THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



brightly polished in places. As it was still blowing we 

 remained in our sleeping-bag for the rest of that day 

 as well as the succeeding night. 



When we rose at about 2 a.m. on Monday, October 

 12, the blizzard was over. We found very heavy snow- 

 drifts on the lee side of our sledges, and it took us a 

 considerable time to dig these away and get the hard 

 snow raked out of all the chinks and crannies among 

 the packages on the sledges. We made a start about 

 4 A.M., and all that day meandered amongst broken 

 pack-ice. It was evident that the south-east blizzards 

 drive large belts of broken floe-ice in this direction across 

 McMurdo Sound to the western shore. The fractured 

 masses of sea ice, inclined at all angles to the horizontal, 

 are frozen in later, as the cold of winter becomes more 

 intense, and of course, constitute a very difficult surface 

 for sledging. 



In order to make up for the time we had lost in our 

 sleeping-bags during the blizzard, we travelled altogether 

 fourteen hours, and succeeded in doing about six 

 statute miles, that is, eighteen miles of relay work, and 

 all felt much exhausted when we turned in that evening. 

 As a result of this we did not wake until after 8 a.m 

 next morning. 



We were now only about two miles from Butter 

 Point. We got under way at 10 a.m., and a few hours 

 later camped at the foot of a low ice cliff, about 600 yards 

 south-south-east of Butter Point. Butter Point is 

 merely an angle in this low ice cliff near the junction of 

 the Ferrar Glacier valley with the main shore of Victoria 

 Land. This cliff was from fifteen to twenty feet in 

 height, and formed of crevassed glacier ice. It was 

 covered by a hard snow crust, which every now and 

 then gave away and let one down for a foot or so. This 

 glacier ice was not part of the main Ferrar Glacier, but 



88 



