Two days later, to my extreme mystification (and joy), I came across a bear and its cub lying dead at the foot of a hummock.  I could not believe my eyes.  There she lay on her right side, a spot of dirty-white in a disordered patch of snow, with one little eye open, and her fierce-looking mouth also; and the cub lay across her haunch, biting into her rough fur.  I set to work upon her, and allowed the dogs a glorious feed on the blubber, while I myself had a great banquet on the fresh meat.  I had to leave the greater part of the two carcasses, and I can feel again now the hankering reluctance—­quite unnecessary, as it turned out—­with which I trudged onwards.  Again and again I found myself asking:  ‘Now, what could have killed those two bears?’

With brutish stolidness I plodded ever on, almost like a walking machine, sometimes nodding in sleep while I helped the dogs, or manouvred the sledge over an ice-ridge, pushing or pulling.  On the 3rd June, a month and a half from my start, I took an observation with the theodolite, and found that I was not yet 400 miles from the Pole, in latitude 84 deg. 50’.  It was just as though some Will, some Will, was obstructing and retarding me.

However, the intolerable cold was over, and soon my clothes no longer hung stark on me like armour.  Pools began to appear in the ice, and presently, what was worse, my God, long lanes, across which, somehow, I had to get the sledge.  But about the same time all fear of starvation passed away:  for on the 6th June I came across another dead bear, on the 7th three, and thenceforth, in rapidly growing numbers, I met not bears only, but fulmars, guillemots, snipes, Ross’s gulls, little awks—­all, all, lying dead on the ice.  And never anywhere a living thing, save me, and the two remaining dogs.

If ever a poor man stood shocked before a mystery, it was I now.  I had a big fear on my heart.

On the 2nd July the ice began packing dangerously, and soon another storm broke loose upon me from the S.W.  I left off my trek, and put up the silk tent on a five-acre square of ice surrounded by lanes:  and again—­for the second time—­as I lay down, I smelled that delightful strange odour of peach-blossom, a mere whiff of it, and presently afterwards was taken sick.  However, it passed off this time in a couple of hours.

Now it was all lanes, lanes, alas! yet no open water, and such was the difficulty and woe of my life, that sometimes I would drop flat on the ice, and sob:  ‘Oh, no more, no more, my God:  here let me die.’  The crossing of a lane might occupy ten or twelve entire hours, and then, on the other side I might find another one opening right before me.  Moreover, on the 8th July, one of the dogs, after a feed on blubber, suddenly died; and there was left me only ‘Reinhardt,’ a white-haired Siberian dog, with little pert up-sticking ears, like a cat’s.  Him, too, I had to kill on coming to open water.