5. We continued our march till the ship disappeared from our eyes, and the route now lost its level character and assumed the appearance of a very chaos of ice. In the evening we reached a high rocky promontory of Wilczek Island, near which rose some stranded icebergs, and against which the ice-sheet of the sea, impelled by the waves, was dashed and broken. Close in shore the ice was in violent motion, and as we passed over the “ice-foot,” to the amazement of all, three of our men fell into a fissure. All through the night we heard in our tent, which we erected on the land, the cracking and crashing sounds emitted by the ice. Next day—March 11th—making a very early start, the thermometer at -14° F., we saw a water-sky to the south, and, after ascending a height, close before us lay the sea, covered with young ice. Heavy mists were ascending from fissures, and the level surface of the young ice glowed with the colours of the morning. Immediately under the coast of the island lay a narrow band of piled-up ice, with traces of recent pressures, and thinking that the interior was impassable to a laden sledge, we began our toilsome march along its rocky coasts. 6. We were in no mood to observe the picturesque character of our route, for our labours in dragging the sledge over the hummocky ice were excessive. We had frequently to unload the sledge or dig away an obstacle which could not be evaded. The conduct of the dogs was not quite faultless; and as for my companions, if one of them turned round, or if a bird flew past, this was enough to make the rest pause in their pulling, with the ready excuse of surprise at the circumstance. If in such cases Klotz failed to exert his strength, the sledge at once came to a standstill. We pressed on through icebergs on each side of us, shattered by the frost, and amid a constant noise of cracking and splitting produced by the increasing cold. At length, after several hours, we came out on an open level and crossed the gentle slope of a snow-covered spit of land. The rugged mountainous front of Hall Island, and the long glacier walls of M’Clintock Island, now rose before us. Our course lay clearly marked out: it ran in a north-westerly direction over a snow-covered level of old ice towards Cape Tegetthoff. Soon, however, the mist began to rise, and floated over the wide expanse of ice, and so obscured every object that we were able to continue our journey in the twilight only by means of the compass. We determined our course by the aid of small hummocks of ice, which rose above the general level surface, but so great was the difficulty of keeping a definite line in the mist, that we were compelled to halt every four hundred paces, and correct our route by the larger compass, which often showed that we had deviated 20° to 40° in azimuth from the true line, and in some cases the error amounted to even 90°. To add to all this, snow began to fall, so