“In front of us we could see another ridge, and we did not know how many lay beyond that.  Things looked pretty bad.  Bill took a long lead on the Alpine rope and we got down our present difficulty all right.  This method of the leader being on a long trace in front we all agreed to be very useful.  From this moment our luck changed and everything went for us to the end.  When we went out on the sea-ice the whole experience was over in a few days, Hut Point was always in sight, and there was daylight.  I always had the feeling that the whole series of events had been brought about by an extraordinary run of accidents, and that after a certain stage it was quite beyond our power to guide the course of them.  When on the way to Cape Crozier the moon suddenly came out of the cloud to show us a great crevasse which would have taken us all with our sledge without any difficulty, I felt that we were not to go under this trip after such a deliverance.  When we had lost our tent, and there was a very great balance of probability that we should never find it again, and we were lying out the blizzard in our bags, I saw that we were face to face with a long fight against cold which we could not have survived.  I cannot write how helpless I believed we were to help ourselves, and how we were brought out of a very terrible series of experiences.  When we started back I had a feeling that things were going to change for the better, and this day I had a distinct idea that we were to have one more bad experience and that after that we could hope for better things.

[Illustration:  DOWN A CREVASSE]

“By running along the hollow we cleared the pressure ridges, and continued all day up and down, but met no crevasses.  Indeed, we met no more crevasses and no more pressure.  I think it was upon this day that a wonderful glow stretched over the Barrier edge from Cape Crozier:  at the base it was the most vivid crimson it is possible to imagine, shading upwards through every shade of red to light green, and so into a deep blue sky.  It is the most vivid red I have ever seen in the sky."[167]

It was -49 deg. in the night and we were away early in -47 deg..  By mid-day we were rising Terror Point, opening Erebus rapidly, and got the first really light day, though the sun would not appear over the horizon for another month.  I cannot describe what a relief the light was to us.  We crossed the point outside our former track, and saw inside us the ridges where we had been blizzed for three days on our outward journey.

The minimum was -66 deg. the next night and we were now back in the windless bight of Barrier with its soft snow, low temperatures, fogs and mists, and lingering settlements of the inside crusts.  Saturday and Sunday, the 29th and 30th, we plugged on across this waste, iced up as usual but always with Castle Rock getting bigger.  Sometimes it looked like fog or wind, but it always cleared away.  We were getting