“We were now fifteen souls; the thermometer seventy-five degrees below the freezing-point; and our sole accommodation a tent barely able to contain eight persons; more than half our party were obliged to keep from freezing by walking outside while the others slept. We could not halt long. Each of us took a turn of two hours’ sleep; and we prepared for our homeward march.” Continuing his spirited narrative, Dr. Kane describes the retreat:— “It was fortunate indeed that we were not inexperienced in sledging over the ice. A great part of our track lay among a succession of hummocks; some of them extending in long lines, fifteen and twenty feet high, and so uniformly steep that we had to turn them by a considerable deviation from our direct course; others that we forced our way through far above our heads in height, lying in parallel ridges, with the space between too narrow for the sledge to be lowered into it safely, and yet not wide enough for the runners to cross without the aid of ropes to stay them. These spaces, too, were generally chocked with light snow, hiding the openings between the ice-fragments. They were fearful traps to disengage a limb from, for every man knew that a fracture or a sprain even would cost him his life. Besides all this, the sledge was top heavy with its load; the maimed men could not bear to be lashed down tight enough to secure them against falling off. “Notwithstanding our caution in rejecting every superfluous burden, the weight, including bags and tent, was eleven hundred pounds. “And yet our march for the first six hours was very cheering. We made by vigorous pulls and lifts nearly a mile an hour, and reached the new floes before we were absolutely weary. Our sledge sustained the trial admirably. Ohlsen, restored by hope, walked steadily at the leading belt of the sledge lines; and I began to feel certain of reaching our halfway station of the day before, where we had left our tent. But we were still nine miles from it, when, almost without premonition, we all became aware of an alarming failure of our energies. [Sidenote: _EFFECTS OF EXHAUSTION AND COLD_] “I was, of course, familiar with the benumbed and almost lethargic sensation of extreme cold; and once, when exposed for some hours in the midwinter of Baffin’s Bay, I had experienced symptoms which I compared to the diffused paralysis of the electro-galvanic shock. But I had treated the _sleepy comfort_ of freezing as something like the embellishment of romance. I had evidence now to the contrary.