The air was as keen and bitter as frozen steel.
At the next camp I had another of the dogs killed.

It was now exactly six weeks since we left the _Roosevelt_, and I felt as if the goal were in sight.

I intended the next day, weather and ice permitting, to make a long march, "boil the kettle" midway, and then go on again without sleep, trying to make up the five miles which we had lost on the 3d of April.
During the daily march my mind and body were too busy with the problem of covering as many miles of distance as possible to permit me to enjoy the beauty of the frozen wilderness through which we tramped.

But at the end of the day's march, while the igloos were being built, I usually had a few minutes in which to look about me and to realize the picturesqueness of our situation--we, the only living things in a trackless, colorless, inhospitable desert of ice.

Nothing but the hostile ice, and far more hostile icy water, lay between our remote place on the world's map and the utmost tips of the lands of Mother Earth.
I knew of course that there was always a _possibility_ that we might still end our lives up there, and that our conquest of the unknown spaces and silences of the polar void might remain forever unknown to the world which we had left behind.