y north for more than five miles.
Then I went with Watson to trace out a road through a difficult area
in front. At this point, there broke on us a most rugged and wonderful
vision of ice-scenery.

The Denman Glacier moving much more rapidly than the Shackleton Shelf,
tore through the latter and, in doing so, shattered both its own sides
and also a considerable area of the larger ice-sheet. At the actual
point of contact was what might be referred to as gigantic bergschrund:
an enormous chasm over one thousand feet wide and from three hundred
feet to four hundred feet deep, in the bottom of which crevasses
appeared to go down for ever. The sides were splintered and crumpled,
glittering in the sunlight with a million sparklets of light. Towering
above were titanic blocks of carven ice. The whole was the wildest,
maddest and yet the grandest thing imaginable.

The turmoil continued to the north, so I resolved to reconnoitre
westward and see if a passage were visible from the crest of David
Island.

The excursion was postponed till next day, when Kennedy, Watson and I
roped up and commenced to thread a tangled belt of crevasses. The island
was three and a half miles from the camp, exposing a bare ridge and a
jutting bluff, nine hundred feet high--Watson Bluff. At the Bluff the
rock was almost all gneiss, very much worn by the action of ice. The
face to the summit was so steep and coarsely weathered that we took
risks in climbing it. Moss and lichens grew luxuriantly and scores of
snow petrels hovered around, but no eggs were seen.

Owing to an overcast sky, the view was not a great deal more
enlightening than that which we had had from below. The Denman
Glacier swept down for forty miles from over three thousand feet above
sea-level. For twenty miles to the east torn ice-masses lay distorted in
confusion, and beyond that, probably sixty miles distant, were several
large stretches of bare rock-like islands.

On November 20, a strong north-east wind blew, with falling snow.
Nothing could be seen but a white blanket, above, below and all around;
so, with sudden death lurking in the bottomless crevasses on every hand,
we stayed in camp.

A blizzard of great violence blew for two days and the tent occupied by
Kennedy and myself threatened to collapse. We stowed all our gear in the
sleeping-bags or in a hole from which snow had been dug for cooking.
By the second day we had become extremely tired of lying down. One
conso