6 SCOTTS “LAST. EXPEDITION [June 
it was — 49° when we turned out at 9 A.M.; but the day was fine 
and calm on the whole, with occasional light easterly airs only. 
Curtains of aurora covered a great part of the sky to the 
east both morning and evening, and it was one of the chief pleas- 
ures of our journey out that we were facing:east, where almost all 
the aurora occurred, and so we could watch its changes as we 
marched, almost the whole time. Nine-tenths of the aurora we 
saw was in the east and S.E. of the sky, often well up to the 
zenith, but always starting from below the Barrier horizon. We 
never saw any that appeared close at hand. 
The temp. remained at — 50° all day, and Cherry and I both 
felt the cold of the snow very much in our feet on the march, he 
getting his big toes blistered by frostbite, and I my heel and the 
sole of my foot. A good many of Cherry’s finger-tips also went 
last night at the edge of the Barrier and are bulbous to-day; but 
he takes them as a matter of course and says nothing, and he 
never once allowed them to interfere with his usefulness. 
The surface to-day was firm, generally; hard and windswept 
in some places, and soft and sandy in others. The sledges to-day 
went heaviest on the harder areas for some reason, which was 
quite exceptional. I think there was a fixed deposit of gritty crys- 
tals on the apparently smooth surface. Always after this it was 
the soft sandy drifts which held us up more than anything else. 
We made two or three long sloping gradients to-day in our 
march going eastward. ‘These also we confirmed on our return 
journey, when we recrossed three long low waves on about the 
same line, and I believe them to be the continuation of a series 
of extensive waves which run out from the point at which the 
glacier flow from Mt. Terra Nova runs into the Barrier. These 
waves curve gradually south-westward from the south-easterly 
direction in which they first join the Barrier. Hodgson and I fol- 
lowed up and roughly chartered one of this group of waves in our 
journey in 1903 when we were examining the tide crack along the 
south side of Ross Island. They are very long and definite dis- 
turbances, and in our march were taken so diagonally that they 
seemed much longer. The difference of surface was quite notice- 
able, harder on the ridge summits and softer in the hollows. We 
have never met with anything like a crevasse on them. 
Friday, June 30, 1911.—The surface to-day proved too heavy 
for us—we were unable to drag both sledges together, so we re- 
