With his negro servant and four Eskimos, the leader set forth on the last one hundred thirty-three miles across the ice. It was not plain level ice like that of a pond, but heaved into sharp hills caused by the pressure, with broken cliffs and labyrinthine reefs. The whole pack was drifting southward before the wind, here breaking into mile-wide lanes of black and foggy sea, there newly frozen and utterly unsafe. Although the sun did not set, the frost was sharp, at times twenty and thirty degrees below zero, while for the most part a cloudy sky made it impossible to take observations. Here great good fortune awaited Peary, for as he neared the Pole, the sky cleared, giving him brilliant sunlight. By observing the sun at frequent intervals he was able to reckon with his instruments until at last he found himself within five miles of ninety degrees north--the Pole. A ten-mile tramp proved he had passed the apex of the earth, and five miles back he made the final tests. Somewhere within a mile of where he stood was the exact point, the north end of the axis on which the earth revolves. As nearly as he could reckon, the very point was marked for that moment upon the drifting ice-field by a berg-like hill of ice, and on this summit he hoisted the flag, a gift from his wife which he had carried for fifteen years, a tattered silken remnant of Old Glory. “Perhaps,” he writes, “it ought not to have been so, but when I knew for a certainty that I had reached the goal, there was not a thing in the world I wanted but sleep. But after I had a few hours of it, there succeeded a condition of mental exaltation which made further rest impossible. For more than a score of years that point on the earth’s surface had been the object of my every effort. To obtain it my whole being, physical, mental and moral, had been dedicated. The determination to reach the Pole had become so much a part of my being that, strange as it may seem, I long ago ceased to think of myself save as an instrument for the attainment of that end.... But now I had at last succeeded in planting the flag of my country at the goal of the world’s desire. It is not easy to write about such a thing, but I knew that we were going back to civilization with the last of the great adventure stories--a story the world had been waiting to hear for nearly four hundred years, a story which was to be told at last under the folds of the Stars and Stripes, the flag that during a lonely and isolated life had come to be for me the symbol of home and everything I loved--and might never see again.” Here is the record left at the North Pole:-- “90 N. Lat., North Pole, “April 6th, 1909.