284 THENORTHPOLE 



We had been very fortunate with the leads so far, 

 but I was in constant and increasing dread lest we 

 should encounter an impassable one toward the very 

 end. With every successive march, my fear of such 

 impassable leads had increased. At every pressure 

 ridge I found myself hurrying breathlessly forward, 

 fearing there might be a lead just beyond it, and when 

 I arrived at the summit I would catch my breath with 

 relief — only to find myself hurrying on in the same 

 way at the next ridge. 



At our camp on the 5th of April I gave the party 

 a little more sleep than at the previous ones, as we were 

 all pretty well played out and in need of rest. I took 

 a latitude sight, and this indicated our position to 

 be 89° 25', or thirty-five miles from the Pole; but I 

 determined to make the next camp in time for a noon 

 observation, if the sun should be visible. 



Before midnight on the 5th we were again on the 

 trail. The weather was overcast, and there was the 

 same gray and shadowless light as on the march after 

 Marvin had turned back. The sky was a colorless pall 

 gradually deepening to almost black at the horizon, and 

 the ice was a ghastly and chalky white, like that of 

 the Greenland ice-cap — just the colors which an 

 imaginative artist would paint as a polar ice-scape. 

 How different it seemed from the glittering fields, can- 

 opied with blue and lit by the sun and full moon, over 

 which we had been traveling for the last four days. 



The going was even better than before. There 

 was hardly any snow on the hard granular surface of 

 the old floes, and the sapphire blue lakes were larger 

 than ever. The temperature had risen to minus 15°, 



