ONE DAY FROM POLE 283 



on again without sleep, trying to make up the five miles 

 which we had lost on the 3d of April. 



During the daily march my mind and body were 

 too busy with the problem of covering as many miles 

 of distance as possible to permit me to enjoy the 

 beauty of the frozen wilderness through which we 

 tramped. But at the end of the day's march, while 

 the igloos were being built, I usually had a few minutes 

 in which to look about me and to realize the picturesque- 

 ness of our situation — we, the only living things 

 in a trackless, colorless, inhospitable desert of ice. 

 Nothing but the hostile ice, and far more hostile icy 

 water, lay between our remote place on the world's 

 map and the utmost tips of the lands of Mother Earth. 



I knew of course that there was always a pos- 

 sibility that we might still end our lives up there, and 

 that our conquest of the unknown spaces and silences 

 of the polar void might remain forever unknown to the 

 world which we had left behind. But it was hard to 

 realize this. That hope which is said to spring eternal 

 in the human breast always buoyed me up with the 

 belief that, as a matter of course, we should be able 

 to return along the white road by which we had come. 



Sometimes I would climb to the top of a pinnacle 

 of ice to the north of our camp and strain my eyes 

 into the whiteness which lay beyond, trying to imagine 

 myself already at the Pole. We had come so far, 

 and the capricious ice had placed so few obstructions 

 in our path, that now I dared to loose my fancy, 

 to entertain the image which my will had heretofore 

 forbidden to my imagination — the image of ourselves 

 at the goal. 



