THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



oozed through not only the canvas of the bags them- 

 selves, but also through the thick brown canvas of the 

 large fortnightly food-bags, which formed a sort 

 of tank for containing the pemmican bags, and we found 

 it necessary at once to shade the food-bags from the sun 

 by piling our Burberry garments over them. Leather 

 straps, tar rope, tins, sledge harness, lamp-black off the 

 blubber cooker, warmed by the rays of the sun, all 

 commenced to sink themselves more or less rapidly into 

 the neve. 



We unpacked and examined both sledges, and 

 found that of the two, the runners of the Duff sledge 

 were the less damaged. As the result of the rough 

 treatment to which it had recently been subjected, one 

 of the iron brackets of this sledge was broken, but we 

 replaced it with a sound one from the discarded Christmas 

 Tree sledge. 



The following day, December 14, we were still busy 

 preparing for the great trek on the morrow. Mackay 

 was busy cooking Emperor penguin and seal meat for 

 the plateau journey; Mawson was employed in trans- 

 ferring the scientific instrument boxes and the Venesta 

 boxes in which our Primus lamp and other light gear 

 were packed from the Christmas Tree sledge on to the 

 Duff sledge. He also scraped the runners of the sledge 

 with pieces of broken glass in order to make their 

 surfaces as smooth as possible. I was busy fixing up 

 depot flags, writing letters to the Commander of the 

 Nimrodj, Lieutenant Shackleton, and my family, and 

 fixing up a milk tin to serve as a post office on to the 

 depot flag-pole. When all our preparations were 

 completed we drew the Christmas Tree sledge with 

 some of our spare clothing, our blubber cooker, a biscuit 

 tin with a few broken biscuits, and all our geological 

 specimens to the top of the ice mound, about a quarter 



150 



