VOYAGE THROUGH THE KARA SEA 19 1 



should have travelled all about here in sledq;es without 

 seeing all these small islands that lie scattered around.* 



" In the afternoon the water-gauge of the boiler got 

 choked up ; we had to stop to have it repaired, and 

 therefore made fast to the edge of the ice. We spent 

 the time in taking in drinking-water. We found a pool 

 on the ice, so small that we thought it would only do to 

 begin with ; but it evidently had a " subterranean " 

 communication with other fresh-water ponds on the floe. 

 To our astonishment it proved inexhaustible, however 

 much we scooped. In the evening we stood in to the head 

 of an ice bay, which opened out opposite the most northern 

 island we then had in sight. There was no passage 

 beyond. The broken drift-ice lay packed so close in 

 on the unbroken land-ice that it was impossible to tell 

 where the one ended and the other began. We could see 

 islands still farther to the northeast. From the atmos- 

 phere it seemed as if there might also be open water in 

 that direction. To the north it all looked very close, 

 but to the west there was an open waterway as far as 

 one could see from the masthead. I was in some doubt 



* Later, when I had investigated the state of matters outside Norden- 

 skiold's Taimur Island, it seemed to me that the same remark applied 

 here with even better reason, as no sledge expedition could go round the 

 coast of this island without seeing Almquist's Islands, which lie so near, 

 for instance, to Cape Lapteff, that they ought to be seen even in very 

 thick weather. It would be less excusable to omit marking these islands, 

 which are much larger, than to omit the small ones lying off the coast of 

 the large island (or as I now consider it, group of large islands) we were at 

 present skirting. 



