The field upon which we camped was about three miles long and two miles wide. Measured at a new crevasse, the ice was sixteen feet thick. The tallest hummock measured twenty-eight feet above water. The snow lay in fine feathery crystals, with no surface crust. About three inches below the soft snow was a sub-surface crust strong enough to carry the bodily weight. Below this were other successive crusts, and a porous snow in coarse crystals, with a total depth of about fifteen inches.

Our igloo was built near one edge in the lee of an old hummock about fifteen feet high. Here a recent bank of drift snow offered just the right kind of material from which to cut building blocks. While a shelter was thus being walled, I moved about constantly to read my instruments and to study carefully the local environment.

In a geographic sense we had now arrived at a point where all meridians meet. The longitude, therefore, was zero. Time was a negative problem. There being no longitude, there can be no time. The hour lines of Greenwich, of New York, of Peking, and of all the world here run together. Figuratively, if this position is the pin-point of the earth's axis, it is possible to have all meridians under one foot, and therefore it should be possible to step from midnight to midday, from the time of San Francisco to that of Paris, from one side of the globe to the other, as time is measured.

Here there is but one day and but one night in each year, but the night of six months is relieved by about one hundred days of continuous twilight. Geographically, there was here but one direction. It was south on every line of the dial of longitude—north, east and west had vanished. We had reached a point where true direction became a paradox and a puzzle. It was south before us, south behind us, and south on every side. But the compass, pointing to the magnetic Pole along the ninety-seventh meridian, was as useful as ever. (To avoid statements easily misunderstood, all our directions about the Pole will be given as taken from the compass, and without reference to the geographer's anomaly of its being south in every direction.)

WHERE ALL MERIDIANS MEET AND EVERY DIRECTION IS SOUTH
The Pivotal Point on which the earth turns.

* Magnetic Pole

My first noon observations gave the following result, which is copied from the original paper, as it was written at the Pole and reproduced photographically on another page. April 21, 1908: Long., 97-W.; Bar., 29-83; Temp., —37.7; Clouds Alt., St., 1; Wind, 1; Mag., S.; Iceblink E.; Water Sky W.

Noon Alt. 0 23—33—25
+2
2 | 23—35—25
50 11—47—425
6½ +15—56
25 12— 3—38
300 —9
60 | 325 11—54—38
5—25 90
11—48—58 78— 5—22
11—54—23 11—54—23
89—59—45