esh air. As a rule we walked and worked and ski-ed alone, not I
feel sure because of any individual distaste for the company of our
fellows but rather because of a general inclination to spend a short
period of the day without company. At least this is certainly true of the
officers: I am not so sure about the men. Under the circumstances, the
only time in the year that a man could be alone was in his walks abroad
from Winter Quarters, for the hut, of course, was always occupied, and
when sledging this sardine-like existence was continuous night and day.

There was one regular exception to this rule. Every possible evening,
that is to say if it was not blowing a full blizzard, Wilson and Bowers
went up the Ramp together 'to read Bertram.' Now this phrase will convey
little meaning without some explanation. I have already spoken of the
Ramp as the steep rubbly slope partly covered by snow and partly by ice
which divided the cape on which we lived from the glaciated slopes of
Erebus. After a breathless scramble up this embankment one came upon a
belt of rough boulder-strewn ground from which arose at intervals conical
mounds, the origin of which puzzled us for many months. At length, by the
obvious means of cutting a section through one of them, it was proved
that there was a solid kenyte lava block in the centre of this cone,
proving that the whole was formed by the weathering of a single rock.
Threading your way for some hundreds of yards through this terrain, a
scramble attended by many slips and falls on a dark night, you reached
the first signs of glaciation. A little farther, isolated in the ice
stream, is another group of debris cones, and on the largest of these we
placed meteorological Screen "B," commonly called Bertram. This screen,
together with "A" (Algernon) and "C" (Clarence), which were in North and
South Bays respectively, were erected by Bowers, who thought, rightly,
that they would form an object to which men could guide their walks, and
that at the same time the observations of maximum, minimum and present
temperatures would be a useful check to the meteorologist when he came to
compare them with those taken at the hut. As a matter of fact the book in
which we used to enter these observations shows that the air temperatures
out on the sea-ice vary considerably from those on the cape, and that the
temperatures several hundred feet up on the slopes of Erebus are often
several degrees higher than those take