The Ascent of Mount Erebus
snow. This difficulty surmounted, we made the acquaintence of some obstructive ‘sastrugi’, which impeded our progress not a little. Occasionally we came to blows, but these were dealt accidentally by a long armed finneskoe-shod cramponless sledger, who whirled his arms like a windmill in his desperate efforts to keep his balance after slipping. On such occasions the silence of our march was broken by a few words, more crisp than courteous, from the smitten one, and then once more nothing was to be heard but the soft pad of the finneskoes, the scrunch of the ski-boots, and the gentle sawing sound of the sledge-runners on the hard snow.
Soon after six p. m. we reached a small nunatak of black rock, 2,750 feet above sea level, and about seven miles distant from our winter quarters, and decided to camp there for the night. Our little green tents were quickly set up on their bamboo poles, and their skirts were speedily loaded with snow shovelled on them in place of pegs, to hold them down against the wind. The two primus lamps were soon singing merrily, snow was melted down, and in a few minutes we were each furnished, for the first time in our lives, with brimming bowls of hot ‘hoosh’, that is, pemmican boiled up with snow water, with chips of plasmon bis-
