ow from burying them alive.

"The storm spent its fury in twenty-four hours, and when the air grew
clear again they were saluted with the sight of that enormous ridge of
ice through which the _Polar King_ found a passage a month before. The
ice was heaped up with the purest snow in places twenty feet in depth.
Thousands of icy peaks and pinnacles, as far as the eye could reach,
pierced the sky. Under other conditions the sight would have been
sublime, but to men frozen and famished with insufficient food it was
a scene of terror.

"The icy range was flanked by an ice-foot varying from thirty to sixty
miles in width, and from four to fifty feet above the sea-level.

"Here was the problem that confronted Dunbar--he had to travel over at
least thirty miles of icy splinters over an ice-foot whose surface was
broken into every possible contortion of crystallization. There were
mounds, hummocks, caverns, crevasses, ridges and gulfs of the hardest
and oldest ice. Then when this barrier was crossed there was the icy
backbone of the whole system, five hundred to a thousand feet in
height, to be crossed, as there was no lane or opening to be
discovered through so formidable a range of ice mountains. Even if he
succeeded in crossing the same, there would certainly be an
ice-foot of perhaps greater dimensions than the one before him to
cross, and that might prove to be only a valley of ice leading to
other and still more inaccessible cliffs to be surmounted.

[Illustration: WE SLOWLY DRAGGED OURSELVES ACROSS THE RANGE OF ICY
PEAKS.]

"'This is no place to die in,' said Dunbar, 'and so, boys, we've got
to hustle if we ever expect to get home.'

"'Ay, ay, sir,' said his companions, but when they reached the ice
they found that having remained in a cramped position for a month in
the boat had incapacitated them for walking.

"It was also found that Walker's feet and those of four other sailors
had been frostbitten, and that they were totally unable to be of any
service to themselves or the others.

"The outlook was mournful in the extreme. The only thing that cheered
them was the constant sunlight, and even that consolation would depart
in another month, and if in the mean time they did not get away from
the ice, hunger and the awful desolation of a polar winter would
terminate their existence.

"There was no chance of starting on their journey until they got
accustomed to the use of their limbs, and so they built a hut of