336 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



depression beyond and then another ridge, with my ice still behind 

 that one. So the width of the neck of land was not a few yards 

 but perhaps half a mile or a mile. But when I came to the top 

 of the second ridge the ice was behind a third one, and it was only 

 when I got to the top of that and had walked a mile or two that I 

 realized that what I was looking at was not pressure ice at all but 

 the top of a mountain peak. It might be supposed that I who had 

 seen thousands of pressure ridges under all sorts of conditions dur- 

 ing many years would not be so deceived, especially against the 

 trend of my desires. 



When I realized that here was a mountain peak I turned to 

 climb the nearest high hill and from an elevation of three or four 

 hundred feet made sure of all my surroundings. Seven or eight 

 miles to the south the men were already pitching camp. It was a 

 little after midnight. The sky was clear and visibility promised 

 to be excellent. I made up my mind to go to the top of the moun- 

 tain, seizing this rare opportunity to learn much about our sur- 

 roundings in a little while. 



It was now the 21st of June, "the longest day of the year" in 

 places where nights are dark, and it promised to be the first really 

 warm day of our experience. But as I proceeded overland I could 

 see that there must have been several warm days here, for little 

 lakes of water in the low places and some of the smaller creeks were 

 beginning to run. The walking could scarcely have been worse. 

 Where the ground was bare the sticky clay stuck to my feet till 

 they weighed each ten or fifteen additional pounds. Where the 

 snow remained it was so soft that at every step I sank deep and 

 occasionally up to the hips. In a few places walking was actually 

 dangerous, for where there is a deep snowbank running from a 

 hill out into a lake it is possible to sink in ten or fifteen feet of 

 slush as one might in quicksand. I was naturally on my guard, 

 for the condition was not new to me, but in several cases I had to 

 cross ravines on top of snow where a brook was running through 

 a tunnel underneath. Every one of such crossings had a danger 

 which I realized fully. 



When I recognized my pressure ridge for a mountain I had es- 

 timated it to be six or eight miles away, but I walked six miles 

 and another six and still the peak was far ahead. Eventually 

 after twenty miles of walking I got to the top of it. But not quite 

 soon enough. The wind was beginning to blow from the north- 

 west and had already rolled a cloud of fog in from the sea that hid 

 everything lying between the north and northwest. There was not 



