9.971--I like
the 1 foot when heights are so hard to determine hereabouts! To the three
secondary ranges, on the S.W. extreme of the Beardmore, nearly in 85
degrees, he gave the names Adams, Marshall, and Wild, after his three
companions on the farthest South march. To get into one's head what we
had to look at on the upper half of the Beardmore, imagine a moderate
straight slope: this is the Glacier like a giant road, white except where
the sun has melted the snow and bared the blue ice. Looking up the
Glacier an overhang of ice-falls and disturbances, with three nunataks or
mountains sticking through the ice-sheet like islands--the disturbance is
mostly to the left (Eastwards) of these, and the road here looks cruelly
steep even where it is not broken up. Down the Glacier the great white
way is broken here and there where tributary glaciers join it, and above
the Cloudmaker the glacier is cut up badly in several places, how badly
we were not to know until the middle of January, 1912--but of that more
anon. To the left (S.E.) a great broad river of ice, the Mill Glacier,
and so on.

The land is extraordinary--gigantic snow drifts like huge waves breaking
against a stone pier beset the lower cliff faces and steeper slopes, then
dark red-brown rock carved by glaciers long since vanished, and above
this rocky bands of limestone, sandstone; and dolerite. Some rocky talus
showing through the big snow drifts, and in some cases talus alone.

From my letter to be taken by the next homeward party in case I missed
the ship:

"The Wild range is extraordinary in its curious stratification, and
one feels when gazing at it some-thing of a wish to scramble along the
crests, if only to feel land underfoot instead of ice, ice, ice.

"The prevailing colours here are blacks, grays, reds, like the cliffs
at Teignmouth and Exmouth, and another more chocolate red. Then the
whites in all kind of shade--fancy different shades of white, but
there are here any amount of them, and a certain sparkle of blue ice
down the Glacier where the sun is shining on it that reminds one of a
tropical sea. Except when marching we don't spend much time out of our
tents, but I take a breather now and again when surveying, and then I
sit on a sledge-box and wonder what is in store for us and where all
this will lead us. Amundsen has certainty not come this way, although
dogs could work here easily enough."

On December