and friendship for him, sometimes
perhaps tinged with respect. However, there are no signs of dangerous
eruptive disturbances in modern times, and we feel pretty safe, despite
the fact that the smoke which issues from his crater sometimes rises in
dense clouds for many thousands of feet, and at others the trail of his
plume can be measured for at least a hundred miles.

If you are not too cold standing about (it does not pay to stand about at
Cape Evans) let us make our way behind the hut and up Wind Vane Hill.
This is only some sixty-five feet high, yet it dominates the rest of the
cape and is steep enough to require a scramble, even now when the wind is
calm. Look out that you do not step on the electric wires which connect
the wind-vane cups on the hill with the recording dial in the hut. These
cups revolve in the wind, the revolutions being registered electrically:
every four miles a signal was sent to the hut, and a pen working upon a
chronograph registered one more step. There is also a meteorological
screen on the summit, which has to be visited at eight o'clock each
morning in all weathers.

[Illustration: A SUMMER VIEW OVER CAPE EVANS AND MCMURDO SOUND FROM THE
RAMP--Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]

Arrived on the top you will now be facing south, that is in the opposite
direction to which you were facing before. The first thing that will
strike you is that the sea, now frozen in the bays though still unfrozen
in the open sound, flows in nearly to your feet. The second, that though
the sea stretches back for nearly twenty miles, yet the horizon shows
land or ice in every direction. For a ship this is a cul-de-sac, as Ross
found seventy years ago. But as soon as you have grasped these two
facts your whole attention will be riveted to the amazing sight on your
left. Here are the southern slopes of Erebus; but how different from
those which you have lately seen. Northwards they fell in broad calm
lines to a beautiful stately cliff which edged the sea. But here--all the
epithets and all the adjectives which denote chaotic immensity could not
adequately tell of them. Visualize a torrent ten miles long and twenty
miles broad; imagine it falling over mountainous rocks and tumbling over
itself in giant waves; imagine it arrested in the twinkling of an eye,
frozen and white. Countless blizzards have swept their drifts over it,
but have failed to hide it. And it continues to move. As you stand in the
still cold ai