CHAPTER X.
KNOCKING AT THE GATEWAY TO THE POLE From Etah to Cape Sheridan! Imagine about three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice--ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below--a theater of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating pond.
Then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, compact, strong and resistant as any vessel built by mortal hands can be, yet utterly insignificant in comparison with the white, cold adversary she must fight.

And on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, men, women, and children, whites and Eskimos, who have gone out into the crazy, ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar Sea--gone out to help prove the reality of a dream which has bewitched some of the most daring minds of the world for centuries, a will-o'-the-wisp in the pursuit of which men have frozen, and starved, and died.

The music that ever sounded in our ears had for melody the howling of two hundred and forty-six wild dogs, for a bass accompaniment the deep, low grumbling of the ice, surging around us with the impulse of the tides, and for punctuation the shock and jar of our crashing assaults upon the floes.
We steamed northward into the fog beyond Etah, Greenland, on the afternoon of August 18, 1908.

This was the beginning of the last stage of the _Roosevelt's_ journey.

All now on board would, if they lived, be with me until my return the following year.