The first two hours of our flight, after leaving Amsterdam Islands, we ran into a heavy bank of fog and rose 1,000 meters to clear it. This ascent was glorified by as beautiful a natural phenomenon as I have ever seen. Looking down into the mist, we saw a double halo in the middle of which the sun cast a perfect shadow of our plane. Evanescent and phantom-like, these two multicolored halos beckoned us enticingly into the Unknown. I recalled the ancient legend which says that the rainbow is a token that man shall not perish by water. The fog lasted until midway between latitudes eighty-two and eighty-three. Through rifts in the mist we caught glimpses of the open sea. This lasted for an hour; then, after another hour, the ocean showed, strewn with small ice floes, which indicated the fringe of the Polar pack. Then, to quote Captain Amundsen, “suddenly the mist disappeared and the entire panorama of Polar ice stretched away before our eyes--the most spectacular sheet of snow and ice ever seen by man from an aerial perspective.” From our altitude we could overlook sixty or seventy miles in any direction. The far-flung expanse was strikingly beautiful in its simplicity. There was nothing to break the deadly monotony of snow and ice but a network of narrow cracks, or “leads,” which scarred this white surface and was the only indication to an aerial observer of the ceaseless movement of the Polar pack. We had crossed the threshold into the Unknown! I was thrilled at the thought that never before had man lost himself with such speed--75 miles per hour--into unknown space. The silence of ages was now being broken for the first time by the roar of our motors. We were but gnats in an immense void. We had lost all contacts with civilization. Time and distance suddenly seemed to count for nothing. What lay ahead was all that mattered now. “Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges-- Something lost behind the Ranges, Lost and waiting for you. Go!” On we sped for eight hours, till the sun had shifted from the west to a point directly ahead of us. By all rights we should now be at the Pole, for our dead reckoning shows that we have traveled just one thousand kilometers (six hundred miles), at seventy-five miles per hour, but shortly after leaving Amsterdam Islands we had run into a heavy northeast wind, which had been steadily driving us westward. Our fuel supply was now about half exhausted, and at this juncture, strangely enough, just ahead of us was the first open lead of water that was large enough for an aeroplane to land in that we had encountered on our whole journey north. There was nothing left now but to descend for observations to learn where we were. As Captain Amundsen’s plane started to circle for a landing, his rear motor backfired and stopped, so that he finally disappeared among a lot of ice hummocks, with only one motor going. This was at 1 A.M. on the morning of May 22nd.