552 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



bight that it took me three and a half hours to walk around. Found 

 the camp at 3 A. M., September 18th, after a steady walk with 

 a fifty-pound pack of about ten and a half hours. Got a little foot- 

 sore from sharp slivers of rock frozen at all angles into mud. These 

 had (in a day) worn a hole in a nearly new bootsole that would 

 have lasted a thousand miles on snow. Thick fog all day inland. 

 It seemed to me that in following the caribou trail I climbed 

 steadily for ten miles, probably nearly a thousand feet. The hills 

 are rounded but there are frequent outcrops of limestone similar 

 to the samples we took the other day, generally horizontally bedded. 

 In many places, both on hilltops and in water courses, the lime- 

 stone is cut into unstable columns — one that I found in a creek 

 is fifteen feet high. Apparently there has, therefore, been no glacier 

 here recently. 



"The lowland along the south coast is mud and sand, barren 

 of vegetation. Strong winds have blown much sand out on the sea 

 ice and buried the snowbanks in sand, which may be another way 

 of forming ground ice. The lowland (under one hundred feet) is 

 about a mile wide along the coast near the camp of September 16-17 

 and about ten miles wide at the camp of September 17-18. It 

 slopes gently to the sea with little detail of any kind. There are 

 some table-topped hills to the northwest and north ten or fifteen 

 miles inland. [In one place I had been walking across] land 

 thickly covered with grass and moss [and came to] where it met 

 absolutely barren land in a straight line as definitely as the edge 

 of a plowed field. [This line of demarcation] shows up well now, 

 for the snow is held in the vegetation and the barren ground is 

 bare, so the boundary shows on a far hillside clearly. Another 

 such line [forming the boundary between rich soil on one side and 

 sterile on the other] runs at least a mile from the coast at our 

 campsite of September 16-17 to the top of a hill three hundred 

 feet high. 



"My fine wolf specimen which I should have liked to take home 

 will have to be abandoned. It is about seventeen miles, partly 

 bare and stony ground, from here to it and that would be a long 

 day for men and dogs and hard on the sled. Besides, I am getting 

 anxious to reach Cape Murray to cooperate with the people there 

 in putting up meat and fat for winter — if anybody is there. If 

 no one is at Murray I am equally in a hurry to get to Melville 

 Island to organize our work there with reference to the ice trip 

 from Murray next year. No sign of Castel and the depot he was 



