190 THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK 
across the leads and reach her, you freeze to death. 
I remember getting into a situation like this when 
I was a boy; fortunately I was rescued before 
things got too bad. 
When we got our sledge, dogs, supplies and our¬ 
selves across the lead we had to load up again. 
The wind was still blowing hard and whirling the 
snow around, so that we lost a good deal of time 
hunting for things in the drifts and loading the 
sledge again. It was a slow job. Everything 
was white; boxes, bags, sleeping-robes, all the ob¬ 
jects of our search, in fact, were blended into the 
one dead tone, so that the effect on the eye was as 
if one were walking in the dark instead of what 
passed technically for daylight. The drifts all 
looked level but the first thing we would know we 
would stumble into a gulch of raftered ice, heaped 
full of soft snow, or a crack in the ice, covered by 
a similar deceptive mass. Altogether we lost three 
hours and not until ten o’clock did we get under 
way again. 
When we finally started we soon found the 
weather better. This was fortunate, for in cross¬ 
ing the lead and afterwards in picking up our 
things, we had got our clothes and our sleeping- 
robes more or less water-soaked and we were glad 
of a more moderate gale and a higher temperature, 
which as the afternoon wore on became almost 
