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and by the pall of black darkness which seemed like an icy hand stretching down from the Pole.

For three long months and more the coal oil-lamps burned in the little shack, banked in six feet thick with snow to preserve the warmth within, and one of us at noon each day took a storm-lantern to read the thermometer hung on the wall outside to gather data for meteorologists down in civilisation.

It was warm within the little shack. Two big heaters burned with a supply of coal brought up from Quebec, and the sixfoot wide wall of hard packed snow sheltered us from the fury of the northern blizzards.

For water we used ice, huge chunks of it chopped from the big icebergs stranded in the bay, hauled to the land with dog teams, and stacked beside the post. When it was needed it was placed in a big drum beside the stove to melt. In the summer time, for about three months we used the water from the glacial streams running down to the sea.

It was the moonlight, the bright, clear, scintillating moonlight, that made life possible in the winter at Craig Harbour.

Perhaps a month after the sun had gone on its long journey south the moon would rise with all her solemn majesty above the frozen mountains behind the post, shedding her brilliant light down on the black frozenness of Craig Harbour, and casting long black

shadows from the cliffs and from the tall icebergs stranded in the bay. It was then that life moved in the little post. When the moon was full the trap-lines were visited daily, a dozen little tasks were done about the post, and with the thermometer at 50 degrees below zero we played football with the Eskimos on the hard stretch of snow behind the detachment buildings. Anything to kill the dread monotony. The days passed on leaden feet. It seemed to us, ringing the days on the calendar hung on the wall, that February would never come.

Christmas would come and go, always with a brave attempt at celebration, and with thoughts not uttered of Christmas in the homeland. It seemed then, most of all, that we were not on the earth at all, but marooned on a sunless frozen planet, barren and lifeless, from which there was no escape.

There was no fresh food other than the game shot in the fall and hung frozen for winter use-bear, musk-oxen, seal, walrus, and ptarmigan. In place of fresh vegetables we daily drank a ration of lime juice to keep away the deadly scurvy, no longer now the menace of Arctic explorers and whalers.

For days at a time, when the terrific gales blew an avalanche of snow down on us from the mountains above, we lay imprisoned in the tiny post, reading until our eyes were worn out, too dispirited to talk

with one another, and feeling winter we usually lost three that summer would never come. Clad in heavy furs it was a pleasure during the awful winter months to ride out behind the dogs to the trap-lines, trusting the dogs to find their own way along in the gloom of mid-day. Without those traps to stimulate ambition, to make us get outdoors, we would have gone mad.

And then came the sun, rising higher each day until it burst above the horizon in blood-red splendour on the 13th of February, bringing life back to frozen Ellesmere. But always with the coming of the sun the temperature sank still lower. As the sun climbed higher in the sky the thermometer dropped, until March saw day after day brilliantly cold in a temperature ranging from 50 to 60 degrees below zero. It seemed as if we were living in a new world. spring sunshine flooded the land, cold, almost synthetic, sunshine which only grew warm towards the end of April.

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With the winter went a great deal of the almost unbearable monotony. When daylight came it was possible to hunt, to organise exploration trips by sled far along the coast and into the unknown interior, to do some of the things for which ostensibly we were stationed on this vast barren island.

Time was a thing of no importance. Days came and went with hardly a thought for the day of the month or even the day itself. During the

hours in clock time, correcting the watches by the sun-dial built behind the post as soon as the sun rose high enough in February to cast a shadow. That first year on Ellesmere, before half our number were taken southwards, we lost a day during the winter, and were only corrected when the Arctic came in August.

As the spring advanced the sun climbed far up into the sky, so that by mid-April it was light all night, a vast change from the horrible gloom of five months before. In those last nights of April the sun did not go below the actual horizon at midnight, although it lay beneath the towering mountains to the northward. In early May it skimmed the mountain - tops at midnight, repaying with its magnificent splendour all the debts of winter. On June 21st, at the summer solstice, it shone brilliantly in the sky 13 degrees above the horizon at midnight, painting the glaciers a delicate rose, and flushing the deep blue sky a beautiful salmon pink along the top of North Devon.

When summer came hours meant nothing on Ellesmere. For nearly four months we knew no such thing as darkness. Night was the same as day, and often as not an expedition would leave the post in the warm light of midnight as in the blinding brilliant sunshine of mid-day.

There was, of course, no police work in the accepted

sense of the word to do. We When the open water came merely understood that the Government desired a garrison on Ellesmere to make good its claim to possession. It was expected that we would explore as much as possible and report each year to Ottawa.

Of Ellesmere itself little was known. The southern and western coast-lines were not mapped until 1900-1 when Captain Otto Sverdrup, the Norwegian explorer, spent two winters in Havn Fiord with the Fram. Sverdrup had accomplished wonders during his two years of exploration, but the coast-line was only roughly mapped, and practically nothing known of the interior. The coast for one hundred miles west of Craig Harbour had never been seen by white man.

So it was that with frequent sled trips far along the coast, hunting trips to supply ourselves with fresh meat and to provide food for our ravenous army of dogs, and with quasiscientific observations, the monotonous weeks and months went by until, one wonderful summer day, the open water lapped again on the shores of Ellesmere Land. And then, in those joyous anxious weeks before the coming of the ship, the bitterness of the past year was forgotten. Life seemed abundant. Gulls and ducks in thousands swam in the sea off the edge of the pack, sleeping seals lay dotted on the ice, and ashore snow-buntings and ptarmigan twittered amongst the rocks.

it was possible to go along the coast in the whaleboat, farther east round rocky King Edward VII. Point to where Coburg Island, looking grim and frozen even in the height of summer, lay between us and Baffin Bay.

Walrus came on their annual migration to Craig Harbour and the fiords along the coast; big seal lay on the large icepans as they floated seawards; now and then a whale would spout a mile off shore, passing through the channel between us and Smith Island; a school of narwhal sometimes passed, and once, almost to our undoing, a squadron of gigantic whale-killers thrashed into the harbour and caught us amongst the floe ice two miles off shore.

Each year, from the tent at the foot of the towering red granite cliffs, we would carry pitch to the summit with which to build a signal fire when the ship should come.

The Sound was never completely open. Of the sixty miles which lay between us and North Devon, forty miles and more lay covered with solid winter ice piled up by the gales and currents on the North Devon shore.

Even in summer there were days when fierce gales from the mountains swept Craig Harbour, days even in July and August when blinding snowstorms drove down from the north-east and obliterated all signs of summer, seeming malevolently to presage the com

ing of another dark winter but a few short months away. By the time the ship came the summer was more than half gone. A few weeks after she had called for the all too short annual visit the harbour would freeze again, and before she docked in Quebec the mountains would echo with the crack of dog-whips as the sleds sped over the ice for the floe edge.

The Barren Lands-that is what they called the tundras along the Arctic shore of the mainland hundreds of miles to the south. Barren Lands, where one could pick up tons of driftwood on each mile of beach, where trees grew a few miles farther south in the river-bottoms, where there were lakes full of fish, and countless herds of caribou roamed the uplands. The Barren Lands, where in summer Stefansson remarked on the terrible heat, the myriads of mosquitoes. It seemed to us that these should have been called the Barren Lands where even bushes did not grow, these gaunt naked islands where it seemed almost impossible for a living thing to exist.

We had built a shack at Cape Sabine, two hundred and fifty miles farther north on the eastern coast of Ellesmere, a few miles from where Greely and his gallant band starved in 1886. It was from this lonely cache and from Craig Harbour that the Canadian Government expected, and still expects, its three men of the Mounted Police to patrol the top of the world.

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A year ago there were but two white men at the Mounted Police post at Craig Harbour. Of these but one, the corporal, could be spared for the top of the world" patrol. It meant travelling northwards for three hundred miles with only one Eskimo, twenty-five days of toiling over treacherous glaciers, a brief stay at the cache at Cape Sabine, and a long journey homewards, carried out with untold hardship. And all to place under the cairn of stones at the foot of the glacier at Cape Sabine an empty cartridge case containing a record that the top of the world " patrol, ordered by the Government in Ottawa, had been carried out.

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But this work is positive, it is something to be accomplished, and accomplishing things is the easiest side of life north of the 76th degree. It is in doing nothing, sitting "tight" through the long Polar winter, waiting for the sun to come, for the months to pass, and the ship to come bringing word of the "outside," always waiting, that strains human endurance to the limit. Even now, while the press is booming with polar flights and spectacular "stunts across the frozen seas, somewhere on Ellesmere Land three solitary white men wait for the day when, unheralded by newspaper reports and thrilling bulletins, the single yearly relief ship brings twenty-four hours happiness to the "top of the world " patrol.

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STRIKE-BREAKING ON A "GENERAL."

BY FUNDI.

It was like the early days of the war in the quadrangle of the Foreign Office. The General Strike looked to be a moral certainty, and by nine o'clock on Monday morning Downing Street was besieged by hundreds of men all bursting to do something to keep the old flag flying and to keep the country on its legs. The first rush was mainly composed of men of no-or at any rate of negligible occupation. Retired officers and officers on leave from India, artists, authors, students, and so forth: men to whom freedom was very sweet, but to whom the chance of an adventure was as the very breath in their nostrils.

"What d'you think they'll give us to do?" "Do you think they'll want us right away?" were the sort of questions one heard on every side, the while the great queue wound slowly up the left-hand side of Downing Street and in through the big iron gates of the Foreign Office. Nobody knew anything, but everybody was willing to listen, and the wildest statements were received without a second's hesitation. The gentleman just in front of me had it on the very best authority that the Government was about to take over the great steamship lines. He had heard it the previous night, and

as he was the very proud owner of a 10-rater yacht, he had come to offer his services as captain of one or other of the white-walled P. & O.'s. He had travelled in a P. & O. once, he told us, and if he couldn't take one to sea and bring her safely back again, he was prepared to eat his hat. Thereupon he tilted his bowler to what is known, I believe, as the Beatty angle, and stared round upon all and sundry as though challenging us to doubt his seamanship or his nautical knowledge.

Meanwhile, a man on my left was holding forth on his ability to drive a Foden steam waggon. Judging by his appearance he was obviously a lawyer, but nothing on earth mattered to him at that moment save the one tremendous fact that he was going to drive a Foden waggon. As we moved slowly along it came out very gradually that he had once been given a lift in France on a Foden waggon, and had promptly fallen in love with that transport. He had since read a lot about Fodens; he had studied the question to a remarkable depth, and in proof of his statements he started off on a long-winded monologue anent their fuel consumption, most economic road speed, and price per ton mile of load.

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