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
absence of fresh-water ice, that the sea could not be far; so I set to
work, and spent two days in putting to rights the now battered kayak.
This done, I had no sooner resumed my way than I sighted far off a
streaky haze, which I knew to be the basalt cliffs of Franz Josef Land;
and in a craziness of joy I stood there, waving my ski-staff about my
head, with the senile cheers of a very old man.
In four days this land was visibly nearer, sheer basaltic cliffs mixed
with glacier, forming apparently a great bay, with two small islands in
the mid-distance; and at fore-day of the 3rd August I arrived at the
definite edge of the pack-ice in moderate weather at about the
freezing-point.
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