40 
IT. T. FERRAR 
journey. A second attempt had to lie made, owing to the sledges breaking down 
on the first, and, even then, bad weather confined the parties to their tents for a 
period of six and a half days ; when the weather had moderated I had but one month 
in which to examine the 600 square miles of new country. 
From what we had seen on the way out, plateau-dolerite would be found 
overlying the Beacon Sandstone. The latter was not exposed at Depot Nunatak, 
but in the moraine at the foot of the rock I found abundant sandstone blocks, and 
the majority of these were locally blackened by carbonaceous matter (743, 744). 
None of these blocks contained fossils, other than the small lenticles of carbonaceous 
material which I thought suggestive of organic origin. These were our first 
evidences of Antarctic life in the geological past, and as my companions, Kennar 
(P. 0.) and Weller (A. B.) spread out our sodden gear in the sun under the lee of 
the nunatak, hopes indeed ran 
high, and all looked forward 
O f 
to the joy of further new dis- 
coveries. 
Next day therefore found 
the camp near the foot of the 
hill B 1( where three hundred 
feet or so of the sandstone 
could be seen cropping out 
below the overlying dolerite. 
Imagine my delight when, 
arriving with bag and hammer 
at the rock-face, I found thin, 
black, irregular bands in a 
pure white sandstone. Though 
the bands were two hundred 
feet below the capping dolerite, 
their carbonaceous material was much charred ; hence, after collecting a few specimens, 
we left this promising locality, perhaps prematurely, and moved diagonally down 
the valley to the vast exposures of the Inland Forts. II etc I had hoped to find 
better specimens, but neither here nor elsewhere did we meet with anything 
nearly so good as at our first locality near the dolerite-j unction. The sandstone 
of these Inland Forts is quite 2000 feet thick, and, though we carefully sought 
for its base, no indications of that base or of the relations to the underlying rocks 
could be found. 
The Beacon Sandstone is also present at the foot of Knob Head Mountain, which 
is over 30 miles to the east of Depot Nunatak and about 3000 feet lower. The 
localities at which the Beacon Sandstone was examined* will therefore be considered 
in turn, in the order in which we came to them. 
