nety miles per
hour, at which rate of travel they considered that they were stemming
the gale, and perhaps actually progressing to windward some ten miles or
so every hour.

The dreary day lagged slowly on, with the occurrence of no event of
importance, until about four o'clock in the afternoon, at which time the
travellers became conscious of a decided rise of temperature. By five
o'clock the cold had so greatly diminished that they were compelled to
throw off their thick fur outer clothing; and half an hour later, the
thick dreadnought jackets, which constituted their ordinary outer
covering in bad weather, were also discarded; the snow meanwhile giving
place to sleet, and the sleet in its turn yielding to a deluge of
driving rain. And, whilst they were still wondering what this singular
phenomenon might portend, a hoarse low muffled roar, accompanied by an
occasional grinding crash, smote upon their ears through the heavy
_swish_ of the rain; the dull white monotonous expanse of the ice-field
was abruptly broken into by a jagged irregular-shaped black blot ahead;
and, almost before they had time to realise the extraordinary change,
the _Flying Fish_ had swept beyond the northern boundary of the immense
expanse of paleocrystic ice, and was careering northward, at an
elevation of about a thousand feet, above the surface of a liquid sea
which raged and chafed and tossed its foamy arms to heaven under the
influence of the fast-diminishing gale.

"Hurrah!" ejaculated the professor; "hurrah! Scoresby and Kane spoke
the truth; and my pet theory turns out to be correct, after all.
Gentlemen, look round and feast your eyes upon the glorious spectacle of
_an open Polar Sea_!"

Whether it actually _was_ an open sea, or only an unusually wide channel
between two ice-fields, was now the question to be settled. It
certainly looked like the former; it was completely free of floating
ice, large or small, except the cakes which were broken away by the
waves from the edge of the enormous floe just left behind, and they were
kept by the wind close to their parent mass; the sea ran so high and was
so regular as to convey the idea of a very considerable extent of
"fetch;" and, lastly, there was neither ice nor ice-blink to be seen
anywhere along the whole stretch of the northern horizon.

Impatient to solve this momentous and interesting question, the _Flying
Fish_ was pushed to her utmost speed, causing her to make headway over