THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



had about seven miles of easy going after we had 

 passed one ridge in this area, and then another ridge 

 would rise up ahead of us, and we would start to 

 climb again. There were always crevasses at the top of 

 the ridges, suggesting that the ice was moving over land 

 at no great depth. 



We passed the last ridge at last, and reached the 

 actual plateau, but instead of hard neve, such as the 

 Discovery expedition had encountered in the journey 

 to the plateau beyond the mountains west of McMurdo 

 Sound, we found soft snow and hard sastrugi. All 

 the sastrugi pointed to the south, and the wind blew 

 strongly nearly all the time from the south or south- 

 east, with an occasional change to the south-west. 

 Sometimes we marched on hard sastrugi, and at other 

 times we had soft snow under our feet, but could 

 feel the sastrugi on which the snow was lying. I 

 formed the opinion that during the winter on the 

 plateau the wind must blow with terrible violence from 

 the south, and that the hard sastrugi are produced 

 then. Still further south we kept breaking through 

 a hard crust that underlay the soft surface snow, and 

 we then sank in about eight inches. This surface, 

 which made the marching heavy, continued to the 

 point at which we planted the flag. After the long 

 blizzard, from the night of January 6 until the morning 

 of January 9, we had a better surface over which to make 

 our final march southwards, for the wind had swept the 

 soft snow away and produced a fairly hard surface, 

 over which, unencumbered with a sledge as we were, 

 we could advance easily. 



We found the surface generally to be improved 

 on the march back. The blizzard winds had removed 

 the soft surface snow, and incidentally uncovered many 

 of the crevasses. We were following our outward 



18 



