cape
joins the mountain, is the sea. You are facing north with your back to
the Great Ice Barrier and the Pole, with your eyes looking out of the
mouth of McMurdo Sound over the Ross Sea towards New Zealand, two
thousand miles of open water, pack and bergs. Look over the sea to your
left. It is mid-day, and though the sun will not appear above the horizon
he is still near enough to throw a soft yellow light over the Western
Mountains. These form the coast-line thirty miles across the Sound, and
as they disappear northwards are miraged up into the air and float, black
islands in a lemon sky. Straight ahead of you there is nothing to be seen
but black open sea, with a high light over the horizon, which you know
betokens pack; this is ice blink. But as you watch there appears and
disappears a little dark smudge. This puzzles you for some time, and then
you realize that this is the mirage of some far mountain or of Beaufort
Island, which guards the mouth of McMurdo Sound against such traffic as
ever comes that way, by piling up the ice floes across the entrance.

As you still look north, in the middle distance, jutting out into the
sea, is a low black line of land, with one excrescence. This is Cape
Royds, with Shackleton's old hut upon it; the excrescence is High Peak,
and this line marks the first land upon the eastern side of McMurdo Sound
which you can see, and indeed is actually the most eastern point of Ross
Island. It disappears abruptly behind a high wall, and if you let your
eyes travel round towards your right front you see that the wall is a
perpendicular cliff two hundred feet high of pure green and blue ice,
which falls sheer into the sea, and forms, with Cape Evans, on which we
stand, the bay which lies in front of our hut, and which we called North
Bay. This great ice-cliff with its crevasses, towers, bastions and
cornices, was a never-ending source of delight to us; it forms the snout
of one of the many glaciers which slide down the slopes of Erebus: in
smooth slopes and contours where the mountain underneath is of regular
shape: in impassable icefalls where the underlying surface is steep or
broken. This particular ice stream is called the Barne Glacier, and is
about two miles across. The whole background from our right front to our
right rear, that is from N.E. to S.E., is occupied by our massive and
volcanic neighbour, Erebus. He stands 13,500 feet high. We live beneath
his shadow and have both admiration