THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 83 



though we had slept a night at the camp I had not seen the topog- 

 raphy, for we had arrived after dark and I had started for Cross 

 Island before daylight in the morning. But I imagined that the 

 camp was on a round point with lowland lying to the east and 

 rolling hills commencing two or three miles back. 



With confidence in this analysis, I took the wind at a certain 

 angle on my cheek, made sure occasionally with the luminous dial 

 of my pocket compass that the wind was not shifting, and walked 

 steadily so as to strike the land, as I thought, a mile or two east 

 of the camp. I knew my rate of walking and timed myself care- 

 fully. After awhile I began to worry a little, for I had walked 

 about an hour longer than I expected without striking any land. 

 It was now about nine o'clock at night with thick clouds and light 

 snowfall so that it was not possible to see even a dark object on the 

 snow background more than five or eight yards away. 



At the end of this superfluous hour of walking I had one of the 

 surprises of my life, for I stumbled against a heap of stones. Now 

 it happens that years ago my former commander, Leffingwell, wrote 

 a geological paper in which he said that stones were absent from 

 the coast west of Flaxman Island, and that in a published review 

 of that paper I have pointed out that while stones are nowhere 

 numerous, I have in repeated journeys along that coast observed 

 a few. I had seen Leffingwell since and found we then agreed that 

 there were a few stones on the coast. But here I was stumbling 

 over a heap of boulders that could not be called "a few" by any 

 reasonable stretch of the vocabulary. I sat down on one of them 

 to think. 



It first occurred to me that I might have struck to the west of 

 the camp instead of east of it and that I might now really be up in 

 the valley of the Shagavanaktok River, having by accident entered 

 the delta by a straight channel without striking any of the islands. 

 I thought this over carefully and decided that it could not be. 

 Daylight had lasted on my backward road until I was only eight or 

 nine miles from camp and I had then set a course to strike two 

 miles east of it and I considered it absurd that I could make an 

 error of more than two miles in a distance of eight. The conclusion 

 was that I must be east of the camp. But this seemed also absurd, 

 for observations in previous years had told me that to the east of 

 the camp the land was continuous, with a low coastline and flat land 

 back of it for two or three miles. And here I had stumbled against 

 the face of a cut-bank covered with boulders that seemed like a 

 moraine. At first sight it would seem that this reasoning had led 



