Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/39

but always starting from below the Barrier horizon. We never saw any that appeared close at hand.

The temp. remained at −50° all day, and Cherry and I both felt the cold of the snow very much in our feet on the march, he getting his big toes blistered by frostbite, and I my heel and the sole of my foot. A good many of Cherry's finger-tips also went last night at the edge of the Barrier and are bulbous to-day; but he takes them as a matter of course and says nothing, and he never once allowed them to interfere with his usefulness.

The surface to-day was firm, generally; hard and windswept in some places, and soft and sandy in others. The sledges to-day went heaviest on the harder areas for some reason, which was quite exceptional. I think there was a fixed deposit of gritty crystals on the apparently smooth surface. Always after this it was the soft sandy drifts which held us up more than anything else.

We made two or three long sloping gradients to-day in our march going eastward. These also we confirmed on our return journey, when we recrossed three long low waves on about the same line, and I believe them to be the continuation of a series of extensive waves which run out from the point at which the glacier flow from Mt. Terra Nova runs into the Barrier. These waves curve gradually south-westward from the south-easterly direction in which they first join the Barrier. Hodgson and I followed up and roughly charted one of this group of waves in our journey in 1903 when we were examining the tide crack along the south side of Ross Island. They are very long and definite disturbances, and in our march