Conjecturing that these people would hardly have visited us without having first fallen in with Sonntag and Hans, I at once sent the interpreter to interrogate them. He came back in a few minutes. I inquired eagerly if they brought news of Mr. Sonntag. "Yes." I had no need to inquire further. Jensen's face told too plainly the terrible truth,--Sonntag was dead! I sent Jensen back to see that the wants of our savage visitors were carefully provided for, and to question them further. They proved to be two of my old acquaintances,--Ootinah, to whom I was under obligations for important services in 1854, and a sprightly fellow, who, having had his leg crushed by a falling stone, had since hobbled about on a wooden one supplied to him, in 1850, by the surgeon of the _North Star_, and which I had once repaired for him. They both came on one sledge, drawn by five dogs, and had traveled all the way through from a village, on the south side of Whale Sound, called Iteplik, without a halt. They had faced a wind part of the way, and were covered from head to foot with snow and frost. Their wants were soon bountifully supplied, and they were not slow in communicating the information which most interested me. From them I learned that Hans was on his way to the vessel with his wife's father and mother. Some of his dogs had died, and he was traveling in slow and easy stages. There being no longer any occasion for my southern journey, the preparations therefor were discontinued. [Sidenote: HANS'S STORY.] Hans arrived two days afterward, and, much to our surprise, he was accompanied only by his wife's brother, a lad whom I had seen some months before at Cape York; but the cause of this was soon explained. His wife's father and mother, as Ootinah informed me, had journeyed with him, but they, as well as the dogs, had broken down, and were left behind, near the glacier, and Hans had come on for assistance. A party was at once dispatched to bring them in. Hans being cold and fatigued, I refrained for the time from questioning him, and sent the weather-beaten travelers to get warmed and fed. The two old people were found coiled up in a cave dug in a snow-bank, and were shivering with the cold. The dogs were huddled together near by, and not one of them would stir a step, so both the animals and the Esquimaux were bundled in a heap upon our large ice-sledge, and dragged to the vessel. The Esquimaux were soon revived by the warmth and good cheer of Hans's tent, while the dogs, only five in number, lay stretched out on the deck in an almost lifeless condition. They could neither eat nor move. And this was the remnant of my once superb pack of thirty-six, and this the result of a journey from which I had hoped so much! There was a mystery somewhere. What could it all mean? I quote from my diary:-- February 1st.