nd I were making a
ladder, Jones was contriving a harpoon for seals, Hoadley was opening
cases and stowing stores in the veranda, Dovers cleaning tools, Moyes
repairing a thermograph and writing up the meteorological log, Harrisson
cooking and Kennedy sleeping after a night-watch.

Between June 4 and 22 there was a remarkably fine spell. It was not calm
all the time, as drift flew for a few days, limiting the horizon to a
few hundred yards. An igloo was built as a shelter for those sinking the
geological shaft, and seal-hunting was a daily recreation. On June 9,
Dovers and Watson found a Weddell seal two and a half miles to the west
on the sea-ice. They killed the animal but did not cut it up as there
were sores on the skin. Jones went over with them afterwards and
pronounced the sores to be wounds received from some other animal, so
the meat was considered innocuous and fifty pounds were brought in,
being very welcome after tinned foods. Jones took culture tubes with him
and made smears for bacteria. The tubes were placed in an incubator
and several kinds of organisms grew, very similar to those which infect
wounds in ordinary climates.

The snowstorms had by this time built up huge drifts under the lee of
the ice-cliffs, some of them more than fifty feet in height and reaching
almost to the top of the ice-shelf. An exhilarating sport was to ski
down these ramps. The majority of them were very steep and irregular
and it was seldom that any of us escaped without a fall at one time or
another. Several of the party were thrown from thirty to forty feet,
and, frequently enough, over twenty feet, without being hurt. The only
accident serious enough to disable any one happened to Kennedy on June
19, when he twisted his knee and was laid up for a week.

There were many fine displays of the aurora in June, the best being
observed on the evening of the 18th. Curtains and streamers were showing
from four o'clock in the afternoon. Shortly after midnight, Kennedy, who
was taking magnetic observations, called me to see the most remarkable
exhibition I have so far seen. There was a double curtain 30 degrees
wide unfolded from the eastern horizon through the zenith, with waves
shimmering along it so rapidly that they travelled the whole length of
the curtain in two seconds. The colouring was brilliant and evanescent.
When the waves reached the end of the curtain they spread out to
the north and rolled in a voluminous billow slowly