xxxii WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
passage, to cross the open leads. They waited long in 
camp, that the travelling conditions might improve, and 
all the time Nansen saw a white spot he thought was cloud. 
At last, on July 24, land was in sight, which proved to be 
that white spot. Fourteen days later they reached it to 
find that it consisted of a series of islands. ‘These they 
left behind them and, unable to say what land they had 
reached, for their Paton had run down, they coasted on 
westwards and southwards until winter approached. ‘They 
built a hut of moss and stones and snow, and roofed it with 
walrus skins cut from the animals while they lay in the sea, 
for they were too heavy for two men to drag on to the ice. 
When I met Nansen he had forgotten all about this, and 
would not believe that it had happened until he saw it in 
his own book. They lay in their old clothes that winter, 
so soaked with blubber that the only way to clean their 
shirts was to scrape them. They made themselves new 
clothes from blankets, and sleeping-bags from the skins 
of the bears which they ate, and started again in May of 
the following year to make Spitzbergen. They had been 
travelling a long month, during which time they had at 
least two very narrow escapes—the first due to their kayaks 
floating away, when Nansen swam out into the icy sea and 
reached them just before he sank, and Johansen passed 
the worst moments of his life watching from the shore ; 
the second caused by the attack of a walrus which went 
for Nansen’s kayak with tusks and flippers. And then one 
morning, as he looked round at the cold glaciers and naked 
cliffs, not knowing where he was, he heard a dog bark. 
Intensely excited, he started towards the sound, to be met 
by the leader of the English Jackson-Harmsworth Expedi- 
tion whose party was wintering there, and who first gave 
him the definite news that he was on Franz Josef Land. 
Nansen and Johansen were finally landed at Vardo in the 
north of Norway, to learn that no tidings had yet been 
heard of the Fram. ‘That very day she cleared the ice which 
had imprisoned her for nearly three years. 
I cannot go into the Fram’s journey save to say that 
she had drifted as far north as 85° 55’ N., only eighteen 
