n of the old Eskimo type, seven feet long, we might
have had to use ropes and pull them across hand over hand on an ice
cake.

It is always hard to make the dogs leap a widening crack, though some of
the best dog drivers can do it instantly, using the whip and the voice.
A poor dog driver would be likely to get everything into the water in
the attempt. It is sometimes necessary to go ahead of the dogs, holding
the hand low and shaking it as though it contained some dainty morsel of
food, thus inspiring them with courage for the leap.

Perhaps a mile beyond this, the breaking of the ice at the edge of a
narrow lead as I landed from a jump sent me into the water nearly to my
hips; but as the water did not come above the waistband of my trousers,
which were water-tight, it was soon scraped and beaten off before it had
time to freeze.

This lead was not wide enough to bother the sledges.

As we stopped to make our camp near a huge pressure ridge, the sun,
which was gradually getting higher, seemed almost to have some warmth.
While we were building our igloos, we could see, by the water clouds
lying to the east and southeast of us some miles distant, that a wide
lead was opening in that direction. The approaching full moon was
evidently getting in its work.

As we had traveled on, the moon had circled round and round the heavens
opposite the sun, a disk of silver opposite a disk of gold. Looking at
its pallid and spectral face, from which the brighter light of the sun
had stolen the color, it seemed hard to realize that its presence there
had power to stir the great ice-fields around us with
restlessness--power even now, when we were so near our goal, to
interrupt our pathway with an impassable lead.

The moon had been our friend during the long winter, giving us light to
hunt by for a week or two each month. Now it seemed no longer a friend,
but a dangerous presence to be regarded with fear. Its power, which had
before been beneficent, was now malevolent and incalculably potent for
evil.

When we awoke early in the morning of April 3, after a few hours' sleep,
we found the weather still clear and calm. There were some broad heavy
pressure ridges in the beginning of this march, and we had to use
pickaxes quite freely. This delayed us a little, but as soon as we
struck the level old floes we tried to make up for lost time. As the
daylight was now continuous we could travel as long as we pleased and
sleep as little as