n headed still
more to the north.

"There must be a good three-mile-an-hour current here," Godfrey observed
presently. "We are going along first-rate past the shore. It took us
over five days to come up. At this rate we shall go down in two."

They paddled steadily for twelve hours, stopping once only to cook a
meal. Then they went close inshore again, had supper, and slept. When
they woke they found they were still within a mile of the shore, and the
current was now taking them along no more than a mile an hour.

"The gulf must be wide here, Luka. I don't think we should gain anything
by going out four or five miles farther, so we will keep about as we
are. We ought to be at the point by the end of to-day's work. We were
two hundred miles up. I expect we drifted down five-and-twenty miles in
crossing, and we must have passed the land at a good five miles an hour
yesterday; so that we ought not to be more than thirty or forty miles
from the point, for this peninsula does not go as far north as the other
by twenty or thirty miles."

After eight hours' paddling they found themselves at the mouth of a deep
bay.

"That is all right," Godfrey said, examining his tracing. "That land on
the farther side of the bay is the northern point of the gulf. We will
paddle across there and anchor by the shore for to-night. To-morrow we
shall have a long paddle, for it is seventy or eighty miles nearly due
west to a sheltered bay that lies just this side of Cape Golovina. Once
round that, we have nearly four hundred miles to go nearly due south
into Kara Bay. This long tongue of land we are working round is called
the Yamal Peninsula. Once fairly down into Kara Bay, we shall leave
Siberia behind us, and the land will be Russia."

They struck across the bay, and landed under shelter of the cape. The
land was higher here than any they had before met; and after their sleep
Godfrey took his gun, accompanied by Jack, and ascended the hill.

"It is rum," he said to himself, as he gazed over the wide expanse of
sea to the north, "that this should be one sheet of ice in the winter. I
do not like the look of those clouds away to the north. I think we are
going to have either a fog or a gale. We won't make a move till we see.
This coast seems rocky, and it won't do to make along it unless we have
settled weather."

He returned and told Luka, and then wandered away again, as he had seen
that birds were very plentiful, and he returned in th