September 24 and 25 were punctuated by several intervals of calm during which it was judged the party would have been able to travel. On the morning of September 26 Ninnis and Mertz, with a team of dogs, set off up the hill to Aladdin's Cave to deposit some provisions and to scan the horizon for any sign of the sledgers. On the way they fell in with them descending the slopes, very worn and frost-bitten. They had a thrilling story to tell, and, when it was known that the party had reached fifty miles to the west, everybody crowded round to listen. The wind average at the Hut during their fortnight of absence was fifty-eight miles per hour, implying worse conditions on the plateau. Madigan gave the facts: "After leaving Aladdin's Cave on the 12th we continued due south, lunching at 2 P.M. on the site of Webb's first camp. Our troubles had already begun; the wind averaging sixty miles an hour all day with a temperature at noon of -14 degrees F. "As a few tears appeared in the tent during the night, we saw that it would not be advisable to put it up next day for lunch, so we had a cold meal, crouched in the lee of the sledge. This custom was found to economize time, as we became so cold eating our fare of biscuit, chocolate and butter that we got moving again as soon as possible. The great disadvantage was that there was nothing to drink between the morning and evening meals. "We sewed up the rents in the tent during the halt, having to use bare fingers in the open. About four stitches at a time were as much as one man could manage, and then the other two took their turns. "The next day was the only comparatively calm period of the two weeks of travelling. The wind was in the vicinity of thirty miles per hour, and, going west, we reached a spot, twenty miles 'out,' on a snow-covered surface, by nightfall. "A steady seventy-five-mile wind blew all day on the 15th at right angles to our course, accompanied by a thick, low drift. The surface was partially consolidated snow, very hard and smooth. Sometimes the sledge would grip and we could pull straight ahead. Then, suddenly, it would slide away sideways down wind and often pull us off our feet with a sudden vicious jerk. Most of the time we were dragging in a south-westerly direction to make the sledge run west, stumbling through the drift with the sledge now behind us, now sliding away to leeward, often capsizing and requiring to be laboriously righted and sometimes repacked. "After many experiments, we found the best device was to have two men on the bow-rope, about twenty feet long, and one with about ten feet of rope attached to the rear of the sledge. The man on the tail-rope, usually Whetter, found it very difficult to keep his feet, and, after a score of falls in stinging drift with incidental frost-bites on fingers and cheeks, he did not feel exactly cheerful.