THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 149 



when we fail to discover one firm enough for a campsite. It is for 

 this reason too that we do not care to leave land in the beginning of 

 our ice journey until after the first part of February in any year, 

 for before that the nights are so long that the probability of getting 

 into ice pressure during darkness is very high. This danger is not 

 so great if your base on land is in some region of sluggish ice move- 

 ment, such as northern Prince Patrick Island or Ellef Ringnes Is- 

 land or, to judge from his account, Peary's starting point, Cape 

 Columbia. But any one beginning a journey from a region of vio- 

 lent ice movement, such as the north coast of Alaska where we 

 worked, or the northeastern coast of Siberia where Baron Wrangel 

 worked nearly a century earlier, is taking serious chances if he 

 starts out before the full moon of February. 



Bright moonlight gives most help after sunlight in ice travel, 

 but cloudy nights hold danger, and for a reason special to arctic 

 latitudes. Sea ice is seldom in reality smooth, but when sun or moon 

 is behind clouds it will appear smooth through absence of shadow. 

 In the more commonplace latitudes the hole out of which you have 

 just pried a stone looks distinctly different from the stone lying 

 beside it, no matter what the conditions of light, so long as you 

 can see at all. That is because the stone is gray or brown or some 

 other shade which differs from the earth walls of the hole. But 

 in the frozen sea a boulder of ice and a hole beside it are just about 

 the same shade of white or blue, and you cannot see either unless in. 

 the relief produced by shadows. Now either sun or moon shining in* 

 a clear sky will cast sharp shadows; but neither will do so when 

 obscured by clouds, though either may give diffused light enough 

 to reveal a man or stone at half a mile or a mountain at twenty 

 miles. On the rough sea ice you may on an unshadowed day, with- 

 out any warning from the keenest eyes, fall over a chunk of ice 

 that is knee high or walk against a cake on edge that rises like the 

 wall of a house. Or you may step into a crack that just admits your 

 foot or into a hole big enough to be your grave. It is the strain on 

 the eyes on such days of diffused light, the attempt to detect almost 

 or quite undetectible hindrances, that makes us_ snowblind in 

 cloudy weather more easily than on the most shimmeringly clear 

 day. And bad as the cloudy day is the cloudy night is worse. 



In taking the chance of starting on a polar journey late in Janu- 

 ary or early in February, the encouraging factor is that your great 

 danger zone is a narrow one in the vicinity of land, and if you have 

 a period of a week or so of calm and intensely frosty weather it 

 ; may be temporarily quiescent, so that by a sort of dash you may 



