Many of these almost unconscious reckonings took the form of playful impressions, and were not even at the time written down.

In the first press reports of my achievement there was not space to go into minute details, nor did the presentation of the subject permit an elaboration on all the data gathered. But now, in the light of a better perspective, it seems important that every possible phase of the minutest detail be presented. For only by a careful consideration of every phase of every phenomena en route can a true verdict be obtained upon this widely discussed subject of Polar attainment.

And now, right here, I want you to consider carefully with me one thing which made me feel sure that we had reached the Pole. This is the subject of shadows—our own shadows on the snow-covered ice. A seemingly unimportant phenomenon which had often been a topic of discussion, and so commonplace that I only rarely referred to it in my notebooks, our own shadows on the snow-cushioned ice had told of northward movement, and ultimately proved to my satisfaction that the Pole had been reached.

In our northward progress—to explain my shadow observations from the beginning—for a long time after our start from Svartevoeg, our shadows did not perceptibly shorten or brighten, to my eyes. The natives, however, got from these shadows a never-ending variety of topics of conversation. They foretold storms, located game and read the story of home entanglements. Far from land, far from every sign of a cheering, solid earth, wandering with our shadows over the hopeless desolation of the moving seas of glitter, I, too, took a keen interest in the blue blots that represented our bodies. At noon, by comparison with later hours, they were sharp, short, of a dark, restful blue. At this time a thick atmosphere of crystals rested upon the ice pack, and when the sun sank the strongest purple rays could not penetrate the frosty haze. Long before the time for sunset, even on clear days, the sun was lost in low clouds of drifting needles.

After passing the eighty-eighth parallel there was a notable change in our shadows. The night shadow lengthened; the day shadow, by comparison, shortened. The boys saw in this something which they could not understand. The positive blue grew to a permanent purple, and the sharp outlines ran to vague, indeterminate edges.

Now at the Pole there was no longer any difference in length, color or sharpness of outline between the shadow of the day or night.

"What does it all mean?" they asked. The Eskimos looked with eager eyes at me to explain, but my vocabulary was not comprehensive enough to give them a really scientific explanation, and also my brain was too weary from the muscular poison of fatigue to frame words.

The shadows of midnight and those of midday were the same. The sun made a circle about the heavens in which the eye detected no difference in its height above the ice, either night or day. Throughout the twenty-four hours there was no perceptible rise or set in the sun's seeming movement. Now, at noon, the shadow represented in its length the altitude of the sun—about twelve degrees. At six o'clock it was the same. At midnight it was the same. At six o'clock in the morning it was the same.

A picture of the snowhouse and ourselves, taken at the same time and developed a year later, gives the same length of shadow. The compass pointed south. The night drop of the thermometer had vanished. Let us, for the sake of argument, grant that all our instrumental observations are wrong. Here is a condition of things in which I believed, and still believe, the eye, without instrumental assistance, places the sun at about the same height for every hour of the day and night. It is only on the earth's axis that such an observation is possible.

There was about us no land. No fixed point. Absolutely nothing upon which to rest the eye to give the sense of location or to judge distance.

Here everything moves. The sea breathes, and lifts the crust of ice which the wind stirs. The pack ever drifts in response to the pull of the air and the drive of the water. Even the sun, the only fixed dot in this stirring, restless world, where all you see is, without your seeing it, moving like a ship at sea, seems to have a rapid movement in a gold-flushed circle not far above endless fields of purple crystal; but that movement is never higher, never lower—always in the same fixed path. The instruments detect a slight spiral ascent, day after day, but the eye detects no change.

Although I had measured our shadows at times on the northward march, at the Pole these shadow notations were observed with the same care as the measured altitude of the sun by the sextant. A series was made on April 22, after E-tuk-i-shook and I had left Ah-we-lah in charge of our first camp at the Pole. We made a little circle for our feet in the snow. E-tuk-i-shook stood in the foot circle. At midnight the first line was cut in the snow to the end of his shadow, and then I struck a deep hole with the ice-axe. Every hour a similar line was drawn out from his foot. At the end of twenty-four hours, with the help of Ah-we-lah, a circle was circumscribed along the points, which marked the end of the shadow for each hour. The result is represented in the snow diagram on the next page.

In the northward march we did not stay up all of bedtime to play with shadow circles. But, at this time, to E-tuk-i-shook the thing had a spiritual interest. To me it was a part of the act of proving that the Pole had been attained. For only about the Pole, I argued, could all shadows be of equal length. Because of this combination of keen interests, we managed to find an excuse, even during sleep hours, to draw a line on our shadow circle.

Here, then, I felt, was an important observation placing me with fair accuracy at the Pole, and, unlike all other observations, it was not based on the impossible dreams of absolutely accurate time or sure corrections for refraction.

At the place where E-tuk-i-shook and I camped, four miles south of where I had left Ah-we-lah with the dogs, only two big ice hummocks were in sight. There were more spaces of open water than at our first camp. After a midnight observation—of April 22—we returned to camp. When the dogs saw us approaching in the distance they rose, and a chorus of howls rang over the regions of the Pole—regions where dogs had never howled before. All the scientific work being finished, we began hastily to make final preparations for departure.

We had spent two days about the North Pole. After the first thrills of victory, the glamor wore away as we rested and worked. Although I tried to do so, I could get no sensation of novelty as we pitched our last belongings on the sleds. The intoxication of success had gone. I suppose intense emotions are invariably followed by reactions. Hungry, mentally and physically exhausted, a sense of the utter uselessness of this thing, of the empty reward of my endurance, followed my exhilaration. I had grasped my ignus fatuus. It is a misfortune for any man when his ignus fatuus fails to elude him.

During those last hours I asked myself why this place had so aroused an enthusiasm long-lasting through self-sacrificing years; why, for so many centuries, men had sought this elusive spot? What a futile thing, I thought, to die for! How tragically useless all those heroic efforts—efforts, in themselves, a travesty, an ironic satire, on much vainglorious human aspiration and endeavor! I thought of the enthusiasm of the people who read of the spectacular efforts of men to reach this vacant silver-shining goal of death. I thought, too, in that hour, of the many men of science who were devoting their lives to the study of germs, the making of toxins; to the saving of men from the grip of disease—men who often lost their own lives in their experiments; whose world and work existed in unpicturesque laboratories, and for whom the laudations of people never rise. It occurred to me—and I felt the bitterness of tears in my soul—that it is often the showy and futile deeds of men which men praise; and that, after all, the only work worth while, the only value of a human being's efforts, lie in deeds whereby humanity benefits. Such work as noble bands of women accomplish who go into the slums of great cities, who nurse the sick, who teach the ignorant, who engage in social service humbly, patiently, unexpectant of any reward! Such work as does the scientist who studies the depredations of malignant germs, who straightens the body of the crippled child, who precipitates a toxin which cleanses the blood of a frightful and loathsome disease!

As my eye sought the silver and purple desert about me for some stable object upon which to fasten itself, I experienced an abject abandon, an intolerable loneliness. With my two companions I could not converse; in my thoughts and emotions they could not share. I was alone. I was victorious. But how desolate, how dreadful was this victory! About us was no life, no spot to relieve the monotony of frost. We were the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice.

A wild eagerness to get back to land seized me. It seemed as though some new terror had arisen from the icy waters. Something huge, something baneful ... invisible ... yet whose terror-inspiring, burning eyes I felt ... the master genii of the goal, perhaps ... some vague, terrible, disembodied spirit force, condemned for some unimaginable sin to solitary prisonment here at the top of the world, and who wove its malignant, awful spell, and had lured men on for centuries to their destruction.... The desolation of the place was such that it was almost palpable; it was a thing I felt I must touch and see. My companions felt the heavy load of it upon them, and from the few words I overheard I knew they were eagerly picturing to themselves the simple joys of existence at Etah and Annoatok. I remember that to me came pictures of my Long Island home. All this arose, naturally enough, from the reaction following the strain of striving so long and so fiercely after the goal, combined with the sense of the great and actual peril of our situation. But what a cheerless spot this was, to have aroused the ambition of man for so many ages!

There came forcibly, too, the thought that although the Pole was discovered, it was not essentially discovered, that it could be discovered, in the eyes of the world, unless we could return to civilization and tell what we had done. Should we be lost in these wastes or should we be frozen to death, or buried in the snow, or drowned in a crevasse, it would never be known that we had been here. It was, therefore, as vitally necessary to get back in touch with human life, with our report, as it had been to get to the Pole.

Before leaving, I enclosed a note, written on the previous day, in a metallic tube. This I buried in the surface of the Polar snows. I knew, of course, that this would not remain long at the spot, as the ice was in the grip of a slow-drifting movement. I felt the possibility of this slow movement was more important than if it remained stationary; for, if ever found in the south, the destination of the tube would indicate the ice drift from the Pole. The following is an exact copy of the original note, which is reproduced photographically on another page:

THE RETURN—A BATTLE FOR LIFE AGAINST FAMINE AND FROST

The eagerness to solve the mystery had served its purpose. The memory of the adventure for a time remained as a reminder of reckless daring. As we now moved along, there came more and more strongly the realization of the prospective difficulties of the return. Although the mercury was still frozen and the sun's perpetual flush was lost in a frigid blue, the time was at hand in lower latitudes for the ice to break and drift southward.

With correct reasoning, all former expeditions had planned to return to land and a secure line of retreat by May 1. We could not hope to do this until early in June. It seemed probable, therefore, that the ice along the outskirts of the Polar sea would be much disrupted and that open water, small ice and rapid drifts would seriously interfere with our return to a sure footing on the shores of Fridtjof Nansen Sound. This and many other possible dangers had been carefully considered before, but the conquest of the Pole was not possible without such risks.

We had started earlier than all other Polar expeditions and no time had been lost en route. If misfortune came to us, it could not be because of wasted energies or unnecessary delay. In the last days of the onward rush to success there had been neither time nor opportunity to ponder over future dangers, but now, facing the southern skies, under which lay home and all for which we lived, the back trail seemed indescribably long. In cold, sober thought, freed of the intoxication of Polar enthusiasm, the difficulties increasingly darkened in color. We clearly saw that the crucial stage of the campaign was not the taking of the Pole. The test of our fitness as boreal conquerors was to be measured by the outcome of a final battle for life against famine and frost.

Figuring out the difficulties and possibilities of our return, I came to the conclusion that to endeavor to get back by our upward trail would not afford great advantage. Much time would be lost seeking the trail. The almost continuous low drift of snow during some part of nearly every day would obliterate our tracks and render the trail useless as a beaten track in making travel easier. The advantage of previously constructed snow houses as camps did not appeal to us.

After one is accustomed to a new, clean, bright dome of snow every night, as we were, the return to such a camp is gloomy and depressing. The house is almost invariably left in such a shape that, for hygienic reasons alone, it should not be occupied. Furthermore, the influence of sun and storm absolutely destroys in a few days two out of three of all such shelter places. Moreover, we were now camping in our silk tent and did not require other shelter. At the season of the year in which we were traveling, the activity of the pack farther south made back-tracking impossible, because of irregular lateral drift of individual fields. And to me the most important reason was an eager desire to ascertain what might be discovered on a new trail farther west. It was this eagerness which led to our being carried adrift and held prisoners for a year.

The first days, however, passed rapidly. The ice fields became smoother. On April 24 we crossed five crevasses. With fair weather and favorable ice, long marches were made. On the 24th we made sixteen miles, on the 25th fifteen miles, on the 26th, 27th and 28th, fourteen miles a day. The fire of the homing sentiment began to dispel our overbearing fatigue. The dogs sniffed the air. The Eskimos sang songs of the chase. To me also there came cheering thoughts of friends and loved ones to be greeted. I thought of delightful dinners, of soul-stirring music. For all of us, the good speed of the return chase brought a mental atmosphere of dreams of the pleasures of another world. For a time we were blinded to ultimate dangers, just as we had been in the northward dash.

In our return along the one hundredth meridian, there were three important objects to be gained by a route somewhat west of the northward march. The increasing easterly drift would thus be counterbalanced. We hoped to get near enough to the new lands to explore a part of the coast. And a wider belt would be swept out of the unknown area. On April 30 the pedometer registered one hundred and twenty-one miles, and by our system of dead reckoning, which was usually correct, we should have been at latitude 87°, 59ʹ, longitude 100°. The nautical observations gave latitude 88°, 1ʹ, longitude 97°, 42ʹ. We were drifting eastward, therefore, with increasing speed. To counterbalance our being moved by this drift, we turned and bounded southward in a more westerly course.

The never-changing sameness of the daily routine was again felt. The novelty of success and the passion of the run for the goal were no longer operative. The scenes of shivering blue wearied the eye, and there was no inspiration in the moving sea of ice to gladden the heart. The thermometer rose and fell between 30 and 40° below zero, Fahrenheit, with a ceaseless wind. The first of May was at hand, bringing to mind the blossoms and smiles of a kindly world. But here all nature was narrowed to lines of ice.

May 1 came with increasing color in the sunbursts, but without cheer. The splendor of terrestrial fire was a cheat. Over the horizon, mirages displayed celestial hysterics. The sun circled the skies in lines of glory, but its heat was a sham, its light a torment. The ice was heavy and smooth. On May 2, clouds obscured the sky, fog fell heavily over the ice, we struck our course with difficulty but made nineteen miles. On May 3 snow fell, but the end of the march brought clear skies, and, with them, the longing for my land of blossoming cherry and apple trees.

With weary nerves, and with compass in hand, my lonely march ahead of the sledges continued day by day. Progress was satisfactory. We had passed the eighty-ninth and eighty-eighth parallels. The eighty-seventh and the eighty-sixth would soon be under foot, and the sight of the new lands should give encouragement. These hard-fought times were days long to be remembered. The lack of cerebral stimulation and nutrition left no cellular resource to aid the memory of those fateful hours of chill.

The long strain of the march had established a brotherly sympathy amongst the trio of human strugglers. The dogs, though still possessing the savage ferocity of the wolf, had taken us into their community. We now moved among them without hearing a grunt of discord, and their sympathetic eyes followed until we were made comfortable on the cheerless snows. If they happened to be placed near enough, they edged up and encircled us, giving the benefit of their animal heat. To remind us of their presence, frost-covered noses were frequently pushed under the sleeping bag, and occasionally a cold snout touched our warm skin with a rude awakening.

We loved the creatures, and admired their superb brute strength. Their superhuman adaptability was a frequent topic of conversation. With a pelt that was a guarantee against all weather condition, they threw themselves down to the sweep of winds, in open defiance of death-dealing storms. Eating but a pound of pemmican a day, and demanding neither water nor shelter, they willingly did a prodigious amount of work and then, as bed-fellows, daily offered their fur as shelter and their bones as head-rests to their two-footed companions. We had learned to appreciate the advantage of their beating breasts. The bond of animal fellowship had drawn tighter and tighter in a long run of successive adventures. And now there was a stronger reason than ever to appreciate power, for together we were seeking an escape from a world which was never intended for creatures with pulsating hearts.

Much very heavy ice was crossed near the eighty-eighth parallel, but the endless unbroken fields of the northward trails were not again seen. Now the weather changed considerably. The light, cutting winds from the west increased in force, and the spasmodic squalls came at shorter intervals. The clear purples and blues of the skies gradually gave place to an ugly hue of gray. A rush of frosty needles came over the pack for several hours each day.

The inducement to seek shelter in cemented walls of snow and to wait for better weather was very great. But such delay would mean certain starvation. Under fair conditions, there was barely food enough to reach land, and even short delays might seriously jeopardize our return. We could not, therefore, do otherwise than force ourselves against the wind and drift with all possible speed, paying no heed to unavoidable suffering. As there was no alternative, we tried to persuade ourselves that existing conditions might be worse than they were.

The hard work of igloo building was now a thing of the past—only one had been built since leaving the Pole, and in this a precious day was lost, while the atmospheric fury changed the face of the endless expanse of desolation. The little silk tent protected us sufficiently from the icy airs. There were still 50° of frost, but, with hardened skins and insensible nerve filaments, the torture was not so keenly felt. Our steady diet of pemmican, tea and biscuits was not entirely satisfactory. We longed for enough to give a real filling sense, but the daily ration had to be slightly reduced rather than increased. The change in life from winter to summer, which should take place at about this time of the year, was, in our case, marked only by a change in shelter, from the snow house to the tent, and our beds were moved from the soft snow shelf of the igloo to the hard, wind-swept crust.

In my watches to get a peep of the sun at just the right moment, I was kept awake during much of the resting period. For pastime, my eyes wandered from snorting dogs to snoring men. During one of these idle moments there came a solution of the utility of the dog's tail, a topic with which I had been at play for several days. It is quoted here at the risk of censure, because it is a typical phase of our lives which cannot be illustrated otherwise. Seeming trivialities were seized upon as food for thought. Why, I asked, has the dog a tail at all? The bear, the musk ox, the caribou and the hare, each in its own way, succeeds very well with but a dwarfed stub. Why does nature, in the dog, expend its best effort in growing the finest fur over a seemingly useless line of tail bones? The thing is distinctive, and one could hardly conceive of the creature without the accessory, but nature in the Arctic does not often waste energy to display beauties and temperament. This tail must have an important use; otherwise it would soon fall under the knife of frost and time. Yes! It was imported into the Arctic by the wolf progenitor of the dog from warmer lands, where its swing served a useful purpose in fly time. A nose made to breathe warm air requires some protection in the far north and the dog supplied the need with his tail. At the time when I made this discovery a cold wind, charged with cutting crystal, was brushing the pack. Each dog had his back arched to the wind and his face veiled with an effective curl of his tail. Thus each was comfortably shielded from icy torment by an appendage adapted to that very purpose.

In the long tread over snowy wastes new lessons in human mechanism aroused attention. At first the effort to find a workable way over the troublesome pack surface had kept mind and body keyed to an exciting pitch, but slowly this had changed. By a kind of unconscious intuition, the eye now found easy routes, the lower leg mechanically traveled over yards and miles and degrees without even consulting the brain, while the leg trunk, in the effort to conserve energy, was left in repose at periods during miles of travel, thus saving much of the exertion of walking.

The muscles, thus schooled to work automatically, left the mind free to work and play. The maddening monotone of our routine, together with the expenditure of every available strain of force, had left the head dizzy with emptiness. Something must be done to lift the soul out of the boreal bleach.

The power of the mind over the horse-power of the body was here shown at its best. The flesh proved loyal to the gray matter only while mental entertainment was encouraged. Thus aching muscles were persuaded to do double duty without sending up a cry of tired feeling. The play of the mind with topics of its own choosing is an advantage worth seeking at all times. But, to us, it multiplied vital force and increased greatly the daily advance. Science, art and poetry were the heights to which the wings of thought soared. Beginning with the diversion of making curious speculations on subjects such as that of the use of the dog's tail and the Arctic law of animal coloring, the first period of this mental exercise closed with my staging a drama of the comedies and tragedies of the Eskimos.

In the effort to frame sentiment in measured lines, a weird list of topics occupied my strained fancy. In more agreeable moods I always found pleasure in imagining a picture of the Polar sunrise, that budding period of life when all Nature awakens after its winter sleep. It was not difficult to start E-tuk-i-shook and Ah-we-lah on similar flights of fancy. A mere suggestion would keep up a flow of agreeable thought for several days.

By such forced mental stimuli the centers of fatigue were deluded into insensibility. The eighty-seventh parallel was crossed, the eighty-sixth was neared, but there came a time when both mind and body wearied of the whole problem of forced resolution.

On May 6 we were stopped at six in the morning by the approach of an unusual gale. The wind had been steady and strong all night, but we did not heed its threatening increase of force until too late. It came from the west, as usual, driving coarse snow with needle points. The ice about was old and hummocky, offering a difficult line of march, but some shelter. In the strongest blasts we threw ourselves over the sled behind hummocks and gathered new breath to force a few miles more.

Finally, when no longer able to force the dogs through the blinding drift we sought the lee of an unlifted block of ice. Here suitable snow was found for a snow house. A few blocks were cut and set, but the wind swept them away as if they were chips. The tent was tried, but it could not be made to stand in the rush of the roaring tumult. In sheer despair we crept into the tent without erecting the pole. Creeping into bags, we then allowed the flapping silk to be buried by the drifting snow. Soon the noise and discomfort of the storm were lost and we enjoyed the comfort of an icy grave. An efficient breathing hole was kept open, and the wind was strong enough to sweep off the weight of a dangerous drift. A new lesson was thus learned in fighting the battle of life, and it was afterwards useful.

Several days of icy despair now followed one another in rapid succession. The wind did not rise to the full force of a storm, but it was too strong and too cold to travel. The food supply was noticeably decreasing. The daily advance was less. With such weather, starvation seemed inevitable. Camp was moved nearly every day, but ambition sank to the lowest ebb. To the atmospheric unrest was added the instability of broken ice and the depressing mystery of an unknown position. For many days no observations had been possible. Our location could only be guessed at.

Through driving storms, with the wind wailing in our ears and deafening us to the dismal howling of the hungry dogs, we pushed forward in a daily maddening struggle. The route before us was unknown. We were in the fateful clutch of a drifting sea of ice. I could not guess whither we were bound. At times I even lost hope of reaching land. Our bodies were tired. Our legs were numb. We were almost insensible to the mad craving hunger of our stomachs. We were living on a half ration of food, and daily becoming weaker.[17]

Sometimes I paused, overcome by an almost overwhelming impulse to lie down and drift through sleep into death. At these times, fortunately, thoughts of home came thronging, with memories as tender as are the memories of singing spring-time birds in winter time. And, although the stimulating incentive of reaching the Pole on going north was gone, now, having accomplished the feat, there was always the thought that unless I got home no one should ever learn of that superhuman struggle, that final victory.

Empty though it was, I had, as I had hoped, proved myself to myself; I had justified the three centuries of human effort: I had proven that finite human brain and palpitating muscle can be victorious over a cruel and death-dealing Nature. It was a testimony that it was my duty to give the world of struggling, striving men, and which, as a father, I hoped with pride to give to my little children.

BACK TO LIFE AND BACK TO LAND

THE RETURN—DELUDED BY DRIFT AND FOG—CARRIED ASTRAY OVER AN UNSEEN DEEP—TRAVEL FOR TWENTY DAYS IN A WORLD OF MISTS, WITH THE TERROR OF DEATH—AWAKENED FROM SLEEP BY A HEAVENLY SONG—THE FIRST BIRD—FOLLOWING THE WINGED HARBINGER—WE REACH LAND—A BLEAK, BARREN ISLAND POSSESSING THE CHARM OF PARADISE—AFTER DAYS VERGING ON STARVATION, WE ENJOY A FEAST OF UNCOOKED GAME

XXII

Southward Into the American Archipelago

On May 24 the sky cleared long enough to permit me to take a set of observations. I found we were on the eighty-fourth parallel, near the ninety-seventh meridian. The new land I had noted on my northward journey was hidden by a low mist. The ice was much crevassed, and drifted eastward. Many open spaces of water were denoted in the west by patches of water sky. The pack was sufficiently active to give us considerable anxiety, although pressure lines and open water did not at the time seriously impede our progress.

Scarcely enough food remained on the sledges to reach our caches unless we should average fifteen miles a day. On the return from the Pole to this point we had been able to make only twelve miles daily. Now our strength, even under fair conditions, did not seem to be equal to more than ten miles. The outlook was threatening, and even dangerous, but the sight of the cleared sky gave new courage to E-tuk-i-shook and Ah-we-lah.

Our best course was to get to Fridtjof Nansen Sound as soon as possible. The new land westward was invisible, and offered no food prospects. An attempted exploration might cause a fatal delay.

Still depending upon a steady easterly drift of the pack, a course was set somewhat west of Svartevoeg, the northern point of Axel Heiberg Land. In pressing onward, light variable winds and thick fogs prevailed. The ice changed rapidly to smaller fields as we advanced. The temperature rose to zero, and the air really began to be warm. Our chronic shivering disappeared. With light sledges and endurable weather, we made fair progress over the increasing pack irregularities.

As we crossed the eighty-third parallel we found ourselves to the west of a large lead, extending slightly west of south. Immense quantities of broken and pulverized ice lined the shores to a width of several miles. The irregularities of this surface and the uncemented break offered difficulties over which no force of man or beast could move a sledge or boat. Compelled to follow the line of least resistance, a southerly course was set along the ice division. The wind now changed and came from the east, but there was no relief from the heavy banks of fog that surrounded us.

The following days were days of desperation. The food for man and dog was reduced, and the difficulties of ice travel increased dishearteningly. We traveled twenty days, not knowing our position. A gray mystery enshrouded us. Terror followed in our wake. Beneath us the sea moved—whither it was carrying us I did not know. That we were ourselves journeying toward an illimitable, hopeless sea, where we should die of slow, lingering starvation, I knew was a dreadful probability. Every minute drew its pangs of despair and fear.

The gray world of mist was silent. My companions gazed at me with faces shriveled, thinned and hardened as those of mummies. Their anguish was unspeakable. My own vocal powers seemed to have left me. Our dogs were still; with bowed heads, tails drooping, they pulled the sledges dispiritedly. We seemed like souls in torment, traveling in a world of the dead, condemned to some Dantesque torture that should never cease.

After the mental torment of threatened starvation, which prevented, despite the awful languor of my tortured limbs, any sleep; after heart-breaking marches and bitter hunger and unquenched thirst, the baffling mist that had shut us from all knowledge at last cleared away one morning. Our hearts bounded. I felt such relief as a man buried alive must feel when, after struggling in the stifling darkness, his grave is suddenly opened. Land loomed to the west and south of us.

Yet we found we had been hardly dealt with by fate. Since leaving the eighty-fourth parallel, without noticeable movement, we had been carried astray by the ocean drift. We had moved with the entire mass that covered the Polar waters. I took observations. They gave latitude 79° 32ʹ, and longitude 101° 22ʹ. At last I had discovered our whereabouts, and found that we were far from where we ought to be. But our situation was indeed nearly hopeless. The mere gaining a knowledge of where we actually were, however, fanned again the inextinguishable embers of hope.

We were in Crown Prince Gustav Sea. To the east were the low mountains and high valleys of Axel Heiberg Land, along the farther side of which was our prearranged line of retreat, with liberal caches of good things and with big game everywhere. But we were effectually barred from all this.

Between us and the land lay fifty miles of small crushed ice and impassable lines of open water. In hard-fought efforts to cross these we were repulsed many times. I knew that if by chance we should succeed in crossing, there would still remain an unknown course of eighty miles to the nearest cache, on the eastern coast of Axel Heiberg Land.

We had no good reason to expect any kind of subsistence along the west coast of Axel Heiberg Land. We had been on three-fourths rations for three weeks, and there remained only half rations for another ten days. Entirely aside from the natural barriers in the way of returning eastward and northward, we were now utterly unequal to the task, for we had not the food to support us.

The land to the south was nearer. Due south there was a wide gap which we took to be Hassel Sound. On each side there was a low ice-sheeted island, beyond the larger islands which Sverdrup had named Ellef Ringnes Land and Amund Ringnes Land. The ice southward was tolerably good and the drift was south-south-east.

In the hope that some young seals might be seen we moved into Hassel Sound toward the eastern island. To satisfy our immediate pangs of hunger was our most important mission.

The march on June 14 was easy, with a bright warm sun and a temperature but little under the freezing point. In a known position, on good ice, and with land rising before us, we were for a brief period happy and strong, even with empty stomachs. The horizon was eagerly sought for some color or form or movement to indicate life. We were far enough south to expect bears and seals, and expecting the usual luck of the hungry savage, we sought diligently. Our souls reached forth through our far-searching eyes. Our eyes pained with the intense fixity of gazing, yet no animate thing appeared. The world was vacant and dead. Our beating hearts, indeed, seemed to be the only palpitating things there.

In the piercing rays of a high sun the tent was erected, and in it, after eating only four ounces of pemmican and drinking two cups of icy water, we sought rest. The dogs, after a similar ration, but without water, fell into an easy sleep. I regarded the poor creatures with tenderness and pity. For more than a fortnight they had not uttered a sound to disturb the frigid silence. When a sled dog is silent and refuses to fight with his neighbor, his spirit is very low. Finally I fell asleep.

At about six o'clock we were awakened by a strange sound. Our surprised eyes turned from side to side. Not a word was uttered. Another sound came—a series of soft, silvery notes—the song of a creature that might have come from heaven. I listened with rapture. I believed I was dreaming. The enchanting song continued—I lay entranced. I could not believe this divine thing was of our real world until the pole of our tent gently quivered. Then, above us, I heard the flutter of wings. It was a bird—a snow bunting trilling its ethereal song—the first sound of life heard for many months.

We were back to life! Tears of joy rolled down our emaciated faces. If I could tell you of the resurrection of the soul which came with that first bird note, and the new interest which it gave in our subsequent life, I should feel myself capable of something superhuman in powers of expression.

With the song of that marvelous bird a choking sense of homesickness came to all of us. We spoke no word. The longing for home gripped our hearts.

We were hungry, but no thought of killing this little feathered creature came to us. It seemed as divine as the bird that came of old to Noah in the ark. Taking a few of our last bread crumbs, we went out to give it food. The little chirping thing danced joyously on the crisp snows, evidently as glad to see us as we were to behold it. I watched it with fascination. At last we were back to life! We felt renewed vigor. And when the little bird finally rose into the air and flew homeward, our spirits rose, our eyes followed it, and, as though it were a token sent to us, we followed its winged course landward with eager, bounding hearts.

We were now on immovable ice attached to the land. We directed our course uninterruptedly landward, for there was no thought of further rest or sleep after the visit of the bird had so uplifted our hearts. Our chances of getting meat would have been bettered by following close to the open water, but the ice there was such that no progress could be made. Furthermore, the temptation quickly to set foot on land was too great to resist. At the end of a hard march—the last few hours of which were through deep snows—we mounted the ice edge, and finally reached a little island—a bare spot of real land. When my foot touched it, my heart sank. We sat down, and the joy of the child in digging the sand of the seashore was ours.

I wonder if ever such a bleak spot, in a desert of death, had so impressed men before as a perfect paradise. In this barren heap of sand and clay, we were at last free of the danger, the desolation, the sterility of that soul-withering environment of a monotonously moving world of ice and eternal frost.

We fastened the dogs to a rock, and pitched the tent on earth-soiled snows. In my joy I did not forget that the Pole was ours, but, at that time, I was ready to offer freely to others the future pleasures of its crystal environment and all its glory. Our cup had been filled too often with its bitters and too seldom with its sweets for us to entertain further thirst for boreal conquest.

And we also resolved to keep henceforth from the wastes of the terrible Polar sea. In the future the position of lands must govern our movements. For, along a line of rocks, although we might suffer from hunger, we should no longer be helpless chips on the ocean drift, and if no other life should be seen, at least occasional shrimps would gladden the heart.