25', or thirty-five miles from the Pole; but I determined to make the next camp in time for a noon observation, if the sun should be visible.
[Illustration: CUTTING BLOCKS OF SNOW FOR IGLOOS AT NEXT TO LAST CAMP, 89 deg.

25' NORTH (At This Camp It Was Difficult to Find Enough Snow for the Igloos)] Before midnight on the 5th we were again on the trail.

The weather was overcast, and there was the same gray and shadowless light as on the march after Marvin had turned back.

The sky was a colorless pall gradually deepening to almost black at the horizon, and the ice was a ghastly and chalky white, like that of the Greenland ice-cap--just the colors which an imaginative artist would paint as a polar ice-scape.

How different it seemed from the glittering fields, canopied with blue and lit by the sun and full moon, over which we had been traveling for the last four days.
The going was even better than before.