chap, vi LOW SOUND 89 



sandpiper hen, whose nest was only a few yards away. It 

 was hard to find, owing to its bare simplicity. She had 

 availed herself of a crack in the moss, and had just dropped 

 her four eggs point downwards into the hole ; there was 

 neither packing nor embellishment. When any one ap- 

 proached her place she would run away, looking almost 

 like a rat, then flutter feebly along as though broken- 

 winged. Having thus drawn off the intruder, away she 

 went with a laughing chuckle. 1 Two skuas evidently had 

 business near the camp, for they kept flying slowly round 

 it, often swooping within a couple of yards of my head. 

 I was also visited by three glaucous gulls and a ptarmigan, 

 so that with the ponies to look after I was anything but 

 lonely. About ten p.m. Garwood came in sight as a tiny 

 point descending from the clouds down a distant snow 

 slope. I immediately set hand to the cooking of a monu- 

 mental repast of tea, mulligatawny soup, and grilled rein- 

 deer, with biscuits and jam to follow. The whole was 

 ready when he came into camp, bulging and burdened 

 down with fossils from the beds we traversed on the pre- 

 vious day. He had an interesting story to tell as we sat 

 at supper in the door of the little tent. 



In the afternoon of the 27th, Pedersen left with the 

 ponies and reindeer carcasses for Advent Point. Garwood 

 and I shouldered our knapsacks likewise, and set forth in 

 the opposite direction. We carried an oilskin coat, change 

 of stockings, an extra wrap each, a small tin of Emergency 

 Food, thirty-four biscuits, some lime-juice nodules, four oz. 

 of jam, two sticks of chocolate, a rope, matches, tobacco, 

 pipes, snow-goggles, prismatic compass, aneroid, thermo- 

 meter, and camera. Taking our ice-axes from the tent, and 

 leaving it an amorphous mass on the ground, we turned 



1 We built a little stone man by the nest, and she soon grew accustomed to our 

 visits, and would let us approach within a yard to watch her. 



