could not see far in this hazy atmosphere, and then it was remarkable that the coast on the east began to run in an easterly direction. I thought it might agree with Leigh-Smith's map of Markham Sound. In that case we must have come south through a sound which neither he nor Payer could have seen, and we were therefore not so far out of our longitude, after all. But no! in our journey southward we could not possibly have passed right across Payer's Dove Glacier and his various islands and lands without having seen them. There must still be a land farther west of this, between Franz Josef Land and Spitzbergen; Payer's map could not be altogether wrong. I wanted to reach the land in the southwest, but had to stop on the ice; it was too far. "Our provisions are getting low; we have a little meat for one more day, but there is no living thing to be seen, not a seal on the ice, and no open water anywhere. How long is this going on? If we do not soon reach open sea again, where there may be game to be had, things will not look very pleasant. "Tuesday, June 16th. The last few days have been so eventful that there has been no time to write. I must try to make up for lost time this beautiful morning, while the sun is peeping in under the tent. The sea lies blue and shining outside, and one can lie and fancy one's self at home on a June morning." On Friday, June 12th, we started again at 4 A.M. with sails on our sledges. There had been frost, so the snow was in much better condition again. It had been very windy in the night, too, so we hoped for a good day. On the preceding day it had cleared up so that we could at last see distinctly the lands around. We now discovered that we must steer in a more westerly direction than we had done during the preceding days, in order to reach the south point of the land to the west. The lands to the east disappeared eastward, so we had said good-bye to them the day before. We now saw, too, that there was a broad sound in the land to the west, [75] and that it was not one entire land, as we had taken it to be. The land north of this sound was now so far away that I could only just see it. In the meantime the wind had dropped a good deal; the ice, too, became more and more uneven--it was evident that we had come to the drift-ice, and it was much harder work than we had expected. We could see by the air that there must be open water to the south, and as we went on we heard, to our joy, the sound of breakers. At 6 A.M. we stopped to rest a little, and on going up on to a hummock to take a longitude observation I saw the water not far off. From a higher piece of glacier-ice we could see it better. It extended towards the promontory to the southwest. Even though the wind had become a little westerly now, we still hoped to be able to sail along the edge of the ice, and determined to go to the water by the shortest way. We were quickly at the edge of the ice, and once more saw the blue water spread out before us.