As can perhaps be imagined, I was more than anxious to keep on, but as I looked at the drawn faces of my comrades, at the skeleton figures of my few remaining dogs, at my nearly empty sledges, and remembered the drifting ice over which we had come and the unknown quantity of the “big lead” between us and the nearest land, I felt that I had cut the margin as narrow as could reasonably be expected. I told my men we should turn back from here. My flags were flung out from the summit of the highest pinnacle near us, and a hundred feet or so beyond this I left a bottle containing a brief record and a piece of the silk flag which six years before I had carried around the northern end of Greenland. Then we started to return to our last igloo, making no camp here. CHAPTER VII FROM 87° 6′ TO THE GREENLAND COAST From the time we left Storm Camp on the upward march the wind had blown with greater or less force, but without interruption, from a little south of true west. Now as we retraced our steps it blew quartering in our faces, and accompanied by a fine drift of snow, cut like red-hot needles. We had already made a good day’s march. Now we had to duplicate it without rest or food. When at last we stumbled into camp I was nearly blind from the effects of the cutting snow and wind, and completely done up with the long continued exertion. The interest and excitement of the advance were gone, the reaction had come, and my feet dragged like lead. As a matter of fact the return journey, after the eagerness and excitement of pushing ahead is over, is always the hardest part of the work. Of the fourteen cracks and narrow leads passed in this last forced march, all but three had changed pronouncedly in the few hours elapsing between our outward and return march, and two or three of them had moved to such an extent that we had some difficulty in picking up our trail on the southern side of them. Once inside the igloo and the oil stove started to make our tea, I rolled on the sleeping platform in agony, with my burning eyes, and let Ahngmalokto make the tea. For an hour or more I feared that the cutting wind and snow, together with the strain upon my eyes in taking the observations, had given me an acute attack of snow-blindness, but I repeatedly buried my eyes in the freezing snow until the eyelids were numb, and after a time experienced sufficient relief, so that my utter weariness sent me to dreamless sleep. All regrets and disappointment had to yield temporarily to the imperious demand of the overworked body.