i9n] THE VALLEY OF THE BEARDMORE 505 
the sun gets a good hold on them. There must be a good 
deal of melting and rock weathering, the talus heaps are 
considerable under the southern rock faces. Higher up 
the valley there is much more bare rock and stratification, 
which promises to be very interesting, but oli ! for fine 
weather ; surely we have had enough of this oppressive 
gloom. 
Saturday, December 16. — Camp 38. A gloomy morning, 
clearing at noon and ending in a gloriously fine evening. 
Although constantly anxious in the morning, the light held 
good for travelling throughout the day, and we have 
covered 1 1 miles (stat.), altering the aspect of the glacier 
greatly. But the travelling has been very hard. We 
started at 7, lunched at 12.15, anc * marched on till 6.30 — 
over ten hours on the march — the limit of time to be 
squeezed into one day. We began on ski as usual, Evans' 
team hampering us a bit ; the pulling very hard after 
yesterday's snowfall. In the afternoon we continued on 
ski till after two hours we struck a peculiarly difficult 
surface — old hard sastrugi underneath, with pits and high 
soft sastrugi due to very recent snowfalls. The sledges 
were so often brought up by this that we decided to take 
to our feet, and thus made better progress, but for the 
time with very excessive labour. The crust, brittle, held 
for a pace or two, then let one down with a bump some 
8 or 10 inches. Now and again one's leg went down a 
crack in the hard ice underneath. We drew up a slope 
on this surface and discovered a long iccfall extending 
right across our track, I presume the same pressure which 
caused Shacklcton to turn towards the Cloudmakcr. We 
