276 THE NORTH POLE 



dead level with a straight line for a horizon — reminded 

 me of those marches of the long ago. 



The most marked difference was the shadows, which 

 on the ice-cap are absent entirely, but on the polar 

 ice, where the great pressure ridges stand out in bold 

 relief, are deep and dark. Then, too, there are on the 

 polar ice those little patches of sapphire blue already 

 mentioned, made from the water pools of the preced- 

 ing summer. On the Greenland ice-cap years ago I 

 had been spurred on by the necessity of reaching the 

 musk-oxen of Independence Bay before my supplies 

 gave out. Now I was spurred on by the necessity of 

 making my goal, if possible, before the round face of 

 the coming full moon should stir the tides with unrest 

 and open a network of leads across our path. 



After some hours the sledges caught up with me. 

 The dogs were so active that morning, after their day's 

 rest, that I was frequently obliged to sit on a sledge 

 for a few minutes or else run to keep up with them, 

 which I did not care to do just yet. Our course was 

 nearly, as the crow flies, due north, across floe after 

 floe, pressure ridge after pressure ridge, headed straight 

 for some hummock or pinnacle of ice which I had lined 

 in with my compass. 



In this way we traveled for ten hours without stop- 

 ping, covering, I felt sure, thirty miles, though, to be 

 conservative, I called it twenty-five. My Eskimos 

 said that we had come as far as from the Roosevelt to 

 Porter's Bay, which by our winter route scales thirty- 

 five miles on the chart. Anyway, we were well over 

 the 88th parallel, in a region where no human being 

 had ever been before. And whatever distance we 



