The open water supplies the evaporation, the cold air acts as a condenser, and when the wind is blowing just right this forms a fog so dense that at times it looks as black as the smoke of a prairie fire.
Sure enough, just ahead of us were black spots against the snow which I knew to be my various divisions held up by a lead.

When we came up with them I saw a lane of open water, about a quarter of a mile wide, which had formed since the captain had passed the day before.

The wind had been getting in its work! I gave the word to camp (there was nothing else to do), and while the igloos were being built, Marvin and MacMillan made a sounding from the edge of the lead, getting ninety-six fathoms.
This march to the edge of the lead put us beyond the British record of 83 deg.

20' made by Captain Markham, R.N., north of Cape Joseph Henry, May 12, 1876.
Before daylight the next morning we heard the grinding of the ice, which told us that the lead was at last crushing together, and I gave the signal to the other three igloos, by pounding with a hatchet on the ice floor of my igloo, to fire up and get breakfast in a hurry.

The morning was clear again, excepting for the wind haze, but the wind still continued to blow with unabated violence.
With the first of the daylight we were hurrying across the lead on the raftering young ice, which was moving, crushing, and piling up with the closing of the sides of the lead.