companions.

"Our voyage after this was quiet and uneventful. Siberia is like no
other country in the world, except the great Arctic plains which fence
in the Pole on the American side. The very loneliness and vastness of
the horizon, like the changeless plain of the sea, envelop you. As soon
as you are off the main roads, wide, untrodden, untouched, virgin space
swallows you up.

"Specially were we safe in that we had chosen to go to the north. Had we
fled to the east, we should have been pursued by swift horses; to the
west, the telegraph would have stopped us; to the south, the Altai and
Himalaya, to say nothing of three thousand miles, barred our way. But no
escape had ever been made to the north, and, so far as we knew, no
attempt.

"One evening, while I was rowing, bending a back far too weary to be
conscious of any additional fatigue, Leof, who happened to be resting,
cried out suddenly, 'The Arctic Ocean!' And there, blue and clear,
through the narrow entrance of a channel half-filled with drift-ice, lay
the mysterious ocean of which we had thought so long. The wind had been
due from the north, and therefore in our teeth, so that not till now had
we had any chance of sailing. Now, however, we rigged a sail, and,
passing over the bar, we felt for the first time the lift of the waves
of the Polar Sea.

"Day by day we held on to the eastward, coasting along almost within
hail of the lonely shore. Often the ice threatened to close in upon us.
Sometimes the growling of the pack churned and crackled only a quarter
of a mile out. One night as we lay asleep--it was my watch, but in that
great silence I too had fallen asleep--Big Peter waked first, and in his
strong emphatic fashion he rose to take the oars. But there before us
were three boats' crews within half a mile, all rowing toward us, while
a mile out from shore, near the edge of the pack, lay a steamer, blowing
off steam through her escape-valves, as though at the end of her day's
run.

"As we woke our first thought was, 'Lost!' For we had no expectation
that any other vessel save a Russian cruiser could be in these waters.
But out from the sternsheets of the leading cutter fluttered the blessed
Stars and Stripes. My companions did not know all the happiness that was
included in the sight of that ensign. Leof had reached for his
case-knife to take his life, and I snatched it from him ere I told him
that of all peoples the Americans would never give us up.