As the result of the application of our calculations to the chart it became evident that we were opposite to what on Captain Scott's chart was termed Charcot Bay, and consequently were nearly twenty miles nearer north than we had thought ourselves to be. This was splendid news, and cheered us up very much.
We were still travelling by night and sleeping during the afternoon, and when we got out of our sleeping-bags at 8 P.M. on the night of the 15th there was a beautifully perfect "Noah's Ark" in the sky. We also saw fleecy sheets of frost-smoke arising from over the open water on Ross Sea, and forming dense cumulus clouds. This warned us that open water was not far away, and impressed us with the necessity of pushing on if we hoped to reach our projected point of departure on the coast for the Magnetic Pole before the sea-ice entirely broke up.
Difficult surfaces continued to beset us, and our progress was consequently exceedingly slow.
By the 24th we were suffering both from exhaustion and want of sleep, and I rued the day when we chose the three-man bag in preference to the one-man bag.
A three-man sleeping-bag, where you are wedged in more or less tightly against your mates, where all snore and shin one another, and where each man feels on waking that he is more shinned against than shinning, is not conducive to real rest.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE DRYGALSKI GLACIER
On November 26 Mawson and I ascended a rocky promontory, while Mackay was securing some seal-meat, and from the top we had a splendid view across the level surface of sea-ice far below us.
But although what we saw was magnificent, it was also discomforting, for at a few miles from the shore an enormous iceberg, frozen into the floe, lay right across the path which we had meant to travel on the next day.
To the north-west of us was Geikie Inlet, and beyond that, stretching as far as the eye could follow, was the great Drygalski Glacier. Not a little concerned were we to observe with our field-glasses that the surface of this glacier was wholly different to that of the Nordenskjold Ice Barrier.
Clearly the surface of the Drygalski Glacier was formed of jagged surfaces of ice very heavily crevassed, but we could see that at the extreme eastern extension, some thirty miles from where we were standing, the surface appeared to be fairly smooth.