THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 315 



after. An entry from my diary for June 16, 1915, completes and 

 resembles the picture. 



"June 16. Storkerson keeps the record and I seldom note the 

 weather (in this diary) but I have never seen anything like it 

 for clouds, snow and fog — only two partly clear days since we 

 landed (on Prince Patrick Island), snow nearly every day and 

 no shadows (cast by anything) so that dark objects are the only 

 ones visible." 



Again I would recall that to those who have not been in some 

 country resembling the Arctic it may seem incredible that in day- 

 light so intense that the eyes have to be protected against it, objects 

 not of dark color should frequently be invisible. McClintock 

 points out above that a snowclad hill with thawed ground on top 

 does not appear as a white hill with a black top, but only as a 

 black horizontal line apparently suspended in the sky. This is 

 because the daylight on cloudy days is so evenly diffused that no 

 shadows are cast. A snowclad hill does not loom against the 

 clouded sky but blends with the background so well that when a 

 man is seen to walk behind such a hill his legs disappear without 

 visible cause of eclipse and then his whole body. You infer the 

 hill that conceals him but you cannot see it. A snag of ice will be 

 equally invisible until you stub your toe against it, though it may 

 show then by contrast with your foot. That is the whole point 

 — there are no contrasts on such a day. There are no shadows. 

 And so you can see only dark things, or light things that are in 

 close proximity to dark. 



In view of the circumstances under which McClintock and we 

 alike had to work it was not surprising that we had difficulty in 

 making our map of the day correspond with his map of his "farth- 

 est." But we felt we had completed the gap between him and 

 Mecham — that our comma island was a period to the story of 

 our linking up the work of our predecessors and making the out- 

 line of Prince Patrick Island complete. We should have built a 

 cairn and left a record here had we been able to find anything 

 beyond gravel out of which to build it. 



In outfitting the Karluk I had provided her library with those 

 of the British Parliamentary Blue Books which contain the route 

 maps and diaries of the sledge parties of the Franklin Search — 

 one containing the diaries and surveys of McClintock and Mecham. 

 These documents had gone with the Karluk and through lack of 

 them I did not know that we were now in the vicinity of one of 

 McClintock's cairns. We always looked around with the binocu- 



