There were a few occasions when the clouds broke up at 87° 42′; for instance, the 29th of May “dawned with sunshine from an almost quite clear sky.” But this was only a sign that worse weather was approaching. In the night, between the 28th and 29th, snow had passed Spitzbergen on the way north. It reached the polar flyers on the 30th in their camp 87° 43′. The clearing on the 29th was therefore just a passing phenomenon, and if the aeroplanes had started that day southwards they would after a few hours’ flight have got right into a heavy snowfall. These clearings, before the large wandering snow-masses, are well known in lower latitudes. It is, however, interesting for meteorologists to find that the same rules also apply to the weather conditions at the Pole. Now follows a period of prevailing southerly and southeasterly winds which cause the temperature to rise quickly. On the coldest day, the 24th of May, there had been -12.5° c., but at the end of the month we already had +7° c. and on the 7th of June the temperature was up to 0°. This enormously quick change from winter to “summer temperature” is typical of the polar conditions. “Spring” does not last “month’s,” as in the lower latitudes--it is finished in a few weeks’ time. From the 7th of June onwards the temperature did not rise much; it remained about 0°. Sometimes a little over, sometimes a little under. One can say that 0° is the characteristic summer temperature of the Arctic region. Warmer air than 0° is very often carried there from lower latitudes, but this gets cooled down immediately through contact with the ice, and gets a temperature of about 0°. As mentioned before, it is this cooling down which is responsible for the fog because it causes the air’s moisture to condense. The first fog, which extended right down to the ground, was observed on the 2nd of June; the next was on the 8th of June, and thereafter happened fairly often, so in the end whole days free of fog were exceptions. Luckily on the 15th of June, when the starting place was ready, there was sufficient visibility for them to start and to find their way out of their “Foggy” home. THE END Transcriber’s Notes Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations. The table on page 175 was printed in a way that was difficult to understand, so its appearance in this eBook may be incorrect. Page 249: “we reached the N 24” was printed that way, but the narrative suggests that it should be “N 25”.