“To-day we were to see something besides sky and snow.  An hour after breaking camp this morning two snowy petrels came sailing over us; a little while later a couple of skua gulls.  We welcomed them as the first living creatures we had seen since leaving winter-quarters.  The constantly increasing ‘water-sky’ to the north had long ago warned us that we were approaching the sea; the presence of the birds told us it was not far off.  The skua gulls settled very near us, and the dogs, no doubt taking them for baby seals, were of course ready to break the line of march, and go off hunting, but their keenness soon passed when they discovered that the game had wings.

“The edge of the Barrier was difficult to see, and, profiting by previous experience of how easy it is to go down when the light is bad, we felt our way forward step by step.  At four o’clock we thought we could see the precipice.  A halt was made at a safe distance, and I went in advance to look over.  To my surprise I found that there was open water right in to the wall of ice.  We had expected the sea-ice to extend a good way out still, seeing it was so early in summer; but there lay the sea, almost free of ice as far as the horizon.  Black and threatening it was to look at, but still a beneficent contrast to the everlasting snow surface on which we had now tramped for 300 geographical miles.

The perpendicular drop of 100 feet that forms the boundary between the dead Barrier and the sea, with its varied swarm of life, is truly an abrupt and imposing transition.  The panorama from the top of the ice-wall is always grand, and it can be beautiful as well.  On a sunny day, or still more on a moonlit night, it has a fairylike beauty.  To-day a heavy, black sky hung above a still blacker sea, and the ice-wall, which shines in the light with a dazzling white purity, looked more like an old white-washed wall than anything else.  There was not a breath of wind; the sound of the surf at the bottom of the precipice now and then reached my ears —­ this was the only thing that broke the vast silence.  One’s own dear self becomes so miserably small in these mighty surroundings; it was a sheer relief to get back to the company of my comrades.”

As things now were, with open water up to the Barrier itself, our prospect of getting seals here at the edge of the ice seemed a poor one.  Next morning, however, we found, a few miles farther east, a bay about four miles long, and almost entirely enclosed.  It was still frozen over, and seals were lying on the ice by the dozen.  Here was food enough to give both ourselves and the dogs an extra feed and to replenish our supplies.  We camped and went off to examine the ground more closely.  There were plenty of crevasses, but a practicable descent was found, and in a very short time three full-grown seals and a fat young one were despatched.  We hauled half a carcass up to the camp with the Alpine rope.  As we were hard at work dragging our spoil