The floes were large and old, hard and level, with patches of sapphire blue ice (the pools of the preceding summer).

While the pressure ridges surrounding them were stupendous, some of them fifty feet high, they were not especially hard to negotiate, either through some gap or up the gradual slope of a huge drift of snow.

The brilliant sunlight, the good going save for the pressure ridges, the consciousness that we were now well started on the last lap of our journey, and the joy of again being in the lead affected me like wine.

The years seemed to drop from me, and I felt as I had felt in those days fifteen years before, when I headed my little party across the great ice-cap of Greenland, leaving twenty and twenty-five miles behind my snowshoes day after day, and on a spurt stretching it to thirty or forty.
* * * * * Perhaps a man always thinks of the very beginning of his work when he feels it is nearing its end.

The appearance of the ice-fields to the north this day, large and level, the brilliant blue of the sky, the biting character of the wind--everything excepting the surface of the ice, which on the great cap is absolutely dead level with a straight line for a horizon--reminded me of those marches of the long ago.
The most marked difference was the shadows, which on the ice-cap are absent entirely, but on the polar ice, where the great pressure ridges stand out in bold relief, are deep and dark.