The dogs were working very well and, if only a little additional food could be procured for them, I knew they could be kept alive. Zip broke loose one night and ate one of my socks which was hanging on the sledge to dry; it probably tasted of seal blubber from the boots. Switzerland, too, was rather a bother, eating his harness whenever he had a chance.
On the 14th, a depot was formed, consisting of one week's provisions and oil; the bags being buried and a mound erected with a flag on top. Kennedy took a round of angles to determine its position.
At the end of two snowy days, after we had avoided many ugly crevasses, our course in an east-south-east line pointed to a narrow strait between David Island and the mainland. On the southern side of the former, there was a heaped line of pressure-ice, caused by the flow from a narrow bay being stopped by the Island. After lunch, on the 16th, there was an hour's good travelling and then we suddenly pulled into a half-mile of broken surface—the confluence of the slowly moving land-ice and of the more rapidly moving ice from a valley on our right, from which issued Reid Glacier. It was impossible to steer the dogs through it with a load, so we lightened the loads on both sledges and then made several journeys backwards and forwards over the more broken areas, allowing the dogs to run loose. The crevasses ran tortuously in every direction and falls into them were not uncommon. One large lid fell in just as a sledge had cleared it, leaving a hole twelve feet wide, and at least a hundred feet deep. Once over this zone, the sledges were worked along the slope leading to the mainland where we were continually worried by their slipping sideways.
Ahead was a vast sea of crushed ice, tossed and piled in every direction. On the northern horizon rose what we concluded to be a flat-topped, castellated berg. Ten days later, it resolved itself into a tract of heavy pressure ridges.
Camping after nine and a half miles, we were surprised, on moving east in the morning, to sight clearly the point—Cape Gerlache—of a peninsula running inland to the southwest. A glacier from the hinterland, pushing out from its valley, had broken up the shelf-ice on which we were travelling to such an extent that nothing without wings could cross it. Our object was to map in the coastline as far east as possible, and the problem, now, was whether to go north or south. From our position the former looked the best, the tumbled shelf-ice appearing to smooth out sufficiently, about ten miles away, to afford a passage east, while, to the south, we scanned the Denman Glacier, as it was named, rolling in magnificent cascades, twelve miles in breadth, from a height of more than three thousand feet. To get round the head of this ice-stream would mean travelling inland for at least thirty miles.
So north we went, getting back to our old surface over a heavy "cross sea," honeycombed with pits and chasms; many of them with no visible bottom. There was half a mile to safety, but the area had to be crossed five times; the load on the twelve-foot sledge being so much, that half the weight was taken off and the empty sledges brought back for the other half. Last of all came the dogs' sledge. Kennedy remarked during the afternoon that he felt like a fly walking on wire-netting.
The camp was pitched in a line of pressure, with wide crevasses and "hell-holes" within a few yards on every side. Altogether the day's march had been a miserable four miles. On several occasions, during the night, while in this disturbed area, sounds of movement were distinctly heard; cracks like rifle shots and others similar to distant heavy guns, accompanied by a weird, moaning noise as of the glacier moving over rocks.
November 18 was a fine, bright day: temperature 8 degrees to 20 degrees F. Until lunch, the course was mainly 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.