THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



it. Mawson's cooking experiments continued to be highly 

 successful and entirely satisfactory to the party. 



We waited for the falling snow to clear sufficiently 

 to enable us to see a short distance ahead, and then 

 started again, the blizzard still blowing with a little 

 low drift. After doing a stage of pulling on both 

 sledges to keep ourselves warm in the blizzard we set 

 sail — always a chilly business — and the wind was a 

 distinct assistance to us. We encountered a good deal 

 of brash ice that day, and noticed that this type of ice 

 surface was most common in the vicinity of icebergs, 

 which just here were very numerous. The brash ice 

 is probably formed by the icebergs surging to and fro 

 in heavy weather like a lot of gigantic Yermaks, and 

 crunching up the sea ice in their vicinity. The latter, 

 of course, re-freezes, producing a surface covered with 

 jagged edges and points. 



We were now reduced to one plasmon biscuit each 

 for breakfast and one for the evening meal, and we were 

 unanimous in the opinion that we had never before 

 fully realised how very nice these plasmon biscuits 

 were. We became exceedingly careful even over the 

 crumbs. As some biscuits were thicker than others, 

 the cook for the week would select three biscuits, place 

 them on the outer cover of our aluminium cooker, and 

 get one of his mates to look in an opposite direction while 

 the messman pointed to a biscuit and said, " Whose? " 

 The mate with averted face, or shut eyes, would then 

 state the owner, and the biscuit was ear-marked for 

 him, and so with the other two biscuits. Grievous 

 was the disappointment of the man to whose lot the 

 thinnest of the three biscuits had fallen. Originally, 

 on this sledge journey, when biscuits were more 

 plentiful, we used to eat them regardless of the loss of 

 crumbs, munching them boldly, with the result that 



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