sleeping-bags (Clark and Mew slept together in one, I in another) were
soaking wet all the night, being thawed by our warmth; and our fingers,
under wrappings of senne-grass and wolf-skin, were always bleeding.
Sometimes our frail bamboo-cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, would
crash perilously against an ice-ridge--and they were our one hope of
reaching land. But the dogs were the great difficulty: we lost six
mortal hours a day in harnessing and tending them. On the twelfth day
Clark took a single-altitude observation, and found that we were only in
latitude 86° 45'; but the next day we passed beyond the furthest point
yet reached by man, viz. 86° 53', attained by the _Nix_ explorers four
years previously.

* * * * *

Our one secret thought now was food, food--our day-long lust for the
eating-time. Mew suffered from 'Arctic thirst.

* * * * *

Under these conditions, man becomes in a few days, not a savage only,
but a mere beast, hardly a grade above the bear and walrus. Ah, the ice!
A long and sordid nightmare was that, God knows.

On we pressed, crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoar
silence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, had
watched.

* * * * *

After the eleventh day our rate of march improved: all lanes