ld find it in that gray light. A more ghastly
atmosphere could not have been imagined even by Dante himself--sky and
ice seeming utterly wan and unreal.

Notwithstanding the fact that I had now passed the "farthest north" of
all my predecessors and was approaching my own best record, with my
eight companions, sixty dogs, and seven fully loaded sledges in far
better condition than I had even dared to hope, the strange and
melancholy light in which we traveled on this day of parting from Marvin
gave me an indescribably uneasy feeling. Man in his egotism, from the
most primitive ages to our own, has always imagined a sympathetic
relationship between nature and the events and feelings of human life.
So--in the light of later events--admitting that I felt a peculiar awe
in contemplating the ghastly grayness of that day, I am expressing only
an ineradicable instinct of the race to which I belong.

The first three-quarters of the march after Marvin turned back, on March
26, the trail was fortunately in a straight line, over large level
snow-covered floes of varying height, surrounded by medium-rough old
rafters of ice; and the last quarter was almost entirely over young ice
averaging about one foot thick, broken and raftered, presenting a rugged
and trying surface to travel over in the uncertain light. Without
Bartlett's trail to follow, the march would have been even more
difficult.

Near the end of the day we were again deflected to the west some
distance by an open lead. Whenever the temperature rose as high as minus
15 deg., where it had stood at the beginning of the day, we were sure of
encountering open water. But just before we reached the camp of
Bartlett's pioneer division, the gray haze in which we had traveled all
day lifted, and the sun came out clear and brilliant. The temperature
had also dropped to minus 20 deg.. Bartlett was just starting out again when
I arrived, and we agreed that we had made a good fifteen miles in the
last march.

The next day, March 27, was a brilliant dazzling day of arctic sunshine,
the sky a glittering blue, and the ice a glittering white, which, but
for the smoked goggles worn by every member of the party, would
certainly have given some of us an attack of snow blindness. From the
time when the reappearing sun of the arctic spring got well above the
horizon, these goggles had been worn continuously.

The temperature during this march dropped from minus 30 deg. to minus 40 deg.,
t