FINAL SPURT BEGUN 275 



was no worse for my involuntary morning plunge. I 

 thought of my unused bath tub on the Roosevelt, 

 three hundred and thirty nautical miles to the south, 

 and smiled. 



It was a fine marching morning, clear and sunlit, 

 with a temperature of minus 25°, and the wind of the 

 past few days had subsided to a gentle breeze. The 

 going was the best we had had since leaving the land. 

 The floes were large and old, hard and level, with 

 patches of sapphire blue ice (the pools of the preced- 

 ing summer). While the pressure ridges surrounding 

 them were stupendous, some of them fifty feet high, 

 they were not especially hard to negotiate, either 

 through some gap or up the gradual slope of a huge 

 drift of snow. The brilliant sunlight, the good going 

 save for the pressure ridges, the consciousness that we 

 were now well started on the last lap of our journey, 

 and the joy of again being in the lead affected me like 

 wine. The years seemed to drop from me, and I felt 

 as I had felt in those days fifteen years before, when I 

 headed my little party across the great ice-cap of Green- 

 land, leaving twenty and twenty-five miles behind my 

 snowshoes day after day, and on a spurt stretching it 

 to thirty or forty. 



Perhaps a man always thinks of the very beginning 

 of his work when he feels it is nearing its end. The 

 appearance of the ice-fields to the north this day, 

 large and level, the brilliant blue of the sky, the biting 

 character of the wind — everything excepting the sur- 

 face of the ice, which on the great cap is absolutely 



