On the 15th of June we had a temperature of -3° c. with a little breeze from the southeast, just the very wind we required. The track was frozen fine and hard during the night, but the sky was not too promising--low-lying clouds--but what in all the world did we care about the sky! The thickest fog would not have kept us back. In this light the track was very difficult to see; small black objects were therefore placed at each side so that the pilot would be certain to make no mistake. A little too much to one side or the other could be fatal. At 9:30 P.M. everything was clear and ready for a start. The solar-compasses and the engines started. They were three-quarters warmed up. I cast a last glance over the track and walked along it to pass the time. It ran from northeast towards southeast. A few yards in front of the machine there was a small crack across the ice. It was only a few inches wide, but there it was, and at any moment it might open and separate the little corner we stood upon from all the rest. For the distance of 100 meters the track rose quite gradually in order to become level. Two hundred meters away, on the floe’s southeast end, there also lay a crack right across, but this was of a much more serious nature, and had caused us many uneasy moments. It was about two feet wide and filled with water and mush. This seemed to show that it was connected with the sea and could give us a few unpleasant surprises sooner or later. Should this crack widen and tear away 200 meters of our track, the latter would be entirely ruined. The floe ended in a three-foot broad water-lane; on the other side of it, direct in the line of the track, lay a flat forty-meter long plain, which one will understand was far from ideal, but absolutely the best which the place could offer us. At 10:30 everything was in order. In the pilot’s seat sat Riiser-Larsen, behind him Dietrichson and I, in the petrol tank Omdal and Feucht, and Ellsworth in the mess. Dietrichson was to navigate us homewards and should really have taken his place in the observer’s seat in front of the pilot. But as that was too exposed in view of the nature of the task we were undertaking, his place was allotted further back at the start. This was undeniably a most anxious moment. As soon as the machine began to glide one could notice a great difference from the day before. The hasty forward glide was not to be mistaken. One hundred meters off, we started at top-speed, 2,000 revolutions a minute. It trembled and shook, shivered and piped. It was as though N 25 understood the situation. It was as though the whole of its energy had been gathered for one last and decisive spring from the floe’s southern edge. Now--or never.