We halted the sledge, and while Mawson took some theodolite angles Mackay and I tried to find a way down the cliff, but failed to find it. Once more we reconnoitred, and this time Mawson and I found some steep slopes formed by drift snow, which were just practicable for a light sledge lowered by an alpine rope. We chose what seemed to be the best of these slopes and Mackay, having tied the rope round his body and having taken his ice-axe, went down the slope cautiously, Mawson and I holding on to the rope meanwhile. The snow gave a good foothold, and he was soon at the bottom without needing support from the rope. Then, when he had returned to the top, we all set to work unpacking the sledges, and after loading one sledge lightly we lowered it little by little down the slope, one of us guiding the sledge while the other two slackened out the alpine rope above. The man who went to the bottom unloaded the sledge on the sea-ice, and then climbed back again, while the others hauled up the empty sledge. This manœuvre was repeated again and again until everything was safe, and we very glad to have crossed the ice barrier so quickly. There can be little doubt, I think, that this Nordenskjold Ice Barrier is afloat. On the following day we were naturally anxious to be sure of our exact position on the chart, in view of the fact that we had come to the end of the barrier some eighteen miles quicker than the chart had led us to anticipate. Accordingly, Mawson worked up his meridian altitude, while I plotted out the angular distances he had found respectively for Mount Erebus, Mount Lister and Mount Melbourne. 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.