114 BIRD LIFE ON ISLAND AND SHORE 
blue sky, dull, cloudy, overcast, foggy. The sky 
was even for periods cloudless. The rainfall was 
small; on comparison it proved to have been 
considerably less than that of Port Pegasus, 
where I had left a rain-gauge. That there may 
be a dry belt south and east of Stewart Island 
is borne out also by the reports of friends camped 
from time to time on the Snares, on several 
occasions the weather there having proved rela- 
tively dry, whilst heavy rains had fallen on the 
mainland of Stewart Island. None of the islands 
immediately south of Stewart Island rise to 
any height above sea-level; they are conse- 
quently unswept by clouds that retain their 
moisture till reaching higher lands. After previ- 
ous experience of weather south of Foveaux 
Strait, water was an article about which I had not 
troubled, yet had it not been for half a dozen 
tins supplied by a chance fishing-boat we should 
have been seriously inconvenienced; instead of 
the anticipated brimful barrel, we had water 
enough only for our simple cookery, barely enough 
to rinse properly the photographic plates, and 
almost none at all for washing ourselves. There 
was but one abbreviated peat burn, oozing from 
slopes honeycombed by Petrel burrows and run- 
ning a shallow course of forty or fifty yards over 
rocks washed bare by winter seas. Its dark 
stagnant pools, reminiscent of midden overflow- 
