As we progressed over the last one hundred mile-step, my mind was divested of its lethargy. Unconsciously I braced myself. My senses became more keen. With a careful scrutiny I now observed the phenomena of the strange world into which fortune had pressed us—first of all men.
Step by step, I invaded a world untrodden and unknown. Dulled as I was by hardship, I thrilled with the sense of the explorer in new lands, with the thrill of discovery and conquest. "Then," as Keats says, "felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken." In this land of ice I was master, I was sole invader. I strode forward with an undaunted glory in my soul.
Signs of land, which I encouraged my companions to believe were real, were still seen every day, but I knew, of course, they were deceptive. It now seemed to me that something unusual must happen, that some line must cross our horizon to mark the important area into which we were passing.
Through vapor-charged air of crystal, my eyes ran over plains moving in brilliant waves of running colors toward dancing horizons. Mirages turned things topsy-turvy. Inverted lands and queer objects ever rose and fell, shrouded in mystery. All of this was due to the atmospheric magic of the continued glory of midnight suns in throwing piercing beams of light through superimposed strata of air of varying temperature and density.
Daily, by careful measurements, I found that our night shadows shortened and became more uniform during the passing hours of the day, as the shadow dial was marked.
With a lucky series of astronomical observations our position was fixed for each stage of progress.
Nearing the Pole, my imagination quickened. A restless, almost hysterical excitement came over all of us. My boys fancied they saw bears and seals. I had new lands under observation frequently, but with a change in the direction of light the horizon cleared. We became more and more eager to push further into the mystery. Climbing the long ladder of latitudes, there was always the feeling that each hour's work was bringing us nearer the Pole—the Pole which men had sought for three centuries, and which, fortune favoring, should be mine!
Yet, I was often so physically tired that my mind was, when the momentary intoxications passed, in a sense, dulled. But the habit of seeing and of noting what I had seen, had been acquired. The habit, yes, of putting one foot in front of the other, mile after mile, through the wild dreariness of ice, the habit of observing, even though with aching, blurred eyes, and noting, methodically, however wearily, what the tired eyes had seen.
From the eighty-eighth to the eighty-ninth parallel the ice lay in large fields, the surface was less irregular than formerly. In other respects it was about the same as below the eighty-seventh. I observed here also, an increasing extension of the range of vision. I seemed to scan longer distances, and the ice along the horizon had a less angular outline. The color of the sky and the ice changed to deeper purple-blues. I had no way of checking these impressions by other observations; the eagerness to find something unusual may have fired my imagination, but since the earth is flattened at the Pole, perhaps a widened horizon would naturally be detected there.
At eight o'clock on the morning of April 19, we camped on a picturesque old field, with convenient hummocks, to the top of which we could easily rise for the frequent outlook which we now maintained. We pitched our tent, and silenced the dogs by blocks of pemmican. New enthusiasm was aroused by a liberal pot of pea-soup and a few chips of frozen meat. Then we bathed in life-giving sunbeams, screened from the piercing air by the strands of the silk-walled tent.