That day we went twenty-three miles in thick fog, and saw nothing of the land.  It was hard to have to travel thus blindly off an unknown coast, but we could only hope for better weather.  During the previous night we had heard, for a change, a noise in the ice.  It was nothing very great, and sounded like scattered infantry fire —­ a few rifle-shots here and there underneath our tent; the artillery had not come up yet.  We took no notice of it, though I heard one man say in the morning:  “Blest if I didn’t think I got a whack on the ear last night.”  I could witness that it had not cost him his sleep, as that night he had very nearly snored us all out of the tent.  During the forenoon we crossed a number of apparently newly-formed crevasses; most of them only about an inch wide.  There had thus been a small local disturbance occasioned by one of the numerous small glaciers on land.  On the following night all was quiet again, and we never afterwards heard the slightest sound.

On November 14 we reached 84deg. 40’ S. We were now rapidly approaching land; the mountain range on the east appeared to turn north-eastward.  Our line of ascent, which we had chosen long ago and now had our eyes fixed upon as we went, would take us a trifle to the west of south, but so little that the digression was of no account.  The semicircle we saw to the south made a more disquieting impression, and looked as if it would offer great irregularities.  On the following day the character of the surface began to change; great wave-like formations seemed to roll higher and higher as they approached the land, and in one of the troughs of these we found the surface greatly disturbed.  At some bygone time immense fissures and chasms would have rendered its passage practically impossible, but now they were all drifted up, and we had no difficulty in crossing.

That day —­ November 15 —­ we reached 85deg.  S., and camped at the top of one of these swelling waves.  The valley we were to cross next day was fairly broad, and rose considerably on the other side.  On the west, in the direction of the nearest land, the undulation rose to such a height that it concealed a great part of the land from us.  During the afternoon we built the usual depot, and continued our journey on the following day.  As we had seen from our camping-ground, it was an immense undulation that we had to traverse; the ascent on the other side felt uncomfortably warm in the powerful sun, but it was no higher than 300 feet by the aneroid.  From the top of this wave the Barrier stretched away before us, flat at first, but we could see disturbances of the surface in the distance.  Now we are going to have some fun in getting to land, I thought, for it seemed very natural that the Barrier, hemmed in as it was here, would be much broken up.  The disturbances we had seen consisted of some big, old crevasses, which were partly filled up; we avoided them easily.  Now there was another deep depression