en or twelve entire hours, and then, on
the other side I might find another one opening right before me.
Moreover, on the 8th July, one of the dogs, after a feed on blubber,
suddenly died; and there was left me only 'Reinhardt,' a white-haired
Siberian dog, with little pert up-sticking ears, like a cat's. Him, too,
I had to kill on coming to open water.

This did not happen till the 3rd August, nearly four months from the
Pole.

I can't think, my God, that any heart of man ever tholed the appalling
nightmare and black abysm of sensations in which, during those four
long desert months, I weltered: for though I was as a brute, I had a
man's heart to feel. What I had seen, or dreamed, at the Pole followed
and followed me; and if I shut my poor weary eyes to sleep, those others
yonder seemed to watch me still with their distraught and gloomy gaze,
and in my spinning dark dreams spun that eternal ecstasy of the lake.

However, by the 28th July I knew from the look of the sky, and the
absence of fresh-water ice, that the sea could not be far; so I set to
work, and spent two days in putting to rights the now battered kayak.
This done, I had no sooner resumed my way than I sighted far off a
streaky haze, which I knew to be the basalt cliffs of Franz Josef Land;
and in a craziness of joy I stood there, waving my ski-staff about my
head, with the senile cheers of a very old man.

In four days this land was visibly nearer, sheer basaltic cliffs mixed
with glacier, forming apparently a great bay, with two small islands in
the mid-distance; and at fore-day of the 3rd August I arrived at the
definite edge of the pack-ice in moderate weather at about the
freezing-point.

I at once, but with great reluctance, shot Reinhardt, and set to work to
get the last of the provisions, and the most necessary of the
implements, into the kayak, making haste to put out to the toilless
luxury of being borne on the water, after all the weary trudge. Within
fourteen hours I was coasting, with my little lug-sail spread, along the
shore-ice of that land. It was midnight of a calm Sabbath, and low on
the horizon smoked the drowsing red sun-ball, as my canvas skiff lightly
chopped her little way through this silent sea. Silent, silent: for
neither snort of walrus, nor yelp of fox, nor cry of startled kittiwake,
did I hear: but all was still as the jet-black shadow of the cliffs and
glacier on the tranquil sea: and many bodies of dead things strewed th