On December 29 we went downhill more and more, and it was indeed tough work being a ski-runner.  The drivers stood so jauntily by the side of their sledges, letting themselves be carried over the plain at a phenomenal pace.  The surface consisted of sastrugi, alternating with smooth stretches like ice.  Heaven help me, how we ski-runners had to struggle to keep up!  It was all very well for Bjaaland; he had flown faster on even worse ground.  But for Hassel and me it was different.  I saw Hassel put out, now an arm; now a leg, and make the most desperate efforts to keep on his feet.  Fortunately I could not see myself; if I had been able to, I am sure I should have been in fits of laughter.  Early that day Mount Helmer Hanssen appeared.  The ground now went in great undulations —­ a thing we had not noticed in the mist when we were going south.  So high were these undulations that they suddenly hid the view from us.  The first we saw of Mount Hanssen was from the top of one of these big waves; it then looked like the top of a pressure hummock that was just sticking up above the surface.  At first we did not understand at all what it was; it was not till the next day that we really grasped it, when the pointed blocks of ice covering the top of the mountain came into view.  As I have said, it was only then that we made sure of being on the right course; all the rest of the land that we saw was so entirely strange to us.  We recognized absolutely nothing.

On the 30th we passed 87deg.  S., and were thus rapidly nearing the Devil’s Ballroom and Glacier.  The next day was brilliantly fine-temperature -2.2deg.  F. —­ with a good breeze right aft.  To our great joy, we got sight of the land around the Butcher’s Shop.  It was still a long way off, of course, but was miraged up in the warm, sunny air.  We were extraordinarily lucky on our homeward trip; we escaped the Devil’s Ballroom altogether.

On January 1 we ought, according to our reckoning, to reach the Devil’s Glacier, and this held good.  We could see it at a great distance; huge hummocks and ice-waves towered into the sky.  But what astonished us was that between these disturbances and on the far side of them, we seemed to see an even, unbroken plain, entirely unaffected by the broken surface.  Mounts Hassel, Wisting, and Bjaaland, lay as we had left them; they were easy to recognize when we came a little nearer to them.  Now Mount Helmer Hanssen again towered high into the air; it flashed and sparkled like diamonds as it lay bathed in the rays of the morning sun.  We assumed that we had come nearer to this range than when we were going south, and that this was the reason of our finding the ground so changed.  When we were going south, it certainly looked impassable between us and the mountains; but who could tell?  Perhaps in the middle of all the broken ground that we then saw there was a good even stretch, and that we had now been lucky enough to stumble upon it.  But it was once more the atmosphere that deceived us, as we found out on the following day, for instead of being nearer the range we had come farther out from it, and this was the reason of our only getting a little strip of this undesirable glacier.