PROFESSOR DAVID'S NARRATIVE {Continued) 



October 16 we were up at 3.30 a.m., and got under 

 way at 5.30. A cold wind was blowing from the 

 south, and after some trouble we set sail on both 

 sledges, using the green floorcloth on the Christmas 

 Tree sledge, and Mackay's sail on the Plum Dufi" sledge. 

 A short time after we set sail it fell nearly calm; thick 

 clouds gathered; a light wind sprang up from the 

 south-east, veering to east-north-east, then back again 

 to south-east in the afternoon. Fine snow fell for about 

 three hours, forming a layer nearly a quarter of an inch in 

 thickness. Towards evening we reached one of the bergs 

 that had been miraged up the night before. It was 

 four hundred yards long, and eighty yards wide, and 

 was a true iceberg formed of glacier ice; Mackay, 

 Mawson and I explored this. Like the previous ice- 

 berg its surface was pitted with numerous deep dust 

 wells. It was wonderful to see what a very small 

 amount of dust sufficed to dig these wells to a depth 

 of several feet. The cliff of the berg which faced 

 towards the north-west was deeply grooved, the appear- 

 ance in the distance reminding one of a number of 

 large parallel stalactites. Climbing up one of these 

 deep grooves I found numbers of small angular rock 

 pebbles, up to one and a half inches in diameter, adher- 

 ing to the bottom of the groove, and it seemed as though 

 these grooves, like the dust wells, were formed by the 

 warmth of these small fragments of rock which, as the 

 process of thawing of the ice cliff progressed, gradually 



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