In the early morning of June 6th Riiser-Larsen and Omdal started out into the heavy fog with the grim determination of men who find themselves in desperate straits, to search for what seemed to us all the unattainable. We saw no more of them till evening. Out of the fog they came, and we knew by their faces, before they uttered a word, that they had good news. Yes, they had found a floe! They had been searching through the fog, stumbling through the rough country. Suddenly the sun broke through and lit up one end of a floe, as Riiser-Larsen puts it, which became our salvation. It was a half mile off, and it would be necessary to build a slip to get out of the lead and bridge two ice cakes before reaching the desired floe. The main body of the pack was now only ten yards away. Immediately behind the N 25 a huge ice wall was advancing slowly, inch by inch, and fifteen minutes after we started the motors the solid ice closed in over the spot where our plane had lain. We were saved. We worked our way slowly up to where we meant to build the slip, using a saw to cut out the ice ahead where it was too heavy for the plane to break through. After six hours of steady toil we had constructed our slip and had the plane safe up on floe No. 1. That night of June 6th we slept well, after the extra cup of chocolate that was allowed us to celebrate our narrow escape. The next morning began the most stupendous task we had yet undertaken: cutting a passage through a huge pressure-ridge,--an ice wall fifteen feet thick which separated floe No. 1 from floe No. 2,--and then bridging between floe No. 1 and floe No. 2 two chasms fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep, separating the two floes from one another. In our weakened condition this was a hard task, but we finished it by the end of the second day. Crossing the bridges between the floes was exciting work. The sustaining capacity of such ice blocks as we could manage to transport and lay in the water could not be great. The heavier blocks which we used for a foundation were floated into place in the sea and left to freeze--as we hoped they would--into a solid mass during the night. When the time came, we must cross at full speed, if we were not to sink into the sea, and then instantly stop on the other side, because we had taken no time to level ahead, so great was our fear that the ice floes might drift apart during the operation of bridging. We made the passages safely and were at last upon the big floe. In order to take advantage of the south wind, which had continued to blow ever since the day of our landing, we leveled a course across the shortest diameter of this cake, which offered only 300 meters for a take-off. But before we completed our work the wind died down. Nevertheless we made a try, but merely bumped over it and stopped just short of the open lead ahead. Our prospects did not look good. The southerly winds had made the deep snow soft and soggy. But it was a relief to know that