a long time with food and
fire, and would stand almost any pressure and a heavy sea, without
"breaking up."

The boat was accordingly loaded with the weapons, tools, and bedding,
and run over the intervening ice with very little difficulty, although
it took a good half hour to ascend the ice-slopes, which were steep and
slippery. Returning, the party took each a seal-skin, with the hair side
down, and loading them with the remaining decoys, fragments of wood, the
Esquimaux lamp and its chimney, and a part of the fir boughs, returned
again to their new location.

Some convulsion of the ice, had strewed the shores of this field with
piles of young field-ice about a foot thick, and with this material
Regnar at once commenced operations. While Peter rapidly split off cakes
about a foot wide and two or three long, La Salle and Waring slid them
along the ice to Orloff, who, furnished with the other axe and a pail of
water, rapidly built them into walls a foot thick and eight feet square.
A dash of water soon froze the blocks together, and as the material was
near at hand, in the course of the forenoon walls five feet in height,
with a single narrow entrance, had been raised. At this height the
blocks were ordered to be made two feet square, and of but half the
thickness.

These were laid flatways, with their edges not quite plumb with the
outside edge of the wall, and being frozen into place, left an uncovered
space about five feet six inches square. Returning to the old berg, the
party took down the shooting-box from the top of the cave, and filling
it with the remaining boughs, and a part of the seal-skins, blubber,
&c., regained the floe, and unloading the box, placed it as a roof on
the new dwelling. A single layer of "ice-bricks," as Waring termed them,
was placed around its edge, and being thoroughly wetted, formed a strong
and weather-proof joining; and shoveling the _debris_ from the interior,
the lamp was set up and lighted, the twigs spread thickly over the icy
floor, and bringing in their few household goods, the party, tired and
hungry, sat down to a lunch of hard bread and weak coffee.

A final trip of all hands brought over the remainder of their birds,
blubber, and skins, much being drawn back on the bottom of the float,
which, although lessened in width nearly a foot, still retained both its
runners, and made quite a decent sledge.

The wind still blew from the north-west, and the pack began to show
evid