

FIRST WESTERN EXPEDITION 115 



surface. This would show the relative age of the two rocks 

 concerned (the lava, of course, being younger), and so was 

 well worth investigating. We found the outcrop readily 

 enough from Captain Scott's sketch, but Debenham and I 

 decided that it was a weathered variety of eruptive rock, and 

 not of sedimentary origin. 



Two other appearances were noticeable here, which were 

 worth recording because we saw them later in various other 

 quarters of Victoria Land. We could not account for them 

 from our first example. On the steep face of the cliff (five 

 hundred feet high) near where poor Vince slipped to his doom, 

 were four long horizontal ridges — one above the other — of 

 dark masses of rock. They resembled lateral moraines left by 

 giant glaciers, but I believe they are due to debris rolling down 

 to the foot of a snow-slope. The latter varies in extent with 

 varying seasons, and so the debris ridge may be deposited at 

 another level. 



Another very curious feature soon attracted our notice. 

 All the more or less level lowland around Cape Armitage, as 

 well as the bare plateau of Crater Heights, was marked out 

 like a gigantic tesselated pavement. I noted in my journal, 

 " The lowlands of loose black rock appear to be rolled by a 

 steam roller, while the surface is broken by gutters from four 

 to eight inches deep." These gutters marked out hexagonal 

 and polygonal areas some twenty or thirty feet across. When 

 a light snowfall had collected in the gutters, the valleys seemed 

 to have been paved with black tiles united by white mortar. 



These symmetrical polygons are due to a slow movement 

 of half-frozen soil, which has been noted in polar lands, and 

 is called solifluxion or soil-creep. We saw many examples 

 of these tesselations in the western moraines. 



We walked back to the camp on the sea-ice, pulling the 

 asbestos sheets on the sledge. There was some cold tea to 

 spare in Nelson's tent, and we were glad to make our meal 

 off this and some biscuits. Then, pillowing my head on a 

 camera, I coiled into my sleeping-bag, and so spent my first 

 night on trek. 



On the next morning we were told that we could ride 

 back to the ship on the dog-sledges. Nothing loth, we tied 

 our sledge behind Meares', and soon covered the eight miles. 



The dogs pulled rapidly, but seemed to need frequent 



