ridge into water mid-thigh deep, where the pressure had forced
down the edge of the floe north of us and had allowed the water to flow
in under the surface snow. My boots and trousers were tight, so that no
water could get inside, and as the water froze on the fur of my trousers
I scraped it off with the blade of the ice lance which I carried, and
was no worse for my involuntary morning plunge. I thought of my unused
bath tub on the _Roosevelt_, three hundred and thirty nautical miles to
the south, and smiled.

It was a fine marching morning, clear and sunlit, with a temperature of
minus 25 deg., and the wind of the past few days had subsided to a gentle
breeze. The going was the best we had had since leaving the land. The
floes were large and old, hard and level, with patches of sapphire blue
ice (the pools of the preceding summer). While the pressure ridges
surrounding them were stupendous, some of them fifty feet high, they
were not especially hard to negotiate, either through some gap or up the
gradual slope of a huge drift of snow. The brilliant sunlight, the good
going save for the pressure ridges, the consciousness that we were now
well started on the last lap of our journey, and the joy of again being
in the lead affected me like wine. The years seemed to drop from me, and
I felt as I had felt in those days fifteen years before, when I headed
my little party across the great ice-cap of Greenland, leaving twenty
and twenty-five miles behind my snowshoes day after day, and on a spurt
stretching it to thirty or forty.

* * * * *

Perhaps a man always thinks of the very beginning of his work when he
feels it is nearing its end. The appearance of the ice-fields to the
north this day, large and level, the brilliant blue of the sky, the
biting character of the wind--everything excepting the surface of the
ice, which on the great cap is absolutely dead level with a straight
line for a horizon--reminded me of those marches of the long ago.

The most marked difference was the shadows, which on the ice-cap are
absent entirely, but on the polar ice, where the great pressure ridges
stand out in bold relief, are deep and dark. Then, too, there are on the
polar ice those little patches of sapphire blue already mentioned, made
from the water pools of the preceding summer. On the Greenland ice-cap
years ago I had been spurred on by the necessity of reaching the
musk-oxen of Independence Bay bef