In the third march from Storm Camp we crossed the scar of the “big lead.” By scar I mean where the edges of the “big lead” had been driven together and had frozen fast. There was no mistaking it, and I foolishly allowed myself to be encouraged by the thought that this obstacle was at last behind us and no longer to be feared. I should have known better than to feel this way, for I certainly had sufficient Arctic experience to know that one should never feel encouraged at anything nor ever expect anything in these regions except the worst. On the second march south of the scar we came upon a region of huge pressure ridges running in every direction. It was an ominous sign, and I was not surprised a few hours later when an Eskimo whom I had sent in advance to reconnoitre a trail for the sledges, signalled to me from the summit of a pinnacle “open water.” When I climbed to his side there was our friend the “big lead,” a broad band of black water, perhaps half a mile in width, lying across our path and reaching east and west farther than I could see. The lead here was thirty to forty miles farther south than where we had crossed it on the upward journey, but it was the same lead. I turned east keeping an Eskimo scouting close to the lead in search of a practicable crossing while the sledges advanced parallel to the lead but at some distance from it, where the going was a little better. Once he raised our hopes by signalling that he had found it: but when the sledges came up the place was impracticable. The next day we continued eastward and found a mixture of half-congealed rubble ice, barely sufficient to support us, spanning the lead. The sledges were hurried on to this and we were within a few yards of firm ice on the south side, when our bridge failed us, and the ice under us began to go apart. It was a rapid and uncertain but finally successful scramble to get back. We camped on a piece of big floe bounded on one side by the steadily widening lead, and on the other three by rafters of Alpine character. Here we remained, drifting steadily eastward, watching the lead slowly widen, as it had done on the upward march. On the upward march, when we were delayed at the “big lead,” in the brilliant, bitter, March days, and the ice on the distant northern side appeared to my eager eyes like the promised land, I had given it the name “The Hudson.” Now as we lay in this dismal camp, watching the distant southern ice beyond which lay the world, all that was near and dear, and perhaps life itself, while on our side was only the wide-stretching ice and possibly a lingering death, there was but one appropriate name for its black waters—“the Styx.”