A few hours after we halted there came from the ice to the north a sound like that made by a heavy surf, and it continued during our stay at this camp. Evidently the floes in that direction were crushing together under the influence of the wind, or what was, perhaps, more probable, from the long continuation of the noise, the entire pack was in slow motion to the east. A clear day enabled me to get observations which showed my latitude to be 84° 17′ 27″ N., magnetic variation, 99° west. I took some photographs of the camp, climbed and floundered through the broken fragments and waist-deep snow for a few hundred yards north of the camp, gave the dogs a double ration, then turned in to sleep, if possible, for a few hours preparatory to returning. We started on our return soon after midnight of the 21st. It was very thick, with wind from the west and snowing heavily. I hurried our departure in order to utilise as much of our tracks as possible before they were obliterated. It was very difficult to keep the trail in the uncertain light and driving snow. We lost it repeatedly, when we would be obliged to quarter the surface like bird dogs. On reaching the last lead of the upward march, instead of the open water which had interrupted our progress then, our tracks now disappeared under a huge pressure ridge, which I estimated to be from seventy-five to one hundred feet high. Our trail was faulted here by the movement of the floes, and we lost time in picking it up on the other side. This was to me a trying march. I had had no sleep the night before, and to the physical strain of handling my sledge was added the mental tax of trying to keep the trail. When we finally camped, it was only for a few hours, for I recognised that the entire pack was moving slowly, and that our trail was everywhere being faulted and interrupted by new pressure ridges and leads, in a way to make our return march nearly, if not quite, as slow and laborious as the outward one. The following marches were much the same. In crossing one lead I narrowly escaped losing two sledges and the dogs attached to them. Arrived at the “Grand Canal,” as I called the big lead at which I had sent two Eskimos back, the changes had been such as to make the place almost unrecognisable. Two marches south of the Grand Canal the changes in the ice had been such, between the time of our upward trip and the return of my two men from the canal, that they, experienced as they were in all that pertains to ice-craft, had been hopelessly bewildered and wandered apparently, for at least a day, without finding the trail. After their passage other changes had taken place, and, as a result, I set a compass course for the land, and began making a new road. In the next march we picked up our old trail again.