no one knows what it was like. It has been a
vertebrate and gone back, and now has the signs of a notochord in early
life, and it also has gills. First found on the Graham's Land side of the
Antarctic continent, it has only recently been discovered in the Ross
Sea, and occurs nowhere else in the world so far as is known.

We left Granite Harbour in the early morning of January 23, and started
to make our way out. Our next job was to pick up the geological specimens
at Evans Coves, where Campbell and his men had wintered in the igloo, and
also to leave a depot there for future explorers. We met very heavy pack,
having to return at least twelve miles and try another way. "The sea has
been freezing out here, which seems an extraordinary thing at this time
of year. There was a thin layer of ice over the water between the floes
this morning, and I feel sure that most of these big level floes, of
which we have seen several, are the remains of ice which has frozen
comparatively recently."[362] The propeller had a bad time, constantly
catching up on ice. At length we were some thirty miles north of Cape
Bird making roughly towards Franklin Island. That night we made good
progress in fairly open water, and we passed Franklin Island during the
day. But the outlook was so bad in the evening (January 24) that we
stopped and banked fires. "We lay just where we stopped until at 5 A.M.
on January 25, when the ice eased up sufficiently for us to get along,
and we started to make the same slow progress--slow ahead, stop (to the
engine-room)--bump and grind for a bit--then slow astern, stop--slow
ahead again, and so on, until at 7 P.M., after one real big bump which
brought the dinner some inches off the table, Cheetham brought us out
into open water."[363]

Mount Nansen rose sheer and massive ahead of us with a table top, and at
3 A.M. on January 26 we were passing the dark brown granite headland of
the northern foothills. We were soon made fast to a stretch of some 500
yards of thick sea-ice, upon which the wind had not left a particle of
snow, and before us the foothills formed that opening which Campbell had
well named Hell's Gate.

I wish I had seen that igloo: with its black and blubber and beastliness.
Those who saw it came back with faces of amazement and admiration. We
left a depot at the head of the bay, marked with a bamboo and a flag, and
then we turned homewards, counting the weeks, and days, and then the
hours. In the ear