their pockets.” Instantly the last preparations were made for leaving the ship—“whither no one pretended to know: for not a fragment of the ice around us had remained whole; nowhere could the eye discover a still perfect and uninjured floe, to serve as a place of refuge, as a vast floe had before been to the crew of the _Hansa_. Nay, not a block, not a table of ice was at rest, all shapes and sizes of it were in active motion, some turning and twisting, none on the level. A sledge would at once have been swallowed up.” The party on the _Tegetthoff_ remained for the whole of the winter on the brink of death. When summer came round it brought with it hopes of release, but day after day passed by and still the floe on which the ship was fixed showed no signs of freeing her from its grasp. In July 1873 an attempt was made to measure the thickness of the ice by means of a borer; after twenty-seven feet had been penetrated the attempt had to be abandoned. In August the chances of release began to lessen considerably, and the bitter thought was beginning to assail the officers and crew that they would be obliged to return home without making a single discovery when, on the 30th of the month, a sudden and unexpected sight infused new life into them. “About midday,” says Payer, “as we were leaning on the bulwarks of the ship and scanning the gliding mists, through which the rays of the sun broke ever and anon, a wall of mist, lifting itself up suddenly, revealed to us afar off in the north-west the outlines of bold rocks, which in a few minutes seemed to grow into a radiant Alpine land! At first we all stood transfixed and hardly believing what we saw. Then carried away by the reality of our good fortune, we burst into shouts of joy, ‘Land, land, land, at last!’ There was now not a sick man on board the _Tegetthoff_. The news of the discovery spread in an instant. Everyone rushed on deck to convince himself, with his own eyes, that the expedition was not, after all, a failure—there before us lay the prize that could not be snatched from us. Yet not by our own action, but through the happy caprice of our floe and as in a dream had we won it; but when we thought of the floe, drifting without intermission, we felt with redoubled pain that we were at the mercy of its movements. As yet we had secured no winter harbour from which the exploration of the strange land could be successfully undertaken. For the present, too, it was not within the verge of possibility to reach and visit it. If we had left the floe, we should have been cut off and lost. It was only under the influence of the first excitement that we made a rush over our ice-field, although we knew that numberless fissures made it impossible to reach the land. But, difficulties notwithstanding, when we ran to the edge of our floe, we beheld from a ridge of ice the mountains and glaciers of the mysterious land.”