What they had lost in quantity did not apparently affect their quality.  Nigger, one of Hassel’s dogs, had been destroyed on the way down from the plateau.  We thus reached this point again with twelve dogs, as we had reckoned on doing, and left it with eleven.  I see in my diary the following remark:  “The dogs look just as well as when we left Framheim.”  On leaving the place a few hours later we had provisions for thirty-five days on the sledges.  Besides this, of course, we had a depot at every degree of latitude up to 80deg..

It looked as though we had found our depot at the right moment, for when we came out to continue our journey the whole Barrier was in a blizzard.  A gale was blowing from the south, with a sky completely clouded over; falling snow and drift united in a delightful dance, and made it difficult to see.  The lucky thing was that now we had the wind with us, and thus escaped getting it all in our eyes, as, we had been accustomed to.  The big crevasse, which, as we knew, lay right across the line of our route, made us go very carefully.  To avoid any risk, Bjaaland and Hassel, who went in advance, fastened an alpine rope between them.  The snow was very deep and loose, and the going very heavy.  Fortunately, we were warned in time of our approach to the expected cracks by the appearance of some bare ice ridges.  These told us clearly enough that disturbances had taken place here, and that even greater ones might be expected, probably near at hand.  At that moment the thick curtain of cloud was torn asunder, and the sun pierced the whirling mass of snow.  Instantly Hanssen shouted:  “Stop, Bjaaland!” He was just on the edge of the yawning crevasse.  Bjaaland himself has splendid sight, but his excellent snow-goggles —­ his own patent —­ entirely prevented his seeing.  Well, Bjaaland would not have been in any serious danger if he had fallen into the crevasse, as he was roped to Hassel, but it would have been confoundedly unpleasant all the same.

As I have said before, I assume that these great disturbances here mark the boundary between the Barrier and the land.  This time, curiously enough, they seemed also to form a boundary between good and bad weather, for on the far side of them —­ to the north —­ the Barrier lay bathed in sunshine.  On the south the blizzard raged worse than ever.  Mount Betty was the last to send us its farewell.  South Victoria Land had gone into hiding, and did not show itself again.  As soon as we came into the sunshine, we ran upon one of our beacons; our course lay straight towards it.  That was not bad steering in the dark.  At 9 p.m. we reached the depot in 85deg.  S. Now we could begin to be liberal with the dogs’ food, too; they had double pemmican rations, besides as many oatmeal biscuits as they would eat.  We had such masses of biscuits now that we could positively throw them about.  Of course, we might have left a large part of these provisions behind; but there was a great satisfaction in being