known
them to do before. The air was as keen and bitter as frozen steel.

At the next camp I had another of the dogs killed. It was now exactly
six weeks since we left the _Roosevelt_, and I felt as if the goal were
in sight. I intended the next day, weather and ice permitting, to make a
long march, "boil the kettle" midway, and then go on again without
sleep, trying to make up the five miles which we had lost on the 3d of
April.

During the daily march my mind and body were too busy with the problem
of covering as many miles of distance as possible to permit me to enjoy
the beauty of the frozen wilderness through which we tramped. But at the
end of the day's march, while the igloos were being built, I usually had
a few minutes in which to look about me and to realize the
picturesqueness of our situation--we, the only living things in a
trackless, colorless, inhospitable desert of ice. Nothing but the
hostile ice, and far more hostile icy water, lay between our remote
place on the world's map and the utmost tips of the lands of Mother
Earth.

I knew of course that there was always a _possibility_ that we might
still end our lives up there, and that our conquest of the unknown
spaces and silences of the polar void might remain forever unknown to
the world which we had left behind. But it was hard to realize this.
That hope which is said to spring eternal in the human breast always
buoyed me up with the belief that, as a matter of course, we should be
able to return along the white road by which we had come.

Sometimes I would climb to the top of a pinnacle of ice to the north of
our camp and strain my eyes into the whiteness which lay beyond, trying
to imagine myself already at the Pole. We had come so far, and the
capricious ice had placed so few obstructions in our path, that now I
dared to loose my fancy, to entertain the image which my will had
heretofore forbidden to my imagination--the image of ourselves at the
goal.

We had been very fortunate with the leads so far, but I was in constant
and increasing dread lest we should encounter an impassable one toward
the very end. With every successive march, my fear of such impassable
leads had increased. At every pressure ridge I found myself hurrying
breathlessly forward, fearing there might be a lead just beyond it, and
when I arrived at the summit I would catch my breath with relief--only
to find myself hurrying on in the same way at the next ridge.

At our ca