AURORA AUSTRALIS.
spot where there was a practicable breach in the crater wall, and where a narrow tongue of snow bridged the névé trench at its base. As soon as we arrived on the hard snow on the far side, Mackay joined us all up with the alpine rope, and with him in the lead we advanced cautiously over the snow plain, keeping a sharp lookout for crevasses. We steered for one of the remarkable mounds which had so interested us at a distance; when we reached the nearest of them, and cursorily examined it, we were as far as ever from understanding how it had formed: we noticed some curious hollows, like large drains partly roofed in, running towards the mound, and at the time we supposed these to be ordinary crevasses. Pushing on slowly we reached eventually a small parasitic cone, about 1,000 feet above the level of our camp, and over a mile distant.
Here peeped from under the snow brown masses of earthy looking material, which we found to consist of lumps of lava, large felspar crystals, from one to three inches in length, and fragments of pumice; both felspar and pumice were, in many cases, coated with sulphur. We now started to return to our camp; we were no longer roped together, as we had not met with any definite crevasses on our way up. We directed our steps towards one of the ice mounds, which
