r Point in the fog we sensed that we had risen and
fallen over several rises. Every now and then we felt hard slippery snow
under our feet. Every now and then our feet went through crusts in the
surface. And then quite suddenly, vague, indefinable, monstrous, there
loomed a something ahead. I remember having a feeling as of ghosts about
as we untoggled our harnesses from the sledge, tied them together, and
thus roped walked upwards on that ice. The moon was showing a ghastly
ragged mountainous edge above us in the fog, and as we rose we found that
we were on a pressure ridge. We stopped, looked at one another, and then
_bang_--right under our feet. More bangs, and creaks and groans; for that
ice was moving and splitting like glass. The cracks went off all round
us, and some of them ran along for hundreds of yards. Afterwards we got
used to it, but at first the effect was very jumpy. From first to last
during this journey we had plenty of variety and none of that monotony
which is inevitable in sledging over long distances of Barrier in summer.
Only the long shivering fits following close one after the other all the
time we lay in our dreadful sleeping-bags, hour after hour and night
after night in those temperatures--they were as monotonous as could be.
Later we got frost-bitten even as we lay in our sleeping-bags. Things are
getting pretty bad when you get frost-bitten in your bag.

There was only a glow where the moon was; we stood in a moonlit fog, and
this was sufficient to show the edge of another ridge ahead, and yet
another on our left. We were utterly bewildered. The deep booming of the
ice continued, and it may be that the tide has something to do with this,
though we were many miles from the ordinary coastal ice. We went back,
toggled up to our sledges again and pulled in what we thought was the
right direction, always with that feeling that the earth may open
underneath your feet which you have in crevassed areas. But all we found
were more mounds and banks of snow and ice, into which we almost ran
before we saw them. We were clearly lost. It was near midnight, and I
wrote, "it may be the pressure ridges or it may be Terror, it is
impossible to say,--and I should think it is impossible to move till it
clears. We were steering N.E. when we got here and returned S.W. till we
seemed to be in a hollow and camped."

The temperature had been rising from -36 deg. at 11 A.M. and it was now -27 deg.;
snow was falling