"To-day the work of extricating the Fram is proceeding; we will at all events get the rails clear of the ice. It presents a most imposing sight by the light of the moon, and, however conscious of one's own strength, one cannot help respecting an antagonist who commands such powers, and who, in a few moments, is capable of putting mighty machinery into action. It is rather an awkward battering-ram to face. The Fram is equal to it, but no other ship could have resisted such an onslaught. In less than an hour this ice will build up a wall alongside us and over us which it might take us a month to get out of, and possibly longer than that. There is something gigantic about it; it is like a struggle between dwarfs and an ogre, in which the pygmies have to resort to cunning and trickery to get out of the clutches of one who seldom relaxes his grip. The Fram is the ship which the pygmies have built with all their cunning in order to fight the ogre; and on board this ship they work as busily as ants, while the ogre only thinks it worth while to roll over and twist his body about now and then, but every time he turns over it seems as though the nutshell would be smashed and buried, and would disappear; but the pygmies have built their nutshell so cleverly that it always keeps afloat, and wriggles itself free from the deadly embrace. The old traditions and legends about giants, about Thor's battles in the Jötunheim, when rocks were split and crags were hurled about, and the valleys were filled with falling boulders, all come back to me when I look at these mighty ridges of ice winding their way far off in the moonlight; and when I see the men standing on the ice-heap cutting and digging to remove a fraction of it, then they seem to me smaller than pygmies, smaller than ants; but although each ant carries only a single fir-needle, yet in course of time they build an ant-hill, where they can live comfortably, sheltered from storm and winter. "Had this attack on the Fram been planned by the aid of all the wickedness in the world, it could not have been a worse one. The floe, seven feet thick, has borne down on us on the port side, forcing itself up on the ice, in which we are lying, and crushing it down. Thus the Fram was forced down with the ice, while the other floe, packed up on the ice beneath, bore down on her, and took her amidships while she was still frozen fast. As far as I can judge, she could hardly have had a tighter squeeze; it was no wonder that she groaned under it; but she withstood it, broke loose, and eased. Who shall say after this that a vessel's shape is of little consequence? Had the Fram not been designed as she was, we should not have been sitting here now. Not a drop of water is to be found in her anywhere. Strangely enough, the ice has not given us another such squeeze since then; perhaps it was its expiring grip we felt on Saturday.