of the trip," we hugely enjoyed it when George served it in a pot
of soup.

At six o'clock we broke camp and laboured on, facing the same
desperate conditions that we had met the day before. It is true
that the rain had ceased to fall, but the good weather brought out
the flies in increasing swarms. We fairly breathed flies, and we
dreaded them far more than the hard work. Since they attacked us
first, we had left our faces unwashed so as to retain the "dope,"
and they were streaming with a mixture of grease, dirt, blood, and
perspiration.

The return of the sun also sent the mercury soaring. At noon that
Saturday it registered 90 degrees in the shade. Always at sunset,
however, the temperature dropped with startling suddenness, and a
variation of from fifty to sixty degrees between the maximum and
minimum record for one day was not an unusual thing as long as
summer lasted.

Floundering up the boulder-strewn river that Saturday, we found the
heat so oppressive that it seemed to us we had got into the torrid
zone instead of up to within a few hundred miles of the Arctic
Circle. We resolved, however, that the obstacles interposed
against our advance by the unfeeling wild should make us fight only
the harder, George and I receiving much inspiration from Hubbard,
to whom difficulties were a blessing and whose spirit remained
indomitable up to the very end. And when we sat down to our
evening meal by a cosey fire, we had the satisfaction of knowing
that we had doubled our previous day's record and were four miles
further up the river.