The Aerial Age

purchase Of This Book Includes Free Trial Access To Www.million-books.com Where You Can Read More Than A Million Books For Free.
this Is An Ocr Edition With Typos.
excerpt From Book:
chapter Iii Struggling Against The Impossible From The Platen Island We Made A Desperate Effort To Get Out Upon The Polar Pack And Start Toward The Pole. But It Was Simply Impossible. The Storm Of Which I Have Spoken Had Driven Hundreds Of Millions Of Tons Of Ice Down Upon The Land—an Example Of An Irresistible Force Encountering An Immovable Body—and The Result Was Mad Chaos. Ice-blocks As Large As Houses Piled High In The Wildest Confusion. Between Them Deep Pockets Filled With Treacherous Slush And Brash Ice Upon Which We Could Get No Firm Footing And Through Which The Water Could Not Be Forced. We Had Many Narrow Escapes Whilst Working In This Mass Of Frozen Stuff Over The Deep Sea. Many Times We Pulled One Another Out Of The Water. After These Cold Baths We Went On With Our Work As If Nothing Had Happened, Not Taking The Trouble To Change Our Soaked Clothing For Dry. It Is Nothing When You Get Used To It. Defeated In The Main Purpose Of Our Expedition, We Had To Think Of Returning To That Partof Spitzbergen Where We Could Hope To Find A Ship. So We Started Back For Walden Island. On The Way We Had Many Adventures. The Advancing Summer Rotted The Ice. For Miles And Miles We Could Make Headway Only By Shoving The Aluminum Boats Through The Slush-ice, We Half Walking, Half Swimming Alongside, Jumping In The Boat When We Came To An Open Pool, Out Again And Leaping From Ice Cake To Cake In The Broken-up Fields. We Were Wet To The Middle From Morning Till Night. We Did Not Mind It So Much When The Sun Shone And The Weather Was Fine. But It Was Pretty Dreary Work In Wind And Rain, And Worse Still In The Thick Fogs, So Dense That We Could Not See Much More Than A Boat's Length. It Was Particularly Awkward To Camp At Night —as We Were Sometimes Forced To Do—upon Ice So Rot...