THE GRANITE HARBOUR EXPEDITION 371 



flensing I managed to inflict eight cuts on my hands, all of 

 which healed up in the pure Polar air, with one exception. It 

 was on the forefinger of my right hand, and was beginning to 

 fester badly. Gran was our self-constituted doctor, though 

 I'm bound to say that the stories he told of deathbeds which 

 he had attended on Norwegian ships were not at all reassuring. 

 Gravely he felt my pulse and armpit, and then said, " Do you 

 feel pain here ? " I truthfully said " No ! " « No blood- 

 poisoning in that finger," said he. At any rate it rapidly 

 became worse, and for days I could not write, sketch, 

 or photograph, while the pain prevented my sleeping at night. 



The first duty before us was to replace the flag on the 

 rendezvous. Gran decided it should be of a bolder pattern, 

 and so he inserted a white specimen bag in the middle of a 

 black dep6t flag, which made a very showy standard indeed. 



After lunch we marched across the bay just east of our 

 camp. This washed the beach where the moss grew, and in 

 our exiled position it was natural that Debenham and myself 

 felt that there could be no better name than Botany Bay for 

 this inlet ! The ice surface was in a peculiarly unpleasant 

 condition. A frozen layer of snow over a foot of soft snow 

 made walking exceptionally tiring. Flanking the Discovery 

 Bluff — as we called our rendezvous — was a tumbled scree of 

 granite blocks mingled with smaller talus and snow. Here, 

 moreover, numerous little rivulets were rushing down the 

 chimneys scored in the face of the bluff, so that there was 

 plenty of variety about our walk. 



We reached our flag sooner than I expected ; in fact, we 

 climbed up right above it to nine hundred feet ; and had to 

 get down somewhat circuitously, when a hurtling granite 

 block warned us of precipitous cliffs directly beneath. I 

 found that our bamboo was as firm fixed as ever, but it had 

 snapped through like matchwood just at the surface. The 

 wind seemed to have blown down the face of the Bluff, which 

 was a most unexpected direction. We mounted it again, 

 after hacking off four feet waste at the bottom. This 

 fragment was to prove very useful to us, for I carried it back 

 to camp. 



From this height we could still see nothing but solid ice. 

 By means of the formula — 



Distance in miles = \/ Height in feet 



