from Amundsen to King Haakon, with a request that Scott should send it to him.  There was also a list of the five men who made up their party, but no news as to what they had done.  I made some sketches here, but it was blowing very cold, -22 deg..  Birdie took some photos.  We found no sledge there though they said there was one:  it may have been buried in drift.  The tent was a funny little thing for 2 men, pegged out with white line and tent-pegs of yellow wood.  I took some strips of blue-grey silk off the tent seams:  it was perished.  The Norskies had got to the Pole on December 16, and were here from 15th to 17th.  At our lunch South Pole Camp we saw a sledge-runner with a black flag about 1/2 mile away blowing from it.  Scott sent me on ski to fetch it, and I found a note tied to it showing that this was the Norskies’ actual final Pole position.  I was given the flag and the note with Amundsen’s signature, and I got a piece of the sledge-runner as well.  The small chart of our wanderings shows best how all these things lie.  After lunch we made 6.2 miles from the Pole Camp to the north again, and here we are camped for the night."[306]

The following remarks on the South Pole area were written by Bowers in the Meteorological Log, apparently on January 17 and 18:  “Within 120 miles of the South Pole the sastrugi crossed seem to indicate belts of certain prevalent winds.  These were definitely S.E.ly. up to about Lat. 78 deg. 30’ S., where the summit was passed and we started to go definitely downhill toward the Pole.  An indefinite area was then crossed S.E.ly, S.ly and S.W.ly sastrugi.  Later, in about 79 deg. 30’ S., those from the S.S.W. predominated.  At this point also the surface of the ice-cap became affected by undulations running more or less at right angles to our course.  These resolved themselves into immense waves some miles in extent,[307] with a uniform surface both in hollow and crust.  The whole surface was carpeted with a deposit of ice-crystals which, while we were there, fell sometimes in the form of minute spicules and sometimes in plates.  These caused an almost continuous display of parhelia.

“The flags left a month previously by the Norwegian expedition were practically undamaged and so could not have been exposed to very heavy wind during that time.  Their sledging and ski tracks, where marked, were raised slightly, also the dogs’ footprints.  In the neighbourhood of their South Pole Camp the drifts were S.W.ly, but there was one S.S.E. drift to leeward of tent.  They had pitched their tent to allow for S.W.ly wind.  For walking on foot the ground was all pretty soft, and on digging down the crystalline structure of the snow was found to alter very little, and there were no layers of crust such as are found on the Barrier.  The snow seems so lightly put together as not to cohere, and makes very little water for its bulk when melted.  The constant and varied motion of cirrus, and the forming and motion of radiant points, shows that in the upper atmosphere at this time of the year there is little or no tranquillity."[308]