On the 2nd July the ice began packing dangerously, and soon another
storm broke loose upon me from the S.W. I left off my trek, and put up
the silk tent on a five-acre square of ice surrounded by lanes: and
_again_--for the second time--as I lay down, I smelled that delightful
strange odour of peach-blossom, a mere whiff of it, and presently
afterwards was taken sick. However, it passed off this time in a couple
of hours.

Now it was all lanes, lanes, alas! yet no open water, and such was the
difficulty and woe of my life, that sometimes I would drop flat on the
ice, and sob: 'Oh, no more, no more, my God: here let me die.' The
crossing of a lane might occupy ten or twelve entire hours, and then, on
the other side I might find another one opening right before me.
Moreover, on the 8th July, one of the dogs, after a feed on blubber,
suddenly died; and there was left me only 'Reinhardt,' a white-haired
Siberian dog, with little pert up-sticking ears, like a cat's. Him, too,
I had to kill on coming to open water.

This did not happen till the 3rd August, nearly four months from the
Pole.

I can't think, my God, that any heart of man ever tholed the appalling
nightmare and black abysm of sensations in which, during those four
long desert months, I weltered: for though I was as a brute, I had a
man's heart to feel. What I had seen, or dreamed, at the Pole followed
and followed me; and if I shut my poor weary eyes to sleep, those others
yonder seemed to watch me still with their distraught and gloomy gaze,
and in my spinning dark dreams spun that eternal ecstasy of the lake.

However, by the 28th July I knew from the look of the sky, and the