On the 24th of May Dr. Cook and Gibson, who had formed our supporting party, left us to return to Redcliffe, leaving Astrup as my sole companion for the remainder of the journey. On the last day of May, from the dazzling surface of the ice-cap we looked down into the basin of the Petermann Glacier—the grandest amphitheater of snow and ragged ice that human eye has ever seen, walled in the distance by a Titan dam of black mountains, and all lit by the yellow midnight sunlight. Still keeping on to the northward, navigating the ice as does the mariner the sea along an unknown coast, we were befogged for two or three days in clouds and mists which prevented us from seeing to any distance. As a result, we approached too near the mountains of the coast, and got entangled in the rough ice and crevasses of the Sherard Osborne Glacier system. Here we lost twelve or fourteen days in our efforts to get back to the smooth, unbroken snow-cap of the interior. Once there, we continued our march, always northeastward, till on the 27th of June I discerned black mountain-summits rising above the horizon of the ice-cap, directly ahead of us. Then the northwest entrance of a fjord came into view, and we could trace its course southeasterly just beyond the nearer mountains of the land north and northeast. I changed my course to east, when I was soon confronted by the land and the fjord beyond. Then I turned to the southeast, and traveled in that direction until the 1st of July, when we, after fifty-seven days of journeying over a barren waste of snow, stepped upon the rocks of a strange new land, lying red-brown in the sunlight, and dotted with snow-drifts here and there. The murmur of rushing streams, the roar of leaping cataracts from the ice-cap, and the song of snow-buntings made the air musical. Leaving the sledge and our supplies at the very edge of the rocks, leading our dogs, and with a few days’ supplies upon our backs, Astrup and myself started on over this strange land, bound for the coast, which we knew could not be far distant. Four days of the hardest traveling, over sharp stones of all sizes, through drifts of snow and across rushing torrents, and we came out at last upon the summit of a towering cliff, about 3500 feet high, now known as Navy Cliff, from which we overlooked the great and hitherto undiscovered Independence Bay.