During that same day we had a very heavy surface to hamper and tire us, but as an offset to these troubles we had that night, for the first time, the use of a new frying-pan, ingeniously constructed by Mawson out of one of our empty paraffin tins. Indeed, Mawson's cooking experiments continued to be highly successful and entirely satisfactory to the party. At this time we encountered a good deal of brash ice, and noticed that this type of ice surface was most common in the vicinity of icebergs. The brash ice is, I think, formed by the icebergs surging to and fro in heavy weather and crunching up the sea-ice near to them. The sea-ice, of course, refreezes, producing a surface covered with jagged edges and points. But although brash ice was too plentiful biscuits were too scarce, and we were already reduced to one Plasmon biscuit each for breakfast and one for evening meals, and we had become exceedingly careful over the crumbs. At first, on this expedition, when biscuits were more plentiful we had munched them boldly, regardless of the loss of crumbs. Not so at this time, when crumbs were collected most carefully by the man to whom they belonged. Uneventful days of sledging followed--days on which we were tired at night and hungry nearly always; but on the 9th we were cheered by a fine, though distant, view of the Nordenskjold Ice Barrier to the north of us, and we were all extremely anxious to find out what sort of surface for sledging this great glacier was going to offer us. According to the Admiralty chart, prepared from observations by the _Discovery_ expedition, this glacier was twenty-four to thirty miles wide, and projected over twenty miles from the rocky shore into the sea. We hoped that we should be able to cross it without following a circuitous route along its seaward margins. Two days later we reached the Nordenskjold Ice Barrier, and as Mawson wished to take some observations, Mackay and I decided to explore the glacier for the purpose of selecting a suitable track (if we could find it) for our sledges. On our return we were able to tell Mawson the good news that the barrier was quite practicable for sledging; while he informed us that, as the result of his observations, the Magnetic Pole was probably about forty miles further inland than the theoretical mean position calculated for it from the magnetic observations of the _Discovery_ expedition seven years before. Early on the morning of the 12th we packed up and started to cross the barrier, and on the second day we had not sledged for more than a thousand yards when Mawson suddenly exclaimed that he could see the end of the barrier, where it ended in a white cliff some 600 yards ahead.