THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



and haul the sledges after us with the Alpine rope. 

 When we had gone up about sixty feet, the length of 

 the rope, we would haul up the sledge to which we had 

 attached the lower end, and jamb it so that it could not 

 slide back. Then one of us would slide down in order to 

 fix the rope to the other sledge. 



One of the curious features of the glacier was a 

 yellow line, evidently an old moraine, extending for 

 thirty or forty miles. The rocks of the moraine had 

 gradually sunk in out of sight, the radiation of the 

 sun's heat from them causing the ice to melt and let 

 them through, and there had remained enough silt and 

 dust to give the ice a dirty yellow appearance. The 

 travelling along this old moraine was not so bad, but on 

 either side of it there was a mass of pressure ice, 

 caused by the constriction of the glacier between the 

 mountains to the east and west. Unfortunately we 

 brought back no photographs of this portion of the 

 glacier. The number of plates at our disposal was 

 limited, and on the outward march we decided not to 

 take many photographs in case we found interesting 

 land or mountains in the far south nearer the Pole. We 

 thought that we would be able to secure as many 

 photographs of the glacier as we wanted on the way 

 back if we had the plates to spare, but as a matter of 

 fact when we did get on to the glacier a second time 

 we were so short of food that we could not afford the 

 time to unpack the camera, which had to be stowed 

 away carefully on the sledge in order to avoid damage 

 to it. 



Many nights on the glacier there was no snow on 

 which to pitch the tents, and we had to spend perhaps 

 an hour smoothing out a space on a rippled, sharp- 

 pointed sea of ice. The provision bags and sledges 

 had to be packed on the snow cloths round the tents, 



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