It is to be doubted if anywhere on the waters of the Seven Seas there was ever a more outlandishly picturesque vessel than ours at this time--a sort of free tourist steamship for traveling Eskimos, with their chattering children, barking dogs, and other goods and chattels.
[Illustration: ESKIMO DOGS OF THE EXPEDITION (246 IN ALL) ON SMALL ISLAND, ETAH FJORD] Imagine this man-and-dog-bestrewn ship, on a pleasant, windless summer day in Whale Sound.

The listless sea and the overarching sky are a vivid blue in the sunlight--more like a scene in the Bay of Naples than one in the Arctic.

There is a crystalline clearness in the pure atmosphere that gives to all colors a brilliancy seen nowhere else--the glittering white of the icebergs with the blue veins running through them; the deep reds, warm grays, and rich browns of the cliffs, streaked here and there with the yellows of the sandstone; a little farther away sometimes the soft green grass of this little arctic oasis; and on the distant horizon the steel-blue of the great inland ice.

When the little auks fly high against the sunlit sky, they appear like the leaves of a forest when the early frost has touched them and the first gale of autumn carries them away, circling, drifting, eddying through the air.

The desert of northern Africa may be as beautiful as Hichens tells us; the jungles of Asia may wear as vivid coloring; but to my eyes there is nothing so beautiful as the glittering Arctic on a sunlit summer day.
On August 11 the _Erik_ reached Etah, where the _Roosevelt_ was awaiting her.