When we had finished taking our observation, we began to wonder where N 25 was. We crawled up on all the high hummocks near by and with our field-glasses searched the horizon. Dietrichson remarked that perhaps Amundsen had gone on to the Pole. “It would be just like him,” he said. It was not until noon, however, of the 22nd that we spotted them from an especially high hill of ice. The N 25 lay with her nose pointing into the air at an angle of forty-five degrees, among a lot of rough hummocks and against a huge cake of old blue Arctic ice about forty feet thick, three miles away. It was a rough-looking country, and the position of the N 25 was terrible to behold. To us it looked as though she had crashed into this ice. We of the N 24 were not in too good shape where we were. We had torn the nails loose on the bottom of our plane, when we took off from King’s Bay, so that she was leaking badly; in fact, the water was now above the bottom of the petrol tanks. Also, our forward motor was disabled. In short, we were badly wrecked. Things looked so hopeless to us at that moment that it seemed as though the impossible would have to happen ever to get us out. No words so well express our mental attitude at that time as the following lines of Swinburne’s: “From hopes cut down across a world of fears, We gaze with eyes too passionate for tears, Where Faith abides, though Hope be put to flight.” That first day, while Dietrichson and I had tried to reach the N 25, Omdal had been trying to repair the motor. We dragged our canvas canoe up over hummocks and tumbled into icy crevasses until we were thoroughly exhausted. The snow was over two to three feet deep all over the ice, and we floundered through it, never knowing what we were going to step on next. Twice Dietrichson went down between the floes and only by hanging onto the canoe was he able to save himself from sinking. After half a mile of this we were forced to give up and return. We pitched our tent on top of the ice floe, moved all our equipment out of the plane into it, and tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. But there was no sleep for us and very little rest during the next five days. Omdal was continually working on the motor, while Dietrichson and I took turns at the pump. Only by the most incessant pumping were we able to keep the water down below the gasoline tanks. Although we had located the N 25, they did not see us till the afternoon of the second day, which was May 23rd. We had taken the small inflated balloons, which the meteorologist had given us with which to obtain data regarding the upper air strata, and after tying pieces of flannel to them set them loose. We hoped that the wind would drift them over to N 25 and so indicate to them in which direction to look for us. But the wind blew them in the wrong direction, or else they drifted too low and got tangled up in the rough ice.