We are pretty well past the Keltie
Glacier which is a vast tumbled mass: there is a long line of ice falls
ahead, and I think there is a hard day ahead of us to-morrow among
that pressure which must be enormous. We can't go farther inshore here,
being under the north end of the Cloudmaker, and a fine mountain it is,
rising precipitously above us.[232]

"Sunday, December 17. Nearly 11 miles. Temp. 12.5 deg.. 3500 feet. We have
had an exciting day--this morning was just like the scenic railway at
Earl's Court. We got straight on to the big pressure waves, and headed
for the humpy rock at the base of the Cloudmaker. It was a hard plug up
the waves, very often standing pulls, and all that we could do for a
course was a very varied direction. Going down the other side was the
exciting part: all we could do was to set the sledge straight, hang on to
the straps, give her a little push and rush down the slope, which was
sometimes so sheer that the sledge was in the air. Sometimes there was no
chance to brake the sledge, and we all had to get on to the top, and we
rushed down with the wind whistling in our ears. After three hours of
this it levelled out again a bit, and we took the top of a wave, and ran
south along it on blue ice: enormous pressure to our right, largely I
think caused by the Keltie Glacier. Then we ascended a rise, snowy and
crevassed, and camped after doing just under five miles, with big
pressure ahead."[233]

"In the afternoon we had a hard surface. Scott started off at a great
speed, Teddy [Evans] and I following. There was something wrong with my
team or my sledge, as we had a desperate job to keep up at first. We did
keep up all right, but were heartily glad when after about 21/2 hours Scott
stopped for a spell. I rearranged our harness, putting Cherry and myself
on the long span again, which we had temporarily discarded in the
morning. We were both winded and felt wronged. The rearrangement was a
success however, and the remainder of the march was a pleasure instead of
a desperate struggle. It finished up on fields of blue rippled ice with
sharp knife edges, and snow patches few and far between. We are all
camped on a small snow patch in the middle of a pale blue rippled sea,
about 3600 feet above sea level and past the Cloudmaker, which means
that we are half way up the Glacier."[234] We had done 121/2 miles
(statute).

The Beardmore Glacier is twice as large as the Malaspina in Alaska, which
was th