Pl OUR MENU 163 
for in our eagerness we had done a two-mile stage. The 
weather looked thick to south’ard and there was a threatening 
tablecloth on Erebus. We hauled the sledges over some wide 
tide cracks and bumpy ice and put up the tent in a little alcove. 
Here there was not room to spread the poles properly, so the 
tent flapped under the blizzard. We were safe however on fixed 
ice for the first time for days, even if it was only a yard or 
so wide! 
On leaving View Point we proceeded due west up the south 
side of Granite Harbour. We saw ahead of us an ice tongue 
projecting into the bay ice. We had to cross a nasty tide crack 
quite twenty feet wide, but luckily only a foot or two in the 
middle was of pulpy ice. Very heavy clouds rolled up from 
the south and it started to snow, so I decided to camp in the lee 
of the tongue. We made a good pitch on the ice with splendid 
snow blocks for the carving from a big drift alongside. 
Dates and meals were rather hard to adjust at this time. 
Midnight would be in the middle of a march, and supper would 
be celebrated at 8 a.M. However, as night marching was no 
good for surveying, I decided to go back to day work now we 
were inside the Harbour. An opportune blizzard kept us to the 
tent long enough to enable us to straighten out the calendar! 
It continued to snow. We cut out breakfast and kept com- 
fortably to our bags all morning. We had lunch normally at 
1.30. Our last meal had been a lunch (at midnight) and Gran 
caused some amusement by demanding the chocolate for the 
missed meal. During this blizzard I was cook, and trying to 
increase my culinary skill I wrote down full notes of our menu. 
_ Breakfast—Pemmican (looking like lumps of block choco- 
Id#te) is put into the aluminium cup to full measure. Meanwhile 
enough snow or ice has been melted in the cooker to cover the 
bowl of a spoon. The pemmican is added to this. Some water 
is taken out in another cup and the ‘thickers’ stirred up in it. 
The latter consists of three spoonsful of wheat meal or peaflour, 
with salt and pepper to taste. Debenham had a happy knack 
with the ‘ thickers’ which made the hoosh slip down in a most 
comforting and glutinous way. I tried boiling hard and mixing 
soft and vice versa, but finally discovered that the art consisted 
in dropping the ‘thickers’ in just as the hoosh boiled and 
pouring it out ‘good and quick.’ About twenty minutes over 
