The Boreal's way was thus blocked.

Expecting every moment to see the Boreal crushed to splinters, we had to set about unpacking provisions, and placing sledges, kayaks, dogs and everything in a position for instant flight.

On the 13th March, nearly three months later, Clark, Mew and I left the Boreal in latitude 85° 15'.

So it happened that at the end of the fourth day out, we had made only nineteen miles, and could still from a hummock discern afar the leaning masts of the old Boreal.

Worn as I was, I made little delay to set out for that ship; and I had not travelled over water and ice four hours when, to my in-describable joy, I made out from the top of a steep floe that she was the Boreal.

The Boreal was the one little distant jet-black spot in all this purity: and upon her, as though she were Heaven, I paddled, I panted.

But on board the Boreal, though now they must have heard me, seen me, I observed no movement of welcome, but all, all was still as death that still Arctic morning, my God.

It was just as though the Boreal had been openly presented to me by a spiritual agency, which, though I could not see it, I could readily apprehend.

What potassic ferrocyanide was doing on board the Boreal I did not know, and I had neither the means, nor the force of mind, alas!

The Boreal, I found, contained sufficient provisions, untouched by the dust, in cases, casks, &c., to last me, probably, fifty years.

At nine in the morning of the 6th July, a week from my first sighting of the Boreal, I descended to the engine-room to set out.

However, I stopped the Boreal in time, and later on lowered the kayak, and boarded the other.

But still the Boreal moved, traversing, as it were, bottomless Eternity: and I reached latitude 72°, not far now from Northern Europe.

At another of them, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the Boreal's liquid air at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to a stoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able to jump down.

Nothing answered me: and when I went up again, the Boreal had drifted three yards beyond my reach.

Moreover, some days later, the Boreal had found herself in a bank of cod making away northward, millions of fish, for I saw them, and one afternoon caught three, hand-running, with the hook.

The double speed of the Boreal and the other, hastening opposite ways, must have been thirty-eight or forty knots, and the meeting was accomplished in certainly less than five minutes: yet into that time I crowded years of life.

The Boreal's bow walking over a little empty fishing-boat roused me, and a minute later, just before I came to a new promontory and bend, I saw two people.

Not a sound, not one: only the languidly-working engines of the Boreal.

But some mad, audacious whisper was at my brain: and at 10.30, the 2nd September, immediately opposite the Cross Wall Custom House, the Boreal's anchor-chain, after a voyage of three years, two months, and fourteen days, ran thundering, thundering, through the starboard hawse-hole.

Half-way I happened to look at my old silver chronometer of Boreal-days, which I have kept carefully woundand how I can be still thrown into these sudden frantic agitations by a nothing, a nothing, my good God!

But in their insistence upon this particular minute I had found something so hideously solemn, yet mock-solemn, personal, and as it were addressed to me, that when my own watch dared to point to the same moment, I was thrown into one of those sudden, paroxysmal, panting turmoils of mind, half rage, half horror, which have hardly once visited me since I left the Boreal.

Those words: 'signal to the nearer planets' I wrote nearly fourteen months ago, some days after the destruction of London, I being then on board the old Boreal, making for the coast of France: for the night was dark, though calm, and I was afraid of running into some ship, yet not sleepy, so I wrote to occupy my fingers, the ship lying still.

It must have been 'the White,' then, that led me back, retarding me long, so that I should not enter the poison-cloud, and then openly presenting me the Boreal to bring me home to Europe.

My boreal lights leap upward, Forth right my planets roll, And still the man-child is not born, The summit of the Whole.