1911] ANOTHER BLIZZARD 17a 
have not got away. It dripped most of the night for the tem- 
perature was + 27° outside and warmer inside. There was 
a puddle by the door, but Gran’s and my bags have absorbed 
most of that, and Debenham’s is wetter. I put on my boots, 
wind coat, and puttees and dug out the thermometer. The 
sledge is buried two feet under snow. Debenham’s big camera 
tripod shows above the snow and a bamboo pole—also the top 
of the shovel—but the rest is clean buried. . . . Then I came 
in and had breakfast.’ 
We had lunch about 2 and now saw blue sky occasionally 
to the east. Gradually the whole snow cloud blew over en 
masse to the west, leaving blue sky and a bright sun. We dug 
out the sledge, nothing of which showed, and tried to start off. 
We harnessed up alternately so as to beat out a track in the 
soft snow. The going was awful and the sledge pulled us flat 
on our faces in the snow—of course wetting us through. How- 
ever we managed to do about a mile in 3 hours and pitched camp 
in the middle of North Bay. 
This blizzard is evidently the same which delayed Captain 
Scott at the foot of the Beardmore, more than 800 miles south 
of where it trapped us. 
On the 8th we had an eventful day. We were about two 
miles from the coast, the nearest land being the flat glacier-cut 
shelf which we named the Kar Plateau. ‘We loaded up the 
sledge and found we couldn’t move it. It just stuck with the 
prow covered with soft snow. So we stuck up the flag-pole and 
‘packed ” all we could carry on our backs. Gran went first with 
his very heavy bag (half water) and the tent poles. He plugged 
away in great style, but made rather a devious track as different 
parts of the coast appealed to him. By the time we arrived 
near the land Gran was manceuvring with the tent poles to try 
and cross the tide-crack. ‘This was a rotten affair. An ice foot 
2 feet or more high, separated from us by a couple of feet of 
open water, was bad enough—but nearly forty feet of the floe 
was soft and mushy, so that through the thick snow you could 
not tell which was hard ice and which open water. There were 
seals all over this mushy stuff and we came unexpectedly on their 
holes nearly buried in snow. Debenham and Forde were look- 
ing down one to see the thickness of the mushy ice, when a seal 
leaped out three feet, and as Forde pathetically put it “ nearly 
