WE SAY GOOD-BYE TO THE '' FRAM'' 151 



this suffering, which has been one of the greatest hard- 

 ships of many sledge expeditions, must be attributed in a 

 great measure to our admirable cooking apparatus. By 

 the help of this we were able, with the consumption of a 

 minimum of fuel, to melt and boil so much water every 

 morning that we could drink all we wished. There was 

 even some left over, as a rule, which had to be thrown 

 away. The same thing was generally the case in the 

 evening. 



" Friday, March 29th. We are grinding on, but very 

 slowly. The ice is only tolerable, and not what I ex- 

 pected from the beginning. There are often great 

 ridges of piled-up ice of dismal aspect, which take up a 

 great deal of time, as one must go on ahead to find a 

 way, and, as a rule, make a greater or less detour to get 

 over them. In addition, the dogs are growing rather 

 slow and slack, and it is almost impossible to get them 

 on. And then this endless disentangling of the hauling- 

 ropes, with their infernal twists and knots, which get 

 worse and worse to undo ! The dogs jump over and in 

 between one another incessantly, and no sooner has one 

 carefully cleared the hauling-ropes than they are twisted 

 into a veritable skein again. Then one of the sledges is 

 stopped by a block of ice. The dogs howl impatiently 

 to follow their companions in front; then one bites 

 through a trace and starts off on his own account per- 

 haps followed by one or two others, and these must be 

 caught and the traces knotted; there is no time to splice 



