Captain Amundsen and I slept together in the pilot’s cockpit, which we covered over with canvas to darken it at night. I was never able to get used to the monotony of continuous daylight and found it very wearing. With the exception of Riiser-Larsen the rest of the men slept on their skis stretched across the rear-compartment to keep them off the metal bottom. Riiser-Larsen had the tail all to himself, into which he was compelled to crawl on hands and knees. It took us a whole day to construct a slip and work our plane up onto the ice-cake. The work was exhausting on our slim rations, and, besides, we had only the crudest of implements with which to work: three wooden shovels, a two-pound pocket safety-ax, and an ice anchor. Through hopeless necessity we lashed our sheath-knives to the end of our ski-sticks, with which we slashed at the ice. It is remarkable, when one considers the scant diet and the work we accomplished with these implements! Captain Amundsen conservatively estimates that we moved three hundred tons of ice during the twenty-five days of our imprisonment up there in order to free our plane. The floe we were on measured 300 meters in diameter, but we needed a 400-meter course from which to take off. Our best chance, of course, would be to take off in open water, but the wind continued to blow from the south, and the south wind did not make for open water. Riiser-Larsen was tireless in his search for an ice floe of the right dimensions. While the rest of us were relaxing, he was generally to be seen on the skyline searching with that tireless energy that was so characteristic of him. Silent and resourceful, he was the rock on which we were building our hopes. The incessant toil went on. On May 28th the N 25 was safe from the screwing of the pack-ice. On this day we took two soundings, which gave us a depth of 3,750 meters (12,375 feet) of the Polar Sea. This depth corresponds almost exactly to the altitude of Mont Blanc above the village of Chamonix. Up to this time our only thought had been to free the plane and continue on to the Pole, but now, facing the facts as they confronted us, it seemed inadvisable to consider anything else but a return to Spitzbergen. The thermometer during these days registered between -9° c. and -11° c.