It was now that we began to encounter a succession of strange-looking objects lying scattered over the ice, whose number continually increased as we proceeded.  They had the appearance of rocks, or pieces of iron, incrusted with glass-fragments of various colours, and they were of every size.  Their incrustations we soon determined to be diamonds, and other precious stones.  On our first twenty-mile day Mew picked up a diamond-crystal as large as a child’s foot, and such objects soon became common.  We thus found the riches which we sought, beyond all dream; but as the bear and the walrus find them:  for ourselves we had lost; and it was a loss of riches barren as ashes, for for all those millions we would not have given an ounce of fish-meal.  Clark grumbled something about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substance had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in their fall by the frigidity of the air:  and they quickly ceased to interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they obstructed our way.

* * * * *

We had all along had good weather:  till, suddenly, on the morning of the 13th April, we were overtaken by a tempest from the S.W., of such mighty and solemn volume that the heart quailed beneath it.  It lasted in its full power only an hour, but during that time snatched two of our sledges long distances, and compelled us to lie face-downward.  We had travelled all the sun-lit night, and were gasping with fatigue; so as soon as the wind allowed us to huddle together our scattered things, we crawled into the sleeping-bags, and instantly slept.

We knew that the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as our eyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittle cracklings of artillery.  This may have been a result of the tempest stirring up the ocean beneath the ice.  Whatever it was, we did not care:  we slept deep.

We were within ten miles of the Pole.

* * * * *

In my sleep it was as though someone suddenly shook my shoulder with urgent ‘Up! up!’ It was neither Clark nor Mew, but a dream merely:  for Clark and Mew, when I started up, I saw lying still in their sleeping-bag.

I suppose it must have been about noon.  I sat staring a minute, and my first numb thought was somehow this:  that the Countess Clodagh had prayed me ’Be first’—­for her.  Wondrous little now cared I for the Countess Clodagh in her far unreal world of warmth—­precious little for the fortune which she coveted:  millions on millions of fortunes lay unregarded around me.  But that thought, Be first! was deeply suggested in my brain, as if whispered there.  Instinctively, brutishly, as the Gadarean swine rushed down a steep place, I, rubbing my daft eyes, arose.