Conway had meant to make a hurried scamper across the island and back again. He found, however, that the island was in a process of mountain manufacture, and that the cañons in which the interior abounded, slowly eating their way into the ridges, were converting them by degrees into isolated peaks. This process he found so interesting that he determined to change his plans, and he accordingly travelled slowly on, over the magnificent Ivory Glacier, down to Fouls Bay, and then back by a route that differed slightly from that of his outward journey. [Illustration: IN THE SLUSH] On reaching Advent Bay he learnt that a tourist steamer had succeeded in advancing without difficulty or danger to lat. 81° 32´ N., an amazing record for such a boat. Fired by this, he promptly hired the 12 ton steamer _Expres_, and started off on a trip round the coast, during the course of which he paid a visit to Wellmann’s hut and Andrée’s balloon. He would have liked to have done more, but there was a dangerous ice-blink in the sky, and the captain refused point-blank to venture any further in such a tin-kettle of a boat. Sir Martin Conway paid another visit to Spitzbergen in the following year, on which he was again accompanied by Mr Garwood. On this occasion the two explorers occupied themselves chiefly with studying the formation of the glaciers. As we have just seen, while Conway was making the first crossing of Spitzbergen, Andrée was waiting for an opportunity to start on the daring but ill-fated Expedition for the discovery of the North Pole, by which his name will always live in the annals of Arctic exploration. Andrée was a Swedish engineer and an æronaut of unusual skill and enterprise, and it was the success of his attempt to cross the Baltic in a balloon that led him to think seriously of embarking upon that project which was to cost him his life. The idea was, it must be confessed, exceedingly tempting, and sounded feasible enough. A steady south wind would waft a balloon in a few hours to a point which a traveller over the ice could only reach after weeks of strenuous labour, and Andrée had every reason to hope that within a very short time of his departure from Spitzbergen he would be hanging suspended over the Pole itself. The project, though its extreme rashness was not to be denied, commended itself to many, and the æronaut had little difficulty in obtaining the necessary funds, among those who contributed to them being the King of Sweden, the late Alfred Nobel, and Baron Dickson. The construction of the balloon was entrusted to Lachambre of Paris. The material used was Chinese Pongee silk, cemented together in double, threefold, and fourfold layers, and covered with a coating of special varnish. Its cubical contents were 158,294 feet.