We arose the next morning complaining somewhat of the cold, but this is the grievance of every first encampment. After three hours of cooking, chocolate was prepared, and with it we ate alpine biscuits. This was quite sufficient for our morning meal. Then we crawled out of our bags, took our furs from the snow under the bags, shook the snow out of them, and quickly dressed. Once in our travelling garments, though frozen and filled with fine dust-like snow, we soon felt comfortable and dry. Emerging from the camp we saw the sun about fifteen degrees east of north and close to the horizon, from which we concluded it was eleven o’clock. Our watches had refused to tell the time in the cold. The day was not promising, the sun was screened by an increasing mist and the horizon was everywhere indistinct. The pack was gray, and the leads black with many smoky zones on the sky, indicating a disruption of the ice and much pack movement. We were permitted a look at our projected journey’s end, the tabular iceberg, and from our position the way to it seemed simple enough. Its distance from us was about nine miles; it was 2,000 feet long and from 250 to 300 feet high, with a smooth upper surface and vertical cliffs; along the base, on the two sides visible to us, was a huge ice fort about 50 feet high and 100 feet wide. On this were fragments of ice mostly covered with snow, giving it an appearance of a smooth terrace. Here and there were huge fissures visible only at the top, and widening into a valley towards the base. These valleys were strewn with ponderous boulders of ice. There was no evidence of fresh fissures, no blue lines or stratas; everything wore a homogeneous mantle of unblemished purity. The lead before us proved, on further examination, an impassable barrier for the time. It extended as far as the eye could penetrate to the east and to the west, a great polar river in a mid-polar sea of ice. In it were hundreds of whales, finbacks and bottlenoses, and countless seals, Weddell sea-leopards, and crab-eaters, but strangely enough no penguins. The new ice forming was not of sufficient strength to bear our weights, hence we returned to the tent to prepare our dinner, the last meal of the day. When it takes six hours to prepare one meal, one does not provide more than two, and in actual practice that is found sufficient. [Illustration: An Iceberg Held by the Ensnaring Influence of the Pack-ice, Forming the So-called “Barrier.”]