10. It is remarkable that great heat as well as great cold should generate the great evil—thirst. It is also remarkable how rapidly the demoralisation produced by thirst extends when any one of the party begins to show signs of suffering from it. Habit, however, enables men to struggle against thirst more successfully than against hunger. Many try to relieve it by using snow; which is especially pernicious when its temperature falls considerably below the point of liquefaction. Inflammation of the mouth and tongue, rheumatic pains in the teeth, diarrhœa, and other mischiefs, are the consequences, whenever a party incautiously yields to the temptation of such a momentary relief. It is in fact a mere delusion, because it is impossible to eat as much snow—say a cubic foot—as would be requisite to furnish an adequate amount of water. Snow of a temperature of 37° to 50° (C.) below zero feels in the mouth like hot iron, and does not quench, but increases thirst, by its inflammatory action on the mucous membranes of the parts it affects. The Eskimos prefer to endure any amount of thirst rather than eat snow, and it is only the Tschuktschees who indulge in it as a relish with their food, which is always eaten cold. Snow-eaters during the march were regarded by us as weaklings, much in the same way as opium-eaters are. Catarrhs of every kind are less frequent in Polar expeditions, and the chills to which we are exposed by passing suddenly from the cold of the land journey to the warmer temperature of the ship, have no evil consequences. It deserves to be investigated whether this arises from the difference of the amount of ozone in the atmosphere of the respective latitudes.—Now let us return to our journey.
11. After crossing over the Sonklar-Glacier and measuring its slight inclination of 1° 6′, we climbed an elevation to ascertain the most promising route for penetrating in a northerly direction; and none seemed better suited than that which lay over its back, which seemed free from crevasses. But we looked in vain for the fancied paradise of the interior, which had existed only in our desire to clothe in glowing colours the Land, from which we had been so long held back. The true character, however, of Kaiser Franz-Josef Land, so far as it could be explored in this and the following sledge expeditions, will be the subject of the next chapter. The accompanying sketch represents a block of snow, about the height of a man, at the foot of the Sonklar-Glacier, to which the winds had given a fanlike shape. In the afternoon, after inspecting the stakes which we had fixed for measuring the motion of the glacier, we came back to the tent and began our return march to Cape Tegetthoff and the ship. A cutting wind compelled us to make constant efforts against frost-bites. With a heavy creaking noise the sledge was dragged over the hard snow, and to our reduced strength it seemed to be laden with a double load. The night is generally the hardest part of such expeditions, and our camping out during the night under the cliffs of Cape Tegetthoff was especially bitter. Happy was he who, exhausted by the labour of dragging, fell asleep at once. As usual, we dug a deep hole in the snow and loosened it as much as possible, so that we might profit by its property of being one of the worst conductors of heat. In a short time the inside of the tent was covered with rime frost, and we ourselves with ice. The tongue only seemed to recover its former mobility with those who bewailed their loss of knives, stockings, gloves—yea, of everything, even their place in the tent. They ate their portion of bear’s flesh much as if they had been chloroformed, and dropping asleep in their stiffened icy coat of mail, they were awoke by its gradual thawing, to reiterate without cessation how cold it was; a fact which no one present was prepared to dispute. The alcohol thermometer stood at -56° F. (-48° on board the ship), and when the warmth produced by the exercise we had taken and by the effects of supper was gone, the feeling of cold was so intense that it seemed far more probable that we should be frozen to death than that we should sleep. The cook therefore received orders to brew some strong grog, and forthwith six spirit-flames burnt under the kettle filled with snow; but to make snow of such extreme coldness boil quickly we should have had to place the kettle over Vesuvius itself in the height of an eruption.
BLOCK OF SNOW.
12. We now slept without stirring a limb, and about five o’clock in the morning of the 15th of March we started to compass the twenty miles which lay between us and the ship in one march, without encountering the suffering of another night’s camping out in the snow. The weather was as clear as it is possible to be at a temperature of -52° F., and going along with a light breeze from the north, we made use of our sledge sail to such advantage that we reached the gentle ascent of the west point of Wilczek Island after a march of seven hours. We formed a second depôt of provisions on the summit of a rocky promontory, whence we discerned with a telescope the masts and yards of the ship lying behind an iceberg, and our fears and anxieties lest it should have drifted away in our absence were dissipated by this glad view. Our return to the ship could no longer be a matter of choice; it had become a necessity. Lettis had been unable for some days to take any share in the labour of dragging, and walked along in shoes made of reindeer hide, on account of his frost-bitten feet. Haller also wore similar shoes to save his swollen feet; Cattarinch’s face was frost-bitten, and he too suffered from lameness; Pospischill, who could no longer wear his shrunk-up fur coat, so suffered from frost-bite in both hands, that I sent him on to the ship, that he might have the help of the doctor as soon as possible. It was with much effort that we made the last six hours’ march; and when at length, stiff with ice, we passed between the hummocks that lay around the ship, Weyprecht, Brosch, Orel, and eight sailors came to meet us, who, alarmed at the inability of Pospischill to speak in answer to their questions, had set out from the ship in order to find us.
THE BURIAL OF KRISCH.
13. As I entered my berth I heard the hard breathing of our poor comrade Krisch. For more than a week he had lain without consciousness; yet death had not come to relieve him. On the afternoon of the 16th of March a sudden cessation of all sound told us that he was no more! Next day, his body, placed in a coffin, was brought on deck, and our flag hoisted half-mast high. On the 19th, when the thermometer was at -13° F., the body was committed to its lonely grave in the far north. A mournful procession left the ship, with a sledge, on which rested the coffin covered with a flag and cross, and wended its way to the nearest elevation on the shore of Wilczek Island. Silently struggling against the drifting snow, we marched on, dragging our burden through desolate reaches of snow, till we arrived, after a journey of an hour and a half, at the point we sought on the island. Here, in a fissure between basaltic columns, we deposited his earthly remains, filling up the cavity with stones, which we loosened with much labour, and which the wind, as we stood there, covered with wreaths of snow. We read the prayer for the dead over him who had shared in our sufferings and trials, but who was not destined to return home with us with the news of our success; and close by the spot, surrounded with every symbol of death and far from the haunts of men, we raised as our farewell a simple wooden cross. Our sad and solemn task done, there rose in our hearts the thought, whether we ourselves should be permitted to return home, or whether we too should find our resting-place in the unapproachable wastes of the icy north. The wind blowing over the stiff and stark elevation where we stood, covered us all with a thick coating of snow, and caused the appearance of frost-bite in the faces and hands of some of our party. The decoration of the grave of our comrade with a suitable inscription was therefore deferred till the weather proved more favourable. We found considerable difficulty in returning to the ship through an atmosphere filled with snow.[38]