My Attainment of the Pole; Being the Record of the Expedition That First Reached the Boreal Center, 1907-1909 - Softcover

Excerpt: ...I knew was a dreadful probability. Every minute drew its pangs of despair and fear. The gray world of mist was silent. My companions gazed at me with faces shriveled, thinned and hardened as those of mummies. Their anguish was unspeakable. My own vocal powers seemed to have left me. Our dogs were still; with bowed heads, tails drooping, they pulled the sledges dispiritedly. We seemed like souls in torment, traveling in a world of the dead, condemned to some Dantesque torture that should never cease. After the mental torment of threatened starvation, which prevented, despite the awful languor of my tortured limbs, any sleep; after heart-breaking marches and bitter hunger and unquenched thirst, the baffling mist that had shut us from all knowledge at last cleared away one morning. Our hearts bounded. I felt such relief as a man buried alive must feel when, after struggling in the stifling darkness, his grave is suddenly opened. Land loomed to the west and south of us. Yet we found we had been hardly dealt with by fate. Since leaving the eighty-fourth parallel, without noticeable movement, we had been carried astray by the ocean drift. We had moved with the entire mass that covered the Polar waters. I took observations. They Pg 329 gave latitude 79