As in our outward so in our return journey, scarcely for an hour did the wind cease its infernal rush and hiss and assault upon our faces. The last march into Storm Camp, which we reached God only knows how, was in the teeth of another blinding western blizzard with driving snow, through which none but an Eskimo, and a very good one at that, could have kept the trail for five minutes. Of course I found no provisions here. Our igloos were lined with frost crystals and nearly filled with drifting snow, but they were havens of refuge from the howling elements outside, which were more than appreciated. Ootah was the happiest man in the party. Just before reaching the igloos he had spied a small fragment of pemmican, a crumb from somebody’s lunch dropped off the last sledge when we started north from Storm Camp, and he had pounced upon it and swallowed it just as if he were an Eskimo dog. At Storm Camp we were held twenty-four hours by the continuance of the gale, the ice groaning and grinding in the familiar way, then resumed our march with the number of my dogs still further reduced. From here I set a “bee-line” course for the nearest part of the Greenland coast. I alone of the party knew how far we had drifted and that our salvation now lay in the direction of the Greenland coast and its musk-oxen. My Eskimos thought we were coming down on the Grant Land coast which we had left; in fact, by some strange perversion of ideas, they were all fixed in their belief that we had been drifting westward. The only reason for this was that the ice on the northern side of the “big lead” had (so they said) before I joined them at the lead, been drifting pronouncedly westward. When we reached the region where my two Eskimos had been stopped in their attempt to bring up the cache from the “big lead,” I was not surprised at the expressions of amazement and almost horror with which they had returned to me. There was no open water now, but the chaos of shattered and upheaved ice which stretched away to the southward was indescribable. Through this our progress was naturally slow, but one grim and exhausting march, during which the pickaxes were constantly in use, carried us through.