I put this in italics because so much depends upon it—I may say that all depends upon it—for if this barrier can be scaled at any part we may come upon a region as easily traversed as that part of the Arctic Ocean lying between the North Cape and Spitzbergen, which is regularly navigated every summer by hardy Norsemen in little sailing sloops of 30 to 40 tons burden, and only six or eight pair of hands on board; or by overland traveling as easily as the Arctic winter journey between Tornea and Alten. This trip over the snow-covered mountains is done in five or six days, at the latter end of every November, by streams of visitors to the fair at Alten, in latitude 70°, 3½ degrees N. of the Arctic circle; its distance, 430 miles, is just about equal to that which stands between the North Pole and the northernmost reach of our previous Arctic expeditions. One or the other of the above-named conditions, or an enclosed frozen Polar ocean, is what probably exists beyond the broken fjord barrier hitherto explored; a continuation of such a barrier is, in fact, almost a physical impossibility; and therefore the Pole will be ultimately reached, not by a repetition of such weary struggles as those which ended in the very hasty retreat of our last expedition, but by a bound across about 400 miles of open or frozen Polar ocean, or a rapid sledge-run over snow-paved fields like those so merrily traversed in Arctic Norway by festive bonders and their families on their way to Yule-time dancing parties. Reference to a map of the circumpolar regions, or, better, to a globe, will show that the continents of Europe, Asia, and America surround the Pole, and hang, as it were, downwards or southwards from a latitude of 70° and upwards. There is but one wide outlet for the accumulations of Polar ice, and that is between Norway and Greenland, with Iceland standing nearly midway. Davis’s and Behring’s Straits are the narrower openings; the first may be only a fjord, rather than an outlet. The ice-block, or crowding together and heaping up of the glacier fragments and bay ice, is thus explained.