A TRAMP. 
335 
not only covers our decks, but drives into our clothes 
like fine dust or flour. A plated thermometer was in- 
visible fourteen feet from the eye; from the distance 
of ten paces off on our quarter, a white opacity cov- 
ers every thing, the compass-stand, fox-traps, and all 
beyond : the E-escue, of course, is completely hidden. 
This heavy snow-drift exceeds any thing that I had 
conceived, although many of my Arctic English friends 
had discoursed to me eloquently about their perils and 
discomforts. As to facing it in a stationary position, 
nothing human could ; for a man would be buried in 
ten minutes. Even in reaching our little Tusculum, 
we* tumble up to our middle, in places where a few 
minutes before the very ice was laid bare. The en- 
tire topography of our ice is changing constantly. 
" 7 P.M. ' The wind is howling.' Our mess begin 
to talk again of sleeping in boots, and the other lux- 
uries of Lancaster Sound. For my own part, better, 
far better this, with the spicy tingling of a crisis, than 
the corroding, scurvy-engendering sameness of the 
past two months. Every moment now is full of ex- 
pectation. 
March 21. The wind changed this morning to 
the westward, and by daylight was blowing freshly. 
After breakfast, Murdaugh and myself started on a 
tramp to the ' open water,' to see the effects of the 
I gale. The drift was beyond conception; sufficient, 
^ in many places, to have covered up our whole ship's 
company. The wind made it as cold at —5° as I 
have seen it at —30°, and the fine snow pelted our 
faces; but the surface was frozen so hard that we 
walked over the crust, and in a little over half an 
hour we reached the lead. 
" Planting a signal pole, with a red silk handker- 
