chap, xii THE IVORY GATE 181 



admired our luck. We had actually chanced to hit the only 

 point whence it was possible to descend without infinite 

 difficulty and delay. At most points it could not be de- 

 scended. At all other points it could only be descended 

 by cutting a staircase down some hundred feet or more of 

 perilously steep ice-wall. Descrying a little way off a small 

 patch of dry ground, I made for it, through half-a-dozen 

 streams, the others following delicately, carrying their boots 

 and stockings, and lifting high their feet to give them, turn 

 about, a momentary relief from the ice-cold water. On the 

 flat we lunched on a varied assortment of Emergency 

 tablets, biscuits, lime-juice nodules, bits of chocolate, ends 

 of Darbishire's smoked Westphalian ham, and a tin of jam. 

 We named the lunching place Darbishire's Ham, for the 

 patch of dry land was ham-shaped. 



Then we wandered various ways, geologists geologising, 

 photographers photographing, surveyors surveying. Far out 

 on the plain we went to a last gravelly island, fragment of 

 an old raised beach, beyond which was nothing more but 

 hybrid stuff, with a watery surface and a muddy substance, 

 not strong enough to support, nor liquid enough to float 

 anything — a nameless quagmire which gradually merged 

 into the sea, whose stranded icebergs looked down upon it 

 like little hills. The view was less fine than from the glacier, 

 for the broad sea was now foreshortened into a line, and 

 Edge Land had either sunk utterly out of sight or become 

 wholly enveloped in clouds. There was hardly a living 

 thing in sight ; one glaucous gull came over, and an ivory 

 gull, a few fulmar petrels and a snow bunting. There 

 were the footprints of innumerable birds in the mud, and 

 of reindeer on harder ground. That was all. Flowers grew 

 sparsely where they had the chance to grow at all. Snow 

 lay low on the hills around, almost down to sea-level, on 

 north-facing slopes. Clouds played about the collar-peaks, 



