attering-ram,
blind, deaf, resistless. The ugly set of his face became all the more
ugly, the contorted eyes flashing, the great jaw all but simian. He
appeared physically larger. It was no longer a man; it was a giant, an
ogre, a colossal jotun hurling ice-blocks, fighting out a battle
unspeakable, in the dawn of the world, in chaos and in darkness.

The impedimenta of the expedition were broken up into packs that each
man carried upon his shoulders. From now on everything that hindered the
rapidity of their movements must be left behind. Six dogs (all that
remained of the pack of eighteen) still accompanied them.

Bennett had hoped and had counted upon his men for an average daily
march of sixteen miles, but the winter gales driving down from the
northeast beat them back; the ice and snow that covered the land were no
less uneven than the hummocks of the pack. All game had migrated far to
the southward.

Every day the men grew weaker and weaker; their provisions dwindled.
Again and again one or another of them, worn out beyond human endurance,
would go to sleep while marching and would fall to the ground.

Upon the third day of this overland march one of the dogs suddenly
collapsed upon the ground, exhausted and dying. Bennett had ordered such
of the dogs that gave out cut up and their meat added to the store of
the party's provisions. Ferriss and Muck Tu had started to pick up the
dead dog when the other dogs, famished and savage, sprang upon their
fallen mate. The two men struck and kicked, all to no purpose; the dogs
turned upon them snarling and snapping. They, too, demanded to live;
they, too, wanted to be fed. It was a hideous business. There in that
half-night of the polar circle, lost and forgotten on a primordial
shore, back into the stone age once more, men and animals fought one
another for the privilege of eating a dead dog.

But their life was not all inhuman; Bennett at least could rise even
above humanity, though his men must perforce be dragged so far below it.
At the end of the first week Hawes, the carpenter, died. When they awoke
in the morning he was found motionless and stiff in his sleeping-bag.
Some sort of grave was dug, the poor racked body lowered into it, and
before it was filled with snow and broken ice Bennett, standing quietly
in the midst of the bare-headed group, opened his prayer-book and began
with the tremendous words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life--"

It was the beginnin