When we return after three or four days’ absence we shall be able to gather enough eggs to last us a lifetime. The island is famed amongst trappers as being one of the best nesting places on Spitzbergen. It is almost as good as Moss Island at the entrance to South Gate and Dunn Island outside Horn Sound. Through the glasses we can see that the capercailzies are busy building their nests--the most fortunate of them have found places to build in the crannies of the broken ice heaps. Coming out of the sound, we have the whole polar sea lying in front of us. Up till now fate has provided that we should only see the water calm and in sunshine. (Although we had a storm crossing from Tromsö to King’s Bay it is so long ago that we have forgotten it.) Now we get raw, cold and stormy weather. The sea is not blue and pleasant-looking, but gray and heavy as lead. The waves toss the ship about, and we have to hold fast to anything near us to prevent ourselves being slung overboard, whilst from the pantry we hear kitchen utensils and cooking pots crashing about accompanied by the steward’s high-pitched curses. We don’t see much ice! Here and there a small floe or a patch of mush rocks past on the waves, strengthening the impression that this deserted sea stretches to the world’s end. During a sea journey in the south, even if land is not to be seen, one knows that in a few hours a strip of coast line will appear--and behind that coast line there is land, with people and life and new things to see, to hear, and to learn, which gives the journey a purpose! But this sea! It stretches northwards and northwards. The heavy lead-gray mass of water is never broken by a bit of smiling coast, with green-clad mountain sides or high hills, but goes on in an endless monotony of drifting ice. As it lies before us now it has no charm; it only repels with its cold indifference. We prefer not to look at it, and go down into the little saloon, where we who have come to the “Fram” are delighted to find that here also they have the praiseworthy habit of serving coffee at night whilst the ship is at sea. We go to bed at ten o’clock, after which the engines stop and “Hobby” lies drifting through the night (it is just as well to spare our fuel). As we settled down for the night “Hobby” lay a little northwest of Mofföen, almost directly north of Welcome Point in Reindeerland.