Next morning the sun’s disc could just be made out through a veil of thin stratus clouds, and then the light was more or less normal again.  As soon as we could see what our surroundings were, it was clear enough that we had done right in stopping the game of blind man’s buff we had been playing on the previous day.  It might otherwise have had an unpleasant ending.  Right across our line of route and about 500 yards from our camp the surface was so broken up that it was more like a sieve than anything else.  In the background the masses of snow were piled in huge drifts down a steep slope on the north-west side of the two mountains.  It was impossible to take the sledges any farther on the way we had hitherto been following, but in the course of the day we worked round by a long detour to the foot of the most westerly of the mountains.  We were then about 1,000 feet above the sea; to the north of us we had the abrupt descent already mentioned, to the south it was quite flat.  Our view to the east was shut in by the two mountains, and our first idea was to ascend to the tops of them, but the powers of the weather again opposed us with their full force.  A stiff south-east wind set in and increased in the course of half an hour to a regular blizzard.  Little as it suited our wishes, there was nothing to be done but to creep back into the tent.  For a whole month now we had seen scarcely anything but fair weather, and the advance of summer had given us hopes that it would hold; but just when it suited us least of all came a dismal change.

The light Antarctic summer night ran its course, while the gusts of wind tugged and tore at the thin sides of our tent; no snowfall accompanied the south-easterly wind, but the loose snow of the surface was whirled up into a drift that stood like an impenetrable wall round the tent.  After midnight it moderated a little, and by four o’clock there was comparatively fair weather.  We were on our feet at once, put together camera, glasses, aneroids, axe, Alpine rope, with some lumps of pemmican to eat on the way, and then went off for a morning walk with the nearer of the two hills as our goal.  All three of us went, leaving the dogs in charge of the camp.  They were not so fresh now that they would not gladly accept all the rest that was offered them.  We had no need to fear any invasion of strangers; the land we had come to appeared to be absolutely devoid of living creatures of any kind.

The hill was farther off and higher than it appeared at first; the aneroid showed a rise of 700 feet when we reached the top.  As our camp lay at a height of 1,000 feet, this gave us 1,700 feet as the height of this hill above the sea.  The side we went up was covered by neve, which, to judge from the depth of the cracks, must have been immense.  As we approached the summit and our view over the surrounding ground became wider, the belief that we should see so much as a crag of this King Edward Land grew weaker