THE RETURN ON FORCED MARCHES 



The next morning early Abraham is sent off to 

 hunt caribou. The other Greenlanders who are 

 able to travel, Peter and Enok, go back for packs 

 which had been left behind, and we begin our bal- 

 loon studies. These ascents which we carried out 

 were successful, and were the first ever to be made 

 so close to the inland-ice either in the Arctic or the 

 Antarctic. The courses followed by the balloons 

 showed plainly the structure of the ice-cap air 

 circulation. The balloons rose first passing off 

 to the northwest under the influence of the out- 

 blowing winds from the ice-cap, and then at about 

 twelve hundred meters elevation, or about three- 

 fourths of a mile, they reversed direction and, 

 boomerang fashion, passed in over the ice. 



At night Abraham returned discouraged, for he 

 had not seen even a trace of caribou. Our condi- 

 tion is not a pleasant one. We have now reached 

 the ice-front only to find that we must feed 

 eight men with the rations we had planned for 

 four, even though for some days we have been 

 keeping the rations too low for such heavy work as 

 we are doing. Only one course is open to us. We 

 must cut down the time for our ice-cap work to 

 not more than four days at the most, after which it 

 will be necessary to start back to our base on forced 

 marches and with half rations until our nearest 



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