The Mammoth Book of Polar Journeys by Jon E. Lewis

Author:Jon E. Lewis [Lewis, Jon E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Expeditions & Discoveries
ISBN: 9781780332741
Google: vsTABAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-08-04T23:31:29.500184+00:00

27 November

Started at 8 a.m., the ponies pulling well over a bad surface of very soft snow. The weather is fine and clear save for a strong mirage, which throws all the land up much higher than it really is. All day we have seen new mountains arise, and it is causing us some anxiety to note that they trend more and more to the eastward, for that means an alteration of our course from nearly due south. Still they are a long way off, and when we get up to them we may find some strait that will enable us to go right through them and on south. One speculates greatly as we march along, but patience is what is needed. I think that the ponies are feeling the day in, day out drudgery of pulling on this plain. Poor beasts, they cannot understand, of course, what it is all for, and the wonder of the great mountains is nought to them, though one notices them at times looking at the distant land. At lunch time I took a photograph of our camp, with Mount Longstaff in the background. We had our sledge flags up to celebrate the breaking of the southern record. The long snow cape marked on the chart as being attached to Mount Longstaff is not really so. It is attached to a lower bluff mountain to the north of Mount Long-staff. The most northerly peak of Mount Longstaff goes sheer down into the Barrier, and all along this range of mountains are very steep glaciers, greatly crevassed. As we pass along the mountains the capes disappear, but there are several well marked ones of which we have taken angles. Still more mountains appeared above the horizon during the afternoon, and when we camped tonight some were quite clearly defined, many, many miles away. The temperature has been up to plus 22°F today, and we took the opportunity of drying our sleeping bags, which we turned inside out and laid on the sledges. Tonight the temperature is plus 13°F. We find that raw frozen pony meat cools one on the march, and during the ten minutes’ spell after an hour’s march we all cut up meat for lunch or dinner; in the hot sun it thaws well. This fresh meat ought to keep away scurvy from us. Quan seems much better today, but Grisi does not appear fit at all. He seems to be snow blind. Our distance today was 16 miles 1200 yards.

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