Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
119
weight had snapped the swingle tree of the sledge as the pony disappeared into the “black
bottomless pit.” Had it not, the sledge would have gone down with the pony, and with
them two of the four sleeping bags carried by the party, without which they probably
would not have made it back to Cape Royds. The loss of Socks, however, was critical,
for he was to have been the foodstuV that would carry the party to the pole. The pony's
maize became the meager substitute for his calories lost to the crevasse.
From here onward the four men pulled the two sledges in train when possible, and
relayed them when the surface was too rough or slick. Crevasses became a common part
of their routine. You fell in one on your harness, the others helped you out, and you went
on, watchful as could be. Everyone's shins were bruised from catching them on the lips
of blue ice when a foot went through a bridge. A great blessing was the weather, which
remained clear and windless, allowing daily progress up the glacier.
On December 10 the party had pulled abreast of the massif, which from Mount Hope
had appeared to be a volcano. Now in under the cloud that had hung over the massif
since starting up the glacier, it was clear that the mountain was no volcano, though it cer-
tainly had a knack of holding a cloud at its summit, and thus its name, The Cloudmaker.
In form, it was a bare face of rock about twelve miles long, steeply rising to a crest more
than three thousand feet above the side of the glacier, with no spurs patterning its bulg-
ing wall. After dinner Shackleton climbed up the mountainside while the others ground
maize into meal with rocks chosen from the moraine at the edge of the glacier. For the
first six hundred feet or so up the face, the bedrock continued to be covered in moraine,
left by the glacier at some time in the past when it stood much higher in this valley. Above
that Shackleton found outcrop. The rocks were slates and sandstones, and a brown rock
that he could not identify. The party had no geologist, but Shackleton collected small
samples for identification by those at Cape Royds.
From his vantage Shackleton peered to the south. Low cumulus clouds hung in the
upper reaches of the glacier, as they had for a number of days now, so the distance to
the plateau remained obscure. The mountains to the east, on the far side of the glacier,
formed a sort of amphitheater, thirty miles across, rising through broad slopes of white
to a balcony of summits above eight thousand feet. At the left (northern) end of this arc,
a ridge of bedrock asserted itself as a bold promontory into the glacier. Its triangular, fac-
eted face reminded Shackleton of the photos of Cathedral Rocks on Ferrar Glacier, and
Wedge Face was the name he gave to this feature.
Scattered across the lateral moraine at the foot of The Cloudmaker were conspicuous
boulders of limestone breccia, a rock composed of angular fragments of limestone stuck
in a matrix of calcite “showing a great mass of wonderful colors.” Several small samples
of this limestone were also collected for identification by the geologists.
For the next several days the party pulled south past The Cloudmaker (Fig. 4.13).
On December 14 they camped at 5,600 feet, about fifteen miles south of the misty mas-
sif, with hopes that they would soon be on the plateau. Mountains had been rising to the
southwest for several days, but the grand spectacle was a grouping of summits and prom-
ontories that emerged to the west of The Cloudmaker and were now arrayed to the north
and northwest of camp around a high cirque whose glacier dropped abruptly through a
breach in the bedrock bounding the main glacier. The crest of the cirque and the ridgeline
