We still considered the question of sledging, and I decided that if there were the slightest prospect of accomplishing anything, several of us would start before the end of July on a short journey. The month, however, closed with nothing to commend it. The night-watchman for July 29 says:
"The moon was wonderfully bright to-night, encircled by a complete halo. It appeared to hang suspended like a silver globe in the dark blue sky. The stars flash and sparkle and seem much nearer here than in Australia. At midnight the wind blew at ninety miles per hour, so that it was no easy job getting to the screen in slippery finnesko. Away in the north there was a dense cloud of spray and sea-smoke, and the wind screamed past the Hut. The 'St. Elmoscope' was buzzing merrily in the roof all the time."
Ninnis and Mertz with a team of dogs managed, on the morning of the 29th, to get several loads of forty pounds over the first steep rise of the glacier to Webb's magnetic ice-cave against a "blow" of seventy miles per hour.
August 1 was marked by a hurricane, and the celebration in the evening of Swiss Confederation Day. Mertz was the hero of the occasion as well as cook and master of ceremonies. From a mysterious box he produced all kinds of quaint conserves, and the menu soared to unknown delicacies like "Potage a la Suisse, Choucroute garnie aux saucission de Berne, Puree de foie gras trufee, and Leckerley de Bale." Hanging above the buoyant assembly were the Cross of Helvetia and the Jack of Britannia.
It was not till August 8 that there was any indication of improvement. The sun was bright, the barometer was steady, the wind fell to forty miles an hour and a fine radiant of cirrus cloud spread out fan-like from the north; the first from that direction for months.
On the afternoon of August 9, Ninnis, Madigan and I set off with a team of dogs against a forty-mile wind in an attempt to push to the south. Darkness was coming on when we sighted a bamboo pole, three and a quarter miles south of the Hut, and camped. The dogs pulled well up the steep slopes, but the feet of several were cut by the sharp edges of the wind-worn ice.
Very heavy gusts swept by in the early morning hours of the 10th. and when the time came to get out of our sleeping-bags it fell calm for a short space. We had taken down the tent and had started to move away, when back rushed the wind, strong and steady. Still we pushed on with our willing team and by a piece of good fortune reached the sledge which had been abandoned in the autumn, five and a half miles from the Hut, and of whose fate in the winter's hurricanes we had made all kind of conjectures.
On its leeward side there was a ramp of very hard snow slanting down from the top of the sledge. To windward the low pedestal of ice on which the runners stood was hollowed out, and the wood of the rails and cross-bars, the leather straps, tent, floor-cloth and canvas food-tanks were all bleached and worn. The aluminium cooker, strapped on its box, was brightly polished on the weather side by the dry, drifting snow impelled by the furious winds. A thermograph, left behind in the autumn, was found to be intact and indicated a temperature of -35 degrees F.—the lowest for the eight days during which it had run. The remains of Madigan's plum-pudding of the autumn were unearthed and found in splendid condition. That evening it was thawed out over the primus and we demolished it, after a pause of over five months since having the first cut.
At this spot the steepest grades of the ascent to the plateau were left behind, and it appeared to be a strategic point from which to extend our sledging efforts. The main difficulty was that of pitching camp in the prevailing winds on a surface of ice. To obviate this, the only expedient was to excavate a shelter beneath the ice itself; and there was the further consideration that all sledging parties would be able to make use of such a haven and save extra wear on their tents.
On the morning of August 11 Madigan and Ninnis commenced to sink a deep vertical trench, at one end of which a room was hewn out large enough to accommodate three men. The job was finished on the following day, and we struck the tent and moved to our new abode. The tent was spread over the vertical shaft which served as the entrance.