Consequently we made good progress, and though the march was distinctly longer than the previous one, we reached Bartlett's igloo in good time.
[Illustration: STOPPED BY OPEN WATER] Here I found a note from Bartlett which had evidently been despatched by an Eskimo, informing me that he was in camp about a mile farther north--held up by open water.

This explained the black, ominous band which I had been watching for hours on the northern horizon, and which had gradually risen as we approached until it was now almost overhead.
Pushing on, we soon reached the captain's camp.

There I found the familiar unwelcome sight which I had so often before me on the expedition of 1905-06--the white expanse of ice cut by a river of inky black water, throwing off dense clouds of vapor which gathered in a sullen canopy overhead, at times swinging lower with the wind and obscuring the opposite shore of this malevolent Styx.
The lead had opened directly through the heavy floes, and, considering that these floes are sometimes one hundred feet in thickness, and of almost unimaginable weight, the force that could open such a river through them is comparable with the forces that threw up the mountains on the continents and opened the channels between the lands.
Bartlett told me that during the previous night in the camp a mile farther south where I had found his note, the noise caused by the opening of this great lead had awakened him from sleep.

The open water was now about a quarter of a mile in width, and extended east and west as far as we could see when we climbed to the highest pinnacle of ice in the neighborhood of our camp.
Two or three miles to the east of us, as we could see by the vapor hanging over it, the north and south lead which had paralleled our last two marches intersected the course of the lead beside which we were encamped.
Though farther south than where we had encountered the "Big Lead" in 1906, north of Cape Hecla, this one had every resemblance to that great river of open water which on the way up we had called "the Hudson," and on our way back--when it seemed that those black waters had cut us off forever from the land--we had renamed "the Styx." The resemblance was so strong that even the Eskimos who had been with me on the expedition three years before spoke about it.
I was glad to see that there was no lateral movement in the ice; that is, that the two shores of the lead were not moving east or west, or in opposite directions.

The lead was simply an opening in the ice under the pressure of the wind and the spring tides, which were now swelling to the full moon on the 6th.
Captain Bartlett, with his usual thoughtfulness, had an igloo already built for me near his own when I arrived.