We continued until midday, when to my great relief the mist showed signs of dispersing, and the sun, a sickly yellow orb, eventually showed through.  It was surrounded by a halo which was reflected in rainbow colouring in the minute floating ice crystals.  I looked round for a spot suitable for camping, for we were pretty well exhausted, and it was worth while waiting for the mist to disperse.  No time would be wasted since the halt would do for our lunch.  With the greatest difficulty we found amongst the hummocky ice a place to set up our tent.  A space was found somehow, and rather gloomily the three of us made a cooker full of tea.  We munched our biscuit in silence, for we were too tired to talk.  From time to time I went outside the tent, and certainly the atmosphere was clearer.  Odd shapes to the east and west showed themselves to be the fringing mountains which so few eyes had ever rested on.  Gradually they took form and I was able more or less to identify our whereabouts.  We finished our lunch, Crean had a smoke, and then we got under way.

A little discussion, a lot of support, and a wealth of whole-hearted good-fellowship from my companions gave me the encouragement which made leading these two men so easy.

Warmed by the tea, cheered by the meal, and rested by the halt, we pushed on once more, although to go forward was uncertain and to work back impossible since we were too exhausted to do such pulling upward as would be necessary to reach a place from whence a new start could be made, even if we succeeded in re-discovering our night camp of yesterday.

For hours we fought on, sometimes overcoming crevasses by bridging them with the sledge where its length enabled this to be done.  The summer sun had cleared the snow from this part of the glacier, laying bare the great blue, black cracks, and they were horrible to behold.  If the breadth of a crevasse was too large to be crossed we worked along the bank until an ice bridge presented itself along which we could go.  As the sun’s rays grew more powerful, the visibility became perfect, and I must confess we were disappointed to see before us the most disheartening wilderness of pressure ridges and disturbances.  We were in the heart of the Great Ice Fall which is to be found half-way down the Beardmore Glacier.  We struggled along, for there is no other expression which aptly describes our case.  Had we not been in superb physical training and in really hard condition all three of us must have collapsed.  We literally carried the sledge, which weighed nearly four hundred pounds.

When the afternoon march had already extended for hours we found ourselves travelling mile after mile across the line of our intended route to circumvent the crevasses.  They seemed to grow bigger and bigger.  At about 8 p.m. we were travelling on a ridge between two stupendous open gulfs, and we found a connecting bridge which stretched obliquely across.  I saw that it was necessary to move round or across a number of these wide open chasms to reach the undulations which we knew from our ice experience must terminate this broken up part of the glacier.  In vain I told myself that these undulations could not be so far away.