160 THE RETURN TO FRAMHEIM 



Possibly someone may find a use for these things in the 

 future. 



We had to kill Frith j of, one of Bjaaland's dogs, at 

 this camp. He had latterly been showing marked signs 

 of shortness of breath, and finally this became so pain- 

 ful to the animal that we decided to put an end to him. 

 Thus brave Frith j of ended his career. On cutting him 

 ojien it appeared that his lungs were quite shrivelled 

 up ; nevertheless, the remains disappeared pretty quickly 

 into his companions' stomachs. What they had lost 

 in quantity did not apparently affect their quality. 

 Nigger, one of Hassel's dogs, had been destroyed on 

 the way down from the plateau. We thus reached this 

 point again with twelve dogs, as we had reckoned on 

 doing, and left it with eleven. I see in my diary the 

 following remark: " The dogs look just as well as when 

 we left Framheim." On leaving the place a few hours 

 later we had provisions for thirty-five days on the 

 sledges. Besides this, of course, we had a depot at 

 every degree of latitude up to 80°. 



It looked as though we had found our depot at the 

 right moment, for when we came out to continue our 

 journey the whole Barrier was in a blizzard. A gale 

 was blowing from the south, with a sky completely 

 clouded over; falling snow and drift united in a de- 

 lightful dance, and made it difficult to see. The lucky 

 thing was that now we had the wind with us, and thus 

 escaped getting it all in our eyes, as we had been accus- 



