"Monday, June 10th. In spite of the most impenetrable mist and the most detestable going on soppy snow, which has not yet been sufficiently exposed to frost to become granular, and where the sledges rode their very heaviest, we still managed to make good, even progress the whole day yesterday. There were innumerable lanes, of course, to deal with, and many crossings on loose pieces of ice, which we accomplished at a pinch. But the ice is flat here everywhere, and every little counts. It is the same thin winter-ice of about three feet in thickness. I only saw a couple of old floes yesterday--they were in the neighborhood of our camping-ground, which was also on an old floe; otherwise the ice is new, and in places very new. We went over some large expanses yesterday of ice one foot or less in thickness. The last of these tracts in particular was very remarkable, and must at one time have been an immense pool; the ice on it was so thin that it cannot be long before it melts altogether. There was water on all this ice, and it was like walking through gruel. As a matter of fact, the ice about here is nothing else but pure broken-up sea-ice, consisting of large and small floes, not infrequently very small floes closely aggregated; but when they have the chance of slackening they will spread over the whole sea hereabouts, and we shall have water enough to row in any direction we please. "The weather seems to-day to be of the same kind as yesterday, with a southwest wind, which is tearing and rattling at the tent walls. A thaw and wet snow. I do not know if we shall get any more frost, but it would make the snow in splendid condition for our snow-shoes. I am afraid, however, that the contrary will rather be the case, and that we shall soon be in for the worst break-up of the winter. The lanes otherwise are beginning to improve; they are no longer so full of brash and slush; it is melting away, and bridges and such-like have a better chance of forming in the clearer water. "We scan the horizon unremittingly for land every time there is a clear interval; but nothing, never anything, to be seen. Meanwhile we constantly see signs of the proximity of land or open water. The gulls increase conspicuously in number, and yesterday we saw a little auk (Mergulus alle) in a lane. The atmosphere in the south and southwest is always apt to be dark, but the weather has been such that we can really see nothing. Yet I feel that the solution is approaching. But, then, how long have I not thought so? There is nothing for it but the noble virtue of patience. "What beautiful ice this would have been to travel over in April before all these lanes were formed--endless flat plains! For the lanes, as far as we know, are all newly formed ones, with some ridges here and there, which are also new.