The next six days out on the broken sea-ice were full of incident. The weather was gloriously sunny till the 13th, during which time the sledge had to be dragged through a forest of pinnacles and over areas of soft, sticky slush which made the runners execrable for hours. Ponds of open water, by which basked a few Weddell seals, became a familiar sight. We tried to maintain a south-easterly course for the coast, but miles were wasted in the tortuous maze of ice—"a wildering Theban ruin of hummock and serrac."
The sledge-meter broke down and gave the ingenious Correll a proposition which he ably solved. McLean and I had a chronic weakness of the eyes from the continual glare. Looking at the other two fellows with their long protruding goggles made me think of Banquo's ghost: "Thou hast no speculation in those eyes that thou dost glare with."
I had noticed that some of the tide-cracks had opened widely and, when a blizzard blew on December 13, the thought was a skeleton in my brain cupboard.
On the 15th an Emperor penguin was seen sunning himself by a pool of water, so we decided to kill the bird and carry some meat in case of emergency. McLean found the stomach full of fish and myriads of cestodes in the intestines.
By dint of hard toil over cracks, ridges and jagged, broken blocks, we came, by diverging to the south-west, to the junction between shifting pack and fast bay-ice, and even there, we afterwards shuddered to find, it was at least forty-five miles, as the penguin skis, to the land.
It was a fine flat surface on which the sledge ran, and the miles commenced to fly by, comparatively speaking. Except for an occasional deep rift, whose bottom plumbed to the sea-water, the going was excellent. Each day the broken ice on our left receded, the mainland to the south grew closer and traces of rock became discernible on the low, fractured cliffs.
On December 17 a huge rocky bluff—Horn Bluff—stood out from the shore. It had a ram-shaped bow like a Dreadnought battleship and, adjoining it, there were smaller outcrops of rock on the seaward ice-cliffs. On its eastern side was a wide bay with a well-defined cape—Cape Freshfield—at the eastern extremity about thirty miles away.
The Bluff was a place worth exploring. At a distance of more than fifteen miles, the spot suggested all kinds of possibilities, and in council we argued that it was useless to go much farther east, as to touch at the land would mean a detour on the homeward track and time would have to be allowed for that.
At a point two hundred and seventy miles from the Hut, in latitude 68 degrees 18' S., longitude 150 degrees 12' E., we erected our "farthest east" camp on December 18, after a day's tramp of eighteen miles. Here, magnetic "dips" and other observations were made throughout the morning of the 19th. It was densely overcast, with sago snow falling, but by 3 P.M. of the same day the clouds had magically cleared and the first stage of the homeward journey had commenced.