* * * * *

Well, onward through the desert ice I continued my lonely way, with a baleful shrinking terror in my heart; for very stupendous, alas! is the burden of that Arctic solitude upon one poor human soul.

Sometimes on a halt I have lain and listened long to the hollow silence, recoiling, crushed by it, hoping that at least one of the dogs might whine.  I have even crept shivering from the thawed sleeping-bag to flog a dog, so that I might hear a sound.

I had started from the Pole with a well-filled sledge, and the sixteen dogs left alive from the ice-packing which buried my comrades.  This was on the evening of the 13th April.  I had saved from the wreck of our things most of the whey-powder, pemmican, &c., as well as the theodolite, compass, chronometer, train-oil lamp for cooking, and other implements:  I was therefore in no doubt as to my course, and I had provisions for ninety days.  But ten days from the start my supply of dog-food failed, and I had to begin to slaughter my only companions, one by one.

Well, in the third week the ice became horribly rough, and with moil and toil enough to wear a bear to death, I did only five miles a day.  After the day’s work I would crawl with a dying sigh into the sleeping-bag, clad still in the load of skins which stuck to me a mere filth of grease, to sleep the sleep of a swine, indifferent if I never woke.

Always—­day after day—­on the south-eastern horizon, brooded sullenly that curious stretched-out region of purple vapour, like the smoke of the conflagration of the world.  And I noticed that its length constantly reached out and out, and silently grew.

* * * * *

Once I had a very pleasant dream.  I dreamed that I was in a garden—­an Arabian paradise—­so sweet was the perfume.  All the time, however, I had a sub-consciousness of the gale which was actually blowing from the S.E. over the ice, and, at the moment when I awoke, was half-wittedly droning to myself; ’It is a Garden of Peaches; but I am not really in the garden:  I am really on the ice; only, the S.E. storm is wafting to me the aroma of this Garden of Peaches.’

I opened my eyes—­I started—­I sprang to my feet!  For, of all the miracles!—­I could not doubt—­an actual aroma like peach-blossom was in the algid air about me!

Before I could collect my astonished senses, I began to vomit pretty violently, and at the same time saw some of the dogs, mere skeletons as they were, vomiting, too.  For a long time I lay very sick in a kind of daze, and, on rising, found two of the dogs dead, and all very queer.  The wind had now changed to the north.

Well, on I staggered, fighting every inch of my deplorably weary way.  This odour of peach-blossom, my sickness, and the death of the two dogs, remained a wonder to me.