168 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



knew what the process was like. Here and there the six-foot 

 ice was separating into pieces. A ridge of these pieces might be 

 marching towards us, with a movement which all of us could picture 

 clearly, but which is best described for those who have not seen it 

 by the analogy of a few pounds of domino sugar dumped on a table 

 and then moved by pushing the whole heap slowly with the hand. 

 If you were to remember the height of each domino of sugar in 

 comparison with a bread crumb, you would realize the size of the 

 ice cakes in comparison with our tent and ourselves, and you could 

 gather what would take place in the path of that moving ridge. 

 It does sometimes happen that a piece of ice as high as fifty feet 

 rises during the course of ten minutes until it stands perpendicular; 

 a moment later, when pushed just beyond the perpendicular, it 

 breaks near the water line and falls over. If such a cake had top- 

 pled upon our tent, we would have been crushed like flies between 

 two boards. A realization of it kept us awake into the night. But 

 more clearly than the danger of lying quietly in the tent we realized 

 the greater danger of trying to do anything. To have gone outside 

 and groped about in the impenetrable darkness, where the snow 

 was flying so thick that one's eyes could be opened only to be filled 

 with it, would have been to walk into trouble rather than out. We 

 had picked in the evening what looked to us like the safest spot 

 and sensibly chose to abide by that decision. 



We wished the poets and magazinists who write about ''The 

 eternal silence of the Frozen North" might have been with us in the 

 bedlam of that night. It cannot be properly said that we heard 

 the noise of the breaking ice. We knew it would have been a roar 

 if only the shrieking of the gale and the flapping of the tent could 

 have been stilled a moment, and we felt it, by the almost continuous 

 shivering of our ice floor and the occasional jar from the toppling 

 cakes. But one gets used to danger and one gets tired of staying 

 scared, and before one o'clock all of us were asleep, though perhaps 

 not soundly. About five in the morning the gale had lessened enough 

 for me to be awakened by a dog's howling, which would have been 

 inaudible an hour or two earlier. Storkerson, going outside, was 

 able to see a distance of ten or fifteen yards. The trouble with the 

 dog was that he had been tied in such a way that he was about to 

 be dragged by the rope into the water of a crack that was slowly 

 opening. Storkerson untied him and came in to tell us that a pres- 

 sure-ridge about fifteen feet high had formed twenty-five feet from 

 the back of our tent. I found later that this ridge was, as was 

 natural, composed of huge cakes of ice, the fall of any one of which 



