surveyor as coast-lining. This meant walking along the edge of the sea
ice, fixing one's position by sextant angle every five hundred yards or
so, and sketching in a notebook the character and features of the ever
changing coast between the various "fixes." One could keep warm doing
this and one saw more of the land and ice formation than the others, for
it meant following carefully round-cape and glacier edge, penetrating
inlets and delineating every islet, promontory, cliff, and talus.

In spite of the cold, the gloom, and the sad whistling wind that heralded
the now fast approaching darkness, I felt glad to work with my sextant
and sketch-book under the shadow of those fantastic ice-foots hung round
with fringes of icicle. I loved to go with Gran into the deep bays and
walk for miles under the overhanging of the vast ice cliffs all purple in
the reflection of the early winter noon, and to come out sometimes as we
did on to the sea ice clear of a jutting glacier, to face suddenly
northward over the frozen sea where nothing but a great waste of ice
stretched away to meet the horizon and the rosy, copper glow of the
departed sun's rays. Some of the cloud effects at the end of April were
too wonderful for mere pen or brush to describe. To appreciate them one
must go there and see them, those wonderful half-light tints.

Then there were the ice caves and grottos which were formed in the
grounded icebergs that had overturned before we came, and the still more
wonderful caves in the ice-sheet where it over-rode Ross Island and
formed a cliff-face between Cape Evans and Glacier Tongue,
extraordinarily like the white chalk cliffs of Studland Bay I found them,
with here and there outstanding pinnacles which a little imagination
would liken to Old Harry Rocks when the gray light was on them.

At the most we could only take sextant and theodolite angles for two