Meanwhile, Koch had made safely his homeward journey, and, although the anxiety of the officers at the ship was somewhat lessened by the news that game had been found in the far north, yet they were nevertheless uneasy as to the dangers of Erichsen's home travel. Koch, it seems, had found an open and impassable sea at Mount Mallemuk, so that he was driven to the inland ice. He there found himself obliged to cross a very narrow glacier, where its seaward slant was so nearly perpendicular that a single slip would have precipitated men and dogs into the open sea, hundreds of feet below. Later it was decided to send a search party north, under mate Thostrup. Nor was this autumnal march without danger, even apart from the perils of travel along the coast, where the men nearly perished by breaking through the new ice. At Jokel Bay Thostrup was driven to the inland ice, the only possible route. At all times difficult, this travel was now made especially dangerous by the fact that the old glacial surface was not yet covered by the hard-packed winter drifts. Thostrup's whole sledge party on several occasions barely escaped falling into the fearful crevasses, seen with difficulty in the semi-darkness of the sunless days. As it was, several of the dogs were lost when, a snow bridge crumbling, the animals fell into a crevasse. Their seal-skin traces breaking, the dogs dropped to the bottom of the ice-chasms, which were sometimes two hundred feet or more deep. With kindly hearts the Eskimo drivers tried to shoot the poor animals, and put them out of their misery, but did not always succeed. As Erichsen had not reached the coast the journey was without result. Thostrup found untouched the caches of Lambert Land and Mount Mallemuk, and turned southward on October 18, unconscious that a hundred miles to the westward his missing shipmates, facing frost and famine, were valiantly struggling against fate and death. The condition of the arctic Crusoes of Denmark Fiord, though there were doubtless days of cheer and hope, grew gradually worse, and by the middle of October had become terrible, if not hopeless. Although the autumnal ice was now forming, Mylius-Erichsen knew that in their state of physical weakness the long journey of five hundred miles to the ship, around Cape Northeast, could never be made. Hagen agreed with him that the single chance of life, feeble though it was, lay in crossing the ice-capped mountain range, direct to the depot on Lambert Land. Of course, the height of the ice-cap, the character of its surface, and the irregularities of the road were all unknown quantities.