CHAPTER X 



KNOCKING AT THE GATEWAY TO THE POLE 



FROM Etah to Cape Sheridan! Imagine about 

 three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid 

 ice — ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous 

 ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every 

 foot of height revealed above the surface of the water, 

 hides seven feet below — a theater of action which 

 for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's 

 frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating 

 pond. 



Then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, 

 compact, strong and resistant as any vessel built by 

 mortal hands can be, yet utterly insignificant in com- 

 parison with the white, cold adversary she must fight. 

 And on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, 

 men, women, and children, whites and Eskimos, who 

 have gone out into the crazy, ice-tortured channel 

 between Baffin Bay and the Polar Sea — gone out to 

 help prove the reality of a dream which has bewitched 

 some of the most daring minds of the world for cen- 

 turies, a will-o'-the-wisp in the pursuit of which men 

 have frozen, and starved, and died. The music that 

 ever sounded in our ears had for melody the howling 

 of two hundred and forty-six wild dogs, for a bass 

 accompaniment the deep, low grumbling of the ice, 

 surging around us with the impulse of the tides, and 



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