DESCENDING AGAIN 73 



gallop, blindly and in complete ignorance of the ground, 

 would be madness. We might risk falling into some 

 chasm before we had time to pull up. 



Hanssen, as usual, was driving first. Strictly speak- 

 ing, I should now have been going in advance, but the 

 uneven surface at the start and the rapid pace after- 

 wards had made it impossible to walk as fast as the dogs 

 could pull. I was therefore following by the side of 

 Wisting's sledge, and chatting with him. Suddenly I 

 saw Hanssen's dogs shoot ahead, and downhill they 

 went at the wildest pace, Wisting after them. I 

 shouted to Hanssen to stop, and he succeeded in doing 

 so by twisting his sledge. The others, who were 

 following, stopped when they came up to him. We 

 were in the middle of a fairly steep descent; what 

 there might be below was not easy to decide, nor would 

 we try to find out in that weather. Was it possible 

 that we were on our way down through the mountains 

 again? It seemed more probable that we lay on one of 

 the numerous ridges; but we could be sure of nothing 

 before the weather cleared. We trampled down a place 

 for the tent in the loose snow, and soon got it up. It 

 was not a long day's march that we had done — eleven 

 and three-quarter miles — but we had put an end to 

 our stay at the Butcher's Shop, and that was a great 

 thing. The boiling-point test that evening showed that 

 we were 10,300 feet above the sea, and that we had 

 thus gone down 620 feet from the Butcher's. We 



VOL. II. 31 



