The first thing which my mind opened to perceive was that, while the tempest was less strong, the ice was now in extraordinary agitation.  I looked abroad upon a vast plain, stretched out to a circular, but waving horizon, and varied by many hillocks, boulders, and sparkling meteor-stones that everywhere tinselled the blinding white, some big as houses, most small as limbs.  And this great plain was now rearranging itself in a widespread drama of havoc, withdrawing in ravines like mutual backing curtsies, then surging to clap together in passionate mountain-peaks, else jostling like the Symplegades, fluent and inconstant as billows of the sea, grinding itself, piling itself, pouring itself in cataracts of powdered ice, while here and there I saw the meteor-stones leap spasmodically, in dusts and heaps, like geysers or spurting froths in a steamer’s wake, a tremendous uproar, meantime, filling all the air.  As I stood, I plunged and staggered, and I found the dogs sprawling, with whimperings, on the heaving floor.

I did not care.  Instinctively, daftly, brutishly, I harnessed ten of them to my sledge; put on Canadian snow-shoes:  and was away northward—­alone.

The sun shone with a clear, benign, but heatless shining:  a ghostly, remote, yet quite limpid light, which seemed designed for the lighting of other planets and systems, and to strike here by happy chance.  A great wind from the S.W., meantime, sent thin snow-sweepings flying northward past me.

The odometer which I had with me had not yet measured four miles, when I began to notice two things:  first that the jewelled meteor-stones were now accumulating beyond all limit, filling my range of vision to the northern horizon with a dazzling glister:  in mounds, and parterres, and scattered disconnection they lay, like largesse of autumn leaves, spread out over those Elysian fields and fairy uplands of wealth, trillions of billions, so that I had need to steer my twining way among them.  Now, too, I noticed that, but for these stones, all roughness had disappeared, not a trace of the upheaval going on a little further south being here, for the ice lay positively as smooth as a table before me.  It is my belief that this stretch of smooth ice has never, never felt one shock, or stir, or throe, and reaches right down to the bottom of the deep.

* * * * *

And now with a wild hilarity I flew.  Gradually, a dizziness, a lunacy, had seized upon me, till finally, up-buoyed on air, and dancing mad, I sped, I spun, with grinning teeth that chattered and gibbered, and eyeballs of distraction:  for a Fear, too—­most cold and dreadful—­had its hand of ice upon my heart, I being so alone in that place, face to face with the Ineffable:  but still with a giddy levity, and a fatal joy, and a blind hilarity, on I sped, I spun.

* * * * *

The odometer measured nine miles from my start.  I was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Pole.