410 FARTHEST NORTH 



and bellowing, often whole herds of them ; and high up 

 in the air, to and fro, flew the httle auks in swarms ; you 

 could hear the whir of their wings far off. There were 

 cries and life on all sides. But soon the sun will sink, 

 the sea will close in, the birds will disappear one after 

 another towards the south, the polar night will begin, and 

 there will be profound, unbroken silence. 



It was with pleasure that we at last, on September 7th, 

 set to work to build our hut. We had selected a good 

 site in the neighborhood, and from this time forward we 

 might have been seen daily going out in the morning like 

 other laborers, with a can of drinking-water in one hand 

 and a gun in the other. We quarried stones up among the 

 dc'bris from the cliff, dragged them together, dug out the 

 site, and built walls as well as we could. W^e had no tools 

 worth mentioning ; those we used most were our two 

 hands. The cut-off sledge-runner again did duty as a 

 pick with which to loosen the fast-frozen stones, and when 

 we could not manage to dig up the earth on our site with 

 our hands we used a snow-shoe staff with an iron ferrule. 

 We made a sj^ade out of the shoulder-blade of a walrus 

 tied to a piece of a broken snow-shoe staff, and a mattock 

 out of a walrus tusk tied to the crosstree of a sledge. 

 They were poor things to work with, but we managed it 

 with patience, and little by little there arose solid walls of 

 stone with moss and earth between. The weather was 

 growing gradually colder, and hindered us not a little in 

 our work. The soil we had to dig in hardened, and the 



