when stopped; how, if you are dangling fifteen feet down in a chasm, to work above you to get you up to the surface again.  And then our clothes were generally something like clothes.  Even under the ideal conditions of good light, warmth and no wind, crevasses are beastly, whether you are pulling over a level and uniform snow surface, never knowing what moment will find you dropping into some bottomless pit, or whether you are rushing for the Alpine rope and the sledge, to help some companion who has disappeared.  I dream sometimes now of bad days we had on the Beardmore and elsewhere, when men were dropping through to be caught up and hang at the full length of the harnesses and toggles many times in an hour.  On the same sledge as myself on the Beardmore one man went down once head first, and another eight times to the length of his harness in 25 minutes.  And always you wondered whether your harness was going to hold when the jerk came.  But those days were a Sunday School treat compared to our days of blind-man’s buff with the Emperor penguins among the crevasses of Cape Crozier.

Our troubles were greatly increased by the state of our clothes.  If we had been dressed in lead we should have been able to move our arms and necks and heads more easily than we could now.  If the same amount of icing had extended to our legs I believe we should still be there, standing unable to move:  but happily the forks of our trousers still remained movable.  To get into our canvas harnesses was the most absurd business.  Quite in the early days of our journey we met with this difficulty, and somewhat foolishly decided not to take off our harness for lunch.  The harnesses thawed in the tent, and froze back as hard as boards.  Likewise our clothing was hard as boards and stuck out from our bodies in every imaginable fold and angle.  To fit one board over the other required the united efforts of the would-be wearer and his two companions, and the process had to be repeated for each one of us twice a day.  Goodness knows how long it took; but it cannot have been less than five minutes’ thumping at each man.

As we approached Terror Point in the fog we sensed that we had risen and fallen over several rises.  Every now and then we felt hard slippery snow under our feet.  Every now and then our feet went through crusts in the surface.  And then quite suddenly, vague, indefinable, monstrous, there loomed a something ahead.  I remember having a feeling as of ghosts about as we untoggled our harnesses from the sledge, tied them together, and thus roped walked upwards on that ice.  The moon was showing a ghastly ragged mountainous edge above us in the fog, and as we rose we found that we were on a pressure ridge.  We stopped, looked at one another, and then bang—­right under our feet.  More bangs, and creaks and groans; for that ice was moving and splitting like glass.  The cracks went off all round us, and some of them ran along for hundreds of yards.  Afterwards we