THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



cotta tint, and were evidently built up of a continuation 

 of the gneissic rocks and red granites which we had 

 previously seen. Above these crystalline rocks came a 

 belt of greenish-grey rock, apparently belonging to some 

 stratified formation and possibly many hundreds of 

 feet in thickness; the latter was capped with a black 

 rock that seemed to be either a basic plateau lava, or 

 a huge sill. In the direction of the glacier valleys, the 

 plateau was broken up into a vast number of conical 

 hills of various shapes and heights, all showing evidence of 

 intense glacial action in the past. The hills were here 

 separated from the coast-line by a continuous belt of 

 piedmont glacier ice. This last terminated where it 

 joined the sea ice in a steep slope, or low cliff, and in 

 places was very much crevassed. Mawson at our noon 

 halts for lunch, continued taking the angles of all these 

 ranges and valleys with our theodolite. 



The temperature was now rising, being as high as 

 22° Fahr. at noon on November 5. We had a very heavy 

 sledging surface that day, there being much consolidated 

 brash ice, sastrugi, pie-crust snow, and numerous 

 cracks in the sea ice. As an offset to these troubles we 

 had that night, for the first time, the use of our new 

 frying-pan, constructed by Mawson out of one of our 

 empty paraffin tins. This tin had been cut in half 

 down the middle parallel to its broad surfaces, and 

 loops of iron wire being added, it was possible to sus- 

 pend it inside the empty biscuit tin above the wicks of 

 our blubber lamp. We found that in this frying-pan 

 we could rapidly render down the seal blubber into 

 oil, and as soon as the oil boiled we dropped into the 

 pan small slices of seal liver or seal meat. The liver 

 took about ten minutes to cook in the boiling oil, the seal 

 meat about twenty minutes. These facts were ascer- 

 tained by the empirical method. Mawson discovered 



114 



