ANOTHER BLIZZARD 171 



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 manoeuvring 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 



