we had were remarkable for their cleanliness. To protect us against wind and rain we had still our wind clothes, which we had patched and stitched together as well as we could; but it took a terrible time, for the whole garments now consisted of scarcely anything else but patches and seams, and when you had sewed up a hole at one place they split at another the next time you put them on. The sleeves were particularly bad, and at last I tore both sleeves off my jacket, so that I should not have the annoyance of seeing them perpetually stripped away. It was very desirable, too, that we should have a tolerably light sleeping-bag. The one we had brought with us no longer existed, as we had made clothes out of the blankets; so the only thing was to try and make as light a bag as possible out of bearskin. By picking out the thinnest skins we possessed, we managed to make one not so much heavier than the reindeer-skin bag which we had taken with us on leaving the Fram. A greater difficulty was to procure a practicable tent. The one we had had was out of the question. It had been worn and torn to pieces on our five months' journey of the year before, and what was left of it the foxes had made an end of, as we had had it lying spread over our meat and blubber heap in the autumn to protect it against the gulls. The foxes had gnawed and torn it in all directions, and had carried off great strips of it, which we found scattered around. We speculated a great deal as to how we could make ourselves a new tent. The only thing we could think of was to put our sledges, with the kayaks upon them, parallel to each other at the distance of about a man's height, then pile snow around them at the sides until they were closed in, lay our snowshoes and bamboo staffs across, and then spread our two sails, laced together, over the whole, so that they should reach the ground on both sides. In this way we managed to make ourselves a quite effective shelter, the kayaks forming the roof ridges, and the sails the side walls of the tent. It was not quite impervious to drifting snow, and we had usually a good deal of trouble in stopping up cracks and openings with our wind clothes and things of that sort. But the most important part of our equipment was, after all, our firearms, and these, fortunately, we had kept in tolerably good order. We cleaned the rifles thoroughly and rubbed them with train-oil. We had also a little vaseline and gun-oil left for the locks. On taking stock of our ammunition, we found, to our joy, that we still had about 100 rifle cartridges and 110 small-shot cartridges. We had thus enough, if necessary, for several more winters. CHAPTER IX THE JOURNEY SOUTHWARD At last, on Tuesday, May 19th, we were ready for the start. Our sledges stood loaded and lashed. The last thing we did was to photograph our hut, both outside and inside, and to leave in it a short report of our journey. It ran thus: