6 SCOTT'S 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- 



