Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/296

'snout' of the glacier just below us. The slope became too steep for the sledge and at six o'clock we halted to try and find a site for our camp.

Beyond the snout was a wide, bare stony trough, extending many miles to the east. The lower slopes were strewn with reddish granite boulders. Here and there on the upper slopes piles of intensely black fragments—for all the world like coal dumps—marked recent lava flows.

Between the serrated crests of the giant cliffs towering five or six thousand feet above us were cascading rivers of ice. These hanging glaciers spread out in great white lobes over the lower slopes of dark rock, and in some cases the cliffs were so steep that the lower portion of the tributary glacier was fed purely by avalanches falling from the ice fields up above. And, most amazing of all, not a snowdrift in sight. It was warm weather most of the time we spent in Dry Valley—rising sometimes above freezing-point—and everywhere streams were tinkling among the black boulders, so much so that this valley, in spite of its name, was certainly the wettest area I saw in Antarctica!

About a mile back from the end of the glacier we made a permanent camp. We could drag the sledge no further, and I recognised that 'packing' on our backs was the only way to map this snowless region.

Bare ice surrounded us, forty-foot ice cliffs and a wide 'glacier moat' separated us from the steep rock slopes. Nowhere could we find a place to stand easily—while it was impossible to pitch the tent. However, the centre of the glacier was cut up by surface streams into deep gullies whose sunny southern sides were cut into a series of