idges of ice with
precipices on either hand. Fortunately the wind was not above twenty
miles per hour. As the frivolous "Epic" had it:

Odds fish! the solid sea is sorely rent,
And all around we're pent
With quarries, chasms, pits, depressions vast,
Their snow-lids overcast.

A devious track, all curved and serpentine
Round snow-lids superfine.
On jutting brinks and precipices sheer
Precariously we steer.

We pushed on to find a place in which to camp, as there was scarcely
safe standing-room for a primus stove. At seventy miles the broken ice
gave way to a level expanse of hard sastrugi dotted all over with small
mounds of ice about four feet high. After hoosh, a friendly little
Wilson petrel came flying from the northern sea to our tent. We
considered it to be a good omen.

Next day the icy mounds disappeared, to be replaced by a fine, flat
surface, and the day's march amounted to eleven and a quarter miles.

At 11 A.M. four snow petrels visited us, circling round in great
curiosity. It is a cheerful thing to see these birds amid the lone,
inhospitable ice.

We were taking in the surroundings from our position off the land
scanning the far coast to the south for rock and turning round to
admire the bold contours of Aurora Peak and Mount Murchison at our back.
Occasionally there were areas of rubbly snow, blue ice and crevasses
completely filled with snow, of prodigious dimensions, two hundred to
three hundred yards wide and running as far as the eye could travel.
The snow filling them was perfectly firm, but, almost always along the
windward edge, probing with an ice-axe would disclose a fissure. This
part of the Mertz Glacier was apparently afloat.

The lucky Wilson petrel came again in the evening. At this stage the
daily temperatures ranged between 10 degrees F. and near freezing-point.
The greater part of November 26 was passed in the tent, within another
zone of crevasses. The overcast sky made the light so bad that it became
dangerous to go ahead. At 5.30 P.M. we started, and managed to do five
and a half miles before 8 P.M.

It was rather an eventful day, when across the undulating sastrugi there
appeared a series of shallow valleys running eastward. As the valleys
approached closer, the ground sloped down to meet them, their sides
becoming steeper, buckled and broken. Proceeding ahead on an easterly
course, our march came to an abrupt termination on an ice-bluff.