On July 1, after fifty-seven days of travel, they came to the limits of the ice-cap and stood, silent and amazed, looking down from the summit of the snow desert across a wide open plain covered with vegetation, with here and there a snow drift showing white, and with herds of musk oxen contentedly grazing over it. Such a discovery was absolutely so unexpected that at first they could scarcely believe their eyes. There was no sign of any human habitation on the land, and for all that could be learned to the contrary, they were the first human beings who had ever trodden upon that plain, on which the yellow Arctic poppies were waving in bloom and over which the drone of the humble bee sounded, though for hundreds of miles around it the accumulated snow of centuries lay frozen into the great mysterious snow-cap and its glaciers. Having proved that they really were not dreaming, they shot a musk ox, which they used for their own and their dogs' refreshment. Then they stacked their stores and set out with reduced loads across the plain. They walked for four days, exploring, surveying, and examining; and on the fourth of July, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the United States, they stood on the summit of a magnificent range of cliffs, 3500 feet high, overlooking a large bay, which, in honour of the date, they named Independence Bay. The latitude was nearly 82° N., and Lieutenant Peary, writing of the discovery, says: "It was almost impossible for us to believe that we were standing on the northern shore of Greenland as we gazed from the summit of this precipitous cliff with the most brilliant sunshine all about us, with yellow poppies growing between the rocks around our feet and a herd of musk oxen in the valley behind us. In that valley we had also found the dandelion in bloom and had heard the heavy drone and seen the bullet-like flight of the humble bee." For a week the two remained in this northern valley, surveying and making observations and finding it difficult to believe that a distance of 600 miles of frozen snow separated them from the nearest living people. Not a vestige of a human habitation was found, and nothing to show that man had ever been there before. At the end of the week, with a good supply of fresh meat from the musk oxen and a collection of specimens of plants and insects packed on the sledges, the return journey was commenced. Both dogs and men were invigorated by the rest they had had, and they were able to travel homewards at the rate of thirty miles a day over the smooth surface of the ice-cap.