black and brown foothills. A few islands rose to heights of 300 or 400
feet in McMurdo Sound, and these had no snow on them worth speaking of
even in the winter. The visible land was of black or chocolate-brown,
being composed of volcanic tuff, basalts, and granite. There were
occasional patches of ruddy brown and yellow which relieved the general
black and white appearance of this uninhabitable land, and close to the
shore on the north side of Cape Evans were small patches of even gritty
sand. In the neighbourhood of our Cape hard, brittle rocks cropped up
everywhere, rocks that played havoc with one's boots. Sloping up fairly
steeply from Cape Evans itself we had more and more rock masses until a
kind of rampart was reached, on which one could see a number of
extraordinary conical piles of rock, which looked much as if they had
been constructed by human hands for landmarks or surveying beacons--these
were called debris cones. This part above and behind Cape Evans was
christened The Ramp, and from it one merely had to step from boulders and
stones on to the smooth blue ice-slope that extended almost without
interruption to the summit of Erebus itself. From The Ramp one could gaze
in wonder at that magnificent volcano, White Lady of the Antarctic,
beautiful in her glistening gown of sparkling crystal with a stole of
filmy smoke-cloud wrapped about her wonderful shoulders.

We used to gaze and gaze at that constantly changing smoke or steam which
the White Lady breathes out at all seasons, and has done for thousands of
years.

Those were such happy days during the first Cape Evans summer. For the
most part we had hot weather and could wash in the thaw pools which
formed from the melting snow, and even draw our drinking water from the
cascades which bubbled over the sun-baked rock, much as they do in
summer-time in Norway.