At the Mountains of Madness | Page 4

when not
using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would employ one or two in a shuttle
transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on the great plateau
from six hundred to seven hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite
the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the
plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate bases, taking our chances in the
interest of economy and probable efficiency.
Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop flight of our
squadron on November 21st over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west,
and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines. Wind troubled us only
moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we
encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83¡ and 84¡, we knew
we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the
frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coast line. At last we
were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south. Even as we realized
it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of
almost fifteen thousand feet.
The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude 86¡ 7',
East Longitude 174¡ 23', and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings
made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short aeroplane flights, are matters
of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of
the graduate students - Gedney and Carroll - on December 13 - 15. We were some eight
thousand, five hundred feet above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed
solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made
considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed

dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing
mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained
confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with the great bulk of the
continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying eastward below South
America - which we then thought to form a separate and smaller continent divided from
the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since
disproved the hypothesis.
In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their nature, we
found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments; notably ferns, seaweeds,
trilobites, crinoids, and such mollusks as linguellae and gastropods - all of which seemed
of real significance in connection with the region's primordial history. There was also a
queer triangular, striated marking, about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake pieced
together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted aperture. These
fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range; and
Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and
provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects
reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic
formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself
produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for
extreme wonder over the striated depression.
On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six students, and myself flew
directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once by a
sudden high wind, which, fortunately, did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as
the papers have stated, one of several observation flights, during others of which we tried
to discern new topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early
flights were disappointing in this latter respect, though they afforded us some magnificent
examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our
sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as
enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and
scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low
midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying owing to the
tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no
visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five hundred miles eastward
with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would
probably be