ARCTIC FLYING EXPERIENCES 415 



mican, chocolate, oat biscuits, and dry milk, sufficient to last sixteen 

 men two months with a daily ration of 500 grams for each man. 



Two hours after leaving Kings Bay found us over the pack ice. 

 What weather! The sun shone brilliantly out of a sky of pure tur- 

 quoise, and the whalelike shadow that our airship cast beneath us 

 trailed monotonously across a glittering snow field, unbroken save 

 where wind and tide had riven the icy surface into cracks and leads 

 of open water. Three white whales darted under the protecting shelf 

 of an ice floe, and a number of polar bears, diving into the sheltering 

 leads, sent up columns of spray that reflected the bright sunshine, 

 frightened at the sight and noise of the weird monster that took to the 

 air instead of the sea. As we approached latitude 83^° the snow- 

 crowned peaks of Spitsbergen merged into the deepening blue of the 

 southern sky, losing their identity, and all signs of life vanished. In- 

 termittent light fogs hid the ice from our view, rolling beneath us like 

 a great woolen ocean. Approaching latitude 88° we had to rise from 

 1800 feet to more than 3000 in order to get over it. At this point, 

 in latitude 87° 44', we crossed, fifty miles to the eastward, the parallel 

 that we had reached the previous year. Three hours more, and we 

 were nearing the pole. The fog had completely cleared away, and the 

 sun shone brightly; there was no wind. The navigator, who had been 

 on his knees at one of the starboard windows since i.io A. M. (May 

 12) with his sextant set at the altitude the sun should have at the pole 

 corresponding to the given date, suddenly announced, "Here we 

 are!", as the sun's image started to cover his sextant bubble. We 

 were over the north pole! With motors throttled and heads un- 

 covered, "we descended to within 300 feet of the ice and dropped the 

 flags of Norway, the United States, and Italy. 



THE FLIGHT ACROSS THE UNKNOWN AREA BEYOND THE POLE 



With full speed ahead we settled down to the monotony of routine 

 again, heading southward instead of north, with the sun compass 

 settled for Point Barrow, Alaska, 1500 miles away. Ahead lay the 

 unexplored area two-thirds the size of the United States. What 

 would it reveal? Hour after hour passed, but only the same glittering 

 surface riven by wind and tide into cracks and leads of open water, 

 here, as before, crossing our route in a west-east direction. We reached 

 the ice pole at 7 a. m., ^}4 hours later. This "ice pole," so called 

 because it is the center of the Arctic pack and therefore the most 

 difficult spot in the Arctic regions to reach, ^ lies about in latitude 

 86° N. and longitude 157° W. But its inaccessibility was now broken, 

 and the sixteen men that looked down upon the chaos of broken ice 

 fields and pressure ridges of upturned ice blocks, as though giants 



3 On the origin of this conception see, above, footnote 3 to Kolchak's paper. — Edit. Note. 



