ck a
body blow. It is like the work of a skilled heavy-weight pugilist, or
the work of an old Roman fighter with the cestus.

Beyond Melville Bay the world, or what we know as the world, is left
behind. On leaving Cape York, we had exchanged the multifarious purposes
of civilization for the two purposes for which there is room in those
wide wastes: food for man and dog, and the covering of miles of
distance.

Behind me now lay everything that was mine, everything that a man
personally loves, family, friends, home, and all those human
associations which linked me with my kind. Ahead of me lay--my dream,
the goal of that irresistible impulse which had driven me for
twenty-three years to measure myself, time after time, against the
frigid _No_ of the Great North.

Should I succeed? Should I return? Success in the attainment of 90 deg.
North would not inevitably carry with it the safe return. We had learned
_that_ on recrossing the "big lead" in 1906. In the Arctic the chances
are always against the explorer. The inscrutable guardians of the secret
appear to have a well-nigh inexhaustible reserve of trump cards to play
against the intruder who insists upon dropping into the game. The life
is a dog's life, but the work is a man's work.

As we steamed northward from Cape York, on the first day of August,
1908, I felt that I was now in truth face to face with the final
struggle. Everything in my life appeared to have led up to this day. All
my years of work and all my former expeditions were merely preparations
for this last and supreme effort. It has been said that well-directed
labor toward a given end is an excellent kind of prayer for its
attainment. If that be so, then prayer has been my portion for many
years. Through all the seasons of disappointment and defeat I had never
ceased to believe that the great white mystery of the North must
eventually succumb to the insistence of human experience and will, and,
standing there with my back to the world and my face toward that
mystery, I believed that I should win in spite of all the powers of
darkness and of desolation.

CHAPTER V

WELCOME FROM THE ESKIMOS

As we approached Cape York, which is farther from the Pole in actual
distance than New York is from Tampa, Florida, it was with a peculiar
feeling of satisfaction that I saw the foremost of our Eskimo friends
putting out to meet us in their tiny kayaks, or skin canoes. Here is the
southernmost of the Esk