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accompany me to the top, leaving Debenham, who had slight mountain sickness, to continue his survey, and Dickason, who was feeling the height more than the other two men, to help him.

From here we were taking a single camping equipment—tent and poles, bags, inside cooker, primus, oil, and four days' provisions on full ration, and after this had been apportioned each man was permitted to take a reasonable amount of personal gear. All hands dragged the packs on the sledge some distance up the first snow slope, but the gradient soon became so steep that we were obliged to anchor the sledge with ice axes and assume our packs, while Debenham and Dickason tobogganed back to camp on the sledge.

By climbing about a hundred feet at a time and taking long spells we were able to make steady if slow progress up the rock ridges, which were here nearly continuous as far as the rim of the second crater. The only difficult bits to negotiate were when we were obliged to cross the snow-slopes from ridge to ridge, and these were only dangerous because, owing to scarcity of ice axes, the four of us were able to have but three between us, and I was never sure where the fourth man would fetch up if he slipped. This necessitated step cutting and slowed us up considerably, and it was not until three hours and a half after we had left the sledge that we reached the rim and saw the second crater stretching out in front of us.

Our first care was to select a good site for our camp, and after that was pitched to cook our evening meal and turn in. The clouds prevented our getting a view of the