direct to the top.  The moon, which proved a good friend during this journey, threw a long shadow at one point and told us that the surface was broken in our path.  Warned in time, we avoided a huge hole capable of swallowing an army.  The bay was now about three miles away, and the continued roaring of a big glacier at the head of the bay came to our ears.  This glacier, which we had noticed during the stay at Peggotty Camp, seemed to be calving almost continuously.

I had hoped to get a view of the country ahead of us from the top of the slope, but as the surface became more level beneath our feet, a thick fog drifted down.  The moon became obscured and produced a diffused light that was more trying than darkness, since it illuminated the fog without guiding our steps.  We roped ourselves together as a precaution against holes, crevasses, and precipices, and I broke trail through the soft snow.  With almost the full length of the rope between myself and the last man we were able to steer an approximately straight course, since, if I veered to the right or the left when marching into the blank wall of the fog, the last man on the rope could shout a direction.  So, like a ship with its “port,” “starboard,” “steady,” we tramped through the fog for the next two hours.

Then, as daylight came, the fog thinned and lifted, and from an elevation of about 3000 ft. we looked down on what seemed to be a huge frozen lake with its farther shores still obscured by the fog.  We halted there to eat a bit of biscuit while we discussed whether we would go down and cross the flat surface of the lake, or keep on the ridge we had already reached.  I decided to go down, since the lake lay on our course.  After an hour of comparatively easy travel through the snow we noticed the thin beginnings of crevasses.  Soon they were increasing in size and showing fractures, indicating that we were travelling on a glacier.  As the daylight brightened the fog dissipated; the lake could be seen more clearly, but still we could not discover its east shore.  A little later the fog lifted completely, and then we saw that our lake stretched to the horizon, and realized suddenly that we were looking down upon the open sea on the east coast of the island.  The slight pulsation at the shore showed that the sea was not even frozen; it was the bad light that had deceived us.  Evidently we were at the top of Possession Bay, and the island at that point could not be more than five miles across from the head of King Haakon Bay.  Our rough chart was inaccurate.  There was nothing for it but to start up the glacier again.  That was about seven o’clock in the morning, and by nine o’clock we had more than recovered our lost ground.  We regained the ridge and then struck south-east, for the chart showed that two more bays indented the coast before Stromness.  It was comforting to realize that we would have the eastern water in sight during our journey, although we could see there was no way around the shore line owing to steep cliffs and glaciers.  Men lived in houses lit by electric light on the east coast.  News of the outside world waited us there, and, above all, the east coast meant for us the means of rescuing the twenty-two men we had left on Elephant Island.