ects.

* * * * *

Well, again came Christmas, the New Year--Spring: and on the 22nd May I
set out with a well-stocked kayak. The water was fairly open, and the
ice so good, that at one place I could sail the kayak over it, the wind
sending me sliding at a fine pace. Being on the west coast of Franz
Josef Land, I was in as favourable a situation as possible, and I turned
my bow southward with much hope, keeping a good many days just in sight
of land. Toward the evening of my third day out I noticed a large flat
floe, presenting far-off a singular and lovely sight, for it seemed
freighted thick with a profusion of pink and white roses, showing in its
clear crystal the empurpled reflection. On getting near I saw that it
was covered with millions of Ross's gulls, all dead, whose pretty rosy
bosoms had given it that appearance.

Up to the 29th June I made good progress southward and westward (the
weather being mostly excellent), sometimes meeting dead bears, floating
away on floes, sometimes dead or living walrus-herds, with troop after
troop of dead kittiwakes, glaucus and ivory gulls, skuas, and every kind
of Arctic fowl. On that last day--the 29th June--I was about to encamp
on a floe soon after midnight, when, happening to look toward the sun,
my eye fell, far away south across the ocean of floes, upon
something--_the masts of a ship_.

A phantom ship, or a real ship: it was all one; real, I must have
instantly felt, it could not be: but at a sight so incredible my heart
set to beating in my bosom as though I must surely die, and feebly
waving the cane oar about my head, I staggered to my knees, and thence
with wry mouth toppled flat.

So overpoweringly sweet was the thought of springing once more, like the
beasts of Circe, from a walrus into a man. At this time I was tearing my
bear's-meat just like a bear; I was washing my hands in walrus-blood to
produce a glairy sort of pink cleanliness, in place of the black grease
which chronically coated them.

Worn as I was, I made little delay to set out for that ship; and I had
not travelled over water and ice four hours when, to my in-describable
joy, I made out from the top of a steep floe that she was the _Boreal_.
It seemed most strange that she should be anywhere hereabouts: I could
only conclude that she must have forced and drifted her way thus far
westward out of the ice-block in which our party had left her, and
perhaps now was loi