216 CONQUERING THE ARCTIC ICE 



of it, and as we had a small fire most of the day and a pot of 

 water on the stove, we drank a lot of tea during our day of 

 enforced inactivity. It is rather tiresome to lie like this, but 

 we had our books, and the day passed fairly well with reading, 

 drinking tea, talking, and sleeping. The lower part of our 

 sleeping bags is getting rather damp. It is not pleasant, but 

 as long as they do not get worse we have no reason to complain. 

 But we are very careful and never crawl into the bags with our 

 kamicks or overalls on. Even our furs are carefully shaken 

 out and brushed before we retire to our sleeping bags. Mr. 

 Leffingwell, instead of fur pantaloons, wears two pairs of drawers 

 and overalls over them, but the condensation of perspiration 

 inside the overalls is so great that he is obliged to take them 

 off every night and scrape the frost off with a knife. Mr. 

 Storkersen and myself, who use furs, have not yet been bothered 

 with anything of the kind at least we have not noticed it. 

 Like ourselves, the dogs are on short rations and have only 

 got half a meal to-day, but they are in good condition, so it 

 will not hurt them in any way. 



Temperature at 7 A.M. -- 19 C. Wind N.E., twenty-five 

 miles an hour. Heavy snowdrift ; sky clear. 



Sunday, April 7. We woke up several times during the night, 

 listening to the wind, which was still howling outside. We 

 thought that we should have to spend another day in the tent, 

 but the wind slackened decidedly at 7.30 A.M., and at 8 we 

 began to cook breakfast. At 9.20 we were off, and commenced 

 the day with good going over the floe which had been our 

 harbour of refuge during the better part of the last two days. 



The floe was not very large, but from the edge of it we saw 

 fine going in N.N.E., and of course we made for it. It was 

 still better than we expected, and the sledges went easily over 

 its hard and level surface. Only now and again we stopped to 

 climb a ridge in order to have a look at the trail ahead of us, 

 but it was good, or comparatively good, as far as we could see, 

 and we made capital progress until we camped at 6 P.M. At 3 P.M. 

 we had passed a stretch of thin ice and had taken a sounding 

 by means of our sounding machine, with the surprising result 

 of 620 metres and no bottom. This would seem to show that 

 we had passed the edge of the Continental Shelf and thus 

 achieved part of the purpose we went out for, but we decided 



