They thought that this extension would never end, but it was finally reached at Cape Northeast, 82 deg. 30' N., 12 deg. W., no less than 22 deg. of longitude to the eastward of Peary's location of the Greenland Sea in his discoveries of 1892 and 1895. The new cape was half-way between Navy Cliff and Spitzbergen, thus narrowing by one-half the largest connecting waterway of the Arctic and the Atlantic Oceans. It was a magnificent discovery, for which some of these explorers were to pay with their lives. Mylius-Erichsen and Koch counselled seriously together, and well they might. They had been on the march more than a month; coming summer, with a disintegrating ice-pack, and the dreaded Mallemuk mountain precipices, sea-washed at their base, were to be faced on their homeward journey; and to crown all they had provisions for only fourteen days. Imbued with the high Danish spirit, they duly weighed, with national calmness, the pros and the cons, only asking each other how and what, with their pitiful means, they could further do for the glory of Denmark. The heroic loyalty of both men found full expression in the decision that it was their bounden duty to go forward, and to finish the survey with which they were charged, regardless of possible dangers and personal privations. So Koch marched northward, while Mylius-Erichsen turned westward toward Navy Cliff, nearly two hundred miles distant. The westward explorations had been made much more important by the unexpected easterly extension of Greenland, which left a great gap in its northern shore-line that must at all hazards be surveyed. Starting with Topographer Hagen and the Greenlander dog driver, Broenlund, Erichsen reached a great inland fiord (Denmark), which he naturally took for the one charted by Peary as bordering the Greenland Sea. Though this detour carried him a hundred miles out of the direct route to Cape Riksdag, it was not wholly without results. Twenty-one musk-oxen were killed, which restored the strength of the dogs, whose gaunt frames already alarmed the party. Here with astonishment they saw signs not alone of the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air, but everywhere were indications of their master--man himself. As they skirted such scanty bits of land as the inland ice had spared, they found along every bay or inlet proofs of former human life. There were huts and household utensils,--left as though suddenly,--circles of summer tents, fragments of kayaks and sledges, stone meat-caches, fox-traps, and implements of land hunt and sea chase, in which both reindeer and whales were in question. They were mighty hunters, these children of the ice, men of iron who inhabited the most northern lands of the earth, and had there lived where these white voyagers of heroic mould were destined to perish.