cakes, and I had to recognize that the chance of getting
near enough to escape on to it was gone. If, on the other hand, the
whole bay froze solid again I had yet another possible chance. For my
pan would hold together longer and I should be opposite another
village, called Goose Cove, at daylight, and might possibly be seen
from there. I knew that the komatiks there would be starting at
daybreak over the hills for a parade of Orangemen about twenty miles
away. Possibly, therefore, I might be seen as they climbed the hills.
So I lay down, and went to sleep again.

It seems impossible to say how long one sleeps, but I woke with a
sudden thought in my mind that I must have a flag; but again I had no
pole and no flag. However, I set to work in the dark to disarticulate
the legs of my dead dogs, which were now frozen stiff, and which were
all that offered a chance of carrying anything like a distress signal.
Cold as it was, I determined to sacrifice my shirt for that purpose
with the first streak of daylight.

It took a long time in the dark to get the legs off, and when I had
patiently marled them together with old harness rope and the remains
of the skin traces, it was the heaviest and crookedest flag-pole it
has ever been my lot to see. I had had no food from six o'clock the
morning before, when I had eaten porridge and bread and butter. I had,
however, a rubber band which I had been wearing instead of one of my
garters, and I chewed that for twenty-four hours. It saved me from
thirst and hunger, oddly enough. It was not possible to get a drink
from my pan, for it was far too salty. But anyhow that thought did not
distress me much, for as from time to time I heard the cracking and
grinding of the newly formed slob, it seemed that my devoted boat must
inevitably soon go to pieces.

At last the sun rose, and the time came for the sacrifice of my shirt.
So I stripped, and, much to my surprise, found it not half so cold as
I had anticipated. I now re-formed my dog-skins with the raw side out,
so that they made a kind of coat quite rivalling Joseph's. But, with
the rising of the sun, the frost came out of the joints of my dogs'
legs, and the friction caused by waving it made my flag-pole almost
tie itself in knots. Still, I could raise it three or four feet above
my head, which was very important.

Now, however, I found that instead of being as far out at sea as I had
reckoned, I had drifted back in a northwesterly direc