“Land. All the rest’s a blur. And in the blur two shadows—Ky and I, on the homeward journey—the journey that I knew even then wouldn’t end at home. Ky and I. All our companions dead. The last dog, even our infinitesimal rations of pemmican, gone. Everything gone, but Ky and my title-deeds.” “I don’t see how you bore it—how you kept alive.” “_I_ don’t know. Later we fed on the small crustaceans in the ice-channels, then the narwhal. But in the strain I think my wits went. Mercifully I can’t recover much in that blur of agony till the moment that stands out clear as conflagration in the dark—that moment when I set our course by the shadow my staff cast, and saw—” He dropped his hollow jaw, staring at some horror unspeakable. “What was it you—” “I saw that while we were stumbling blindly toward the blessed South—faster still the ice that we were on was drifting north.” “Carrying you back to—” “_Back to the Pole._” Her fingers lost their hold upon the knife. He didn’t even notice that she was no longer keeping her part of the compact. “Talk of Sisyphus! Talk of torture! Ky and I, like half-frozen flies crawling over the roof of the world, while the greater forces carried us calmly back to the North! It remains burnt into my memory as the final type of hopeless human striving. Each day I would read the message of the shadow on the ice, till I began to say to myself: the penalty for having reached the Pole is that you must stay there. No use to struggle. You are surrounded, captured, brought back. The spirit of the violated place won’t allow a man to carry his victory home. It was then I understood.” Palm across palm he laid his fumbling hands, but his faint-moving lips brought no sound forth. “You prayed?” “Prayed? Something of the sort. I made a vow. By the unknown god I swore if I were allowed to get back alive no soul should ever know—except just one among all the living. Strange it should be you!” “Of course you were thinking of little—of—” “Yes. I’d tell nobody, I swore, but a girl. I meant a girl with a little doll face—a girl who wouldn’t understand. Our national phrase for any sort of success kept running in my head. I still felt I’d like her to know I hadn’t failed ‘to get there.’ Foolishness, of course. What I really wanted was that she should have a share in that vision no man’s eyes but mine had seen. I meant to show her these.” It was terrible to see his hands trying to undo the treasure. But while again she hacked at the unyielding wood, Hildegarde followed fascinated each grotesque move the sick man made. At last the tight-drawn knots had yielded. Between the four corners of the ancient oilskin, creased and twisted and stained, the harvest of John Galbraith’s life lay open in the hollow between his knees. Hildegarde stood up with knife caught in a cleft of the skee, staring. He turned over the little hoard of discolored papers that lay on a flat chart-box, a theodolite, a pocket sextant, and a record cylinder.