There was something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt too, another waveofuneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblance; of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings.

—H.P. Lovecraft

This passage from Lovecraft reminded me of the most overwhelmingly beautiful scene I have ever seen, which we encountered quite by accident on this next part of the journey. While standing atop of a ridge near Escalade Peak, I turned around and saw an amazing vista of the Transantarctic Mountains framed by deep blue sky with horizontal layers of white cloud at two separate levels around their mystical peaks. The sun shone down in widely radiating rays, giving the whole vision an aura of transcendental power, like a scene painted specifically for inspiring religious zeal.

It was a busy day on Thursday, 12 December, as we moved on from Moody Peak down to the vast open plateau of the Skelton Névé, leaving two of our sledges with supplies at a storage depot at the head of the Deception Glacier. The first part of the journey was fraught with terrible sastrugi: they were rough, jagged, and very high. It was slow going. We had five overturned sledge accidents—every one of our sledges suffered an overturn or two, but luckily no significant damage was incurred.

After lunch we moved swiftly to the Swartz Nunataks, east of Escalade Peak. It was relatively warm, 12°F at noon. We then swapped teams, Fraka and I taking one sledge train, Margaret and Brian the other. Fraka drove the Skidoo all morning; then I drove from the depot in the late afternoon. After we had made it through the rough sastrugi we entered a wide-open flat snow plain, almost perfect conditions for sledge travel. We were able to scoot along at 20 kilometers per hour from this point on almost to the end of the day. It was an uplifting, exciting feeling to drive the Skidoo pulling only one sledge over a perfectly flat smooth surface. We reached our destination by 8:45 P.M. Although we had completed 57 kilometers of sledging that day, the first ten took us four hours and much hard work to upright all the overturned sledges. We had now covered more than 400 kilometers since the beginning of our trip.

I cooked us a quick dinner that night of dehydrated beef curry with rice, served with soup and bread. Using the dehydrated meals was always preferable after our long heavy days of traveling when we were all dog-tired and needing a quick feed. Dinner was ready by 10:30 P.M.and finished at close to midnight.

The next day was black Friday, 13 December, although I must admit it was the whitest black Friday I'd ever experienced. It had been exactly four weeks to the day since we were put in the field. I' m not superstitious in any way but, for some reason, I thought to myself that I would not take any additional risks that day. It started off as a warm sunny morning with a temperature of 10°F, and light 7-knot winds. We were camped near an outcrop of sandstone at the Swartz Nunataks that Margaret wanted to examine. It was also scheduled that day for helo NZ1 to pick up the fuel and retro from the Deception Glacier and call over to us to drop off some extra lashing ropes, mail, and possibly other goodies.

We passed a few hours searching the low hill of greenish-grey sandstone outcrops near the camp. Margaret concluded that that was probably the Junction Spur Sandstone, a rock unit that we had studied at the base of the succession near Gorgon's Head and at Skua Ridge, so we knew it was unlikely to contain any fish fossils. Escalade Peak, a prominent range over in the distance, looked far more interesting from

where we were camped as we could see that it sported an extensive sedimentary sequence of lighter colored rocks.

Unfortunately, the helo couldn't come out that day as we heard on the evening radio schedule that the weather had turned foul shortly after it had set out, so they had decided to turn back while they could. Apart from this one element of bad luck, it was a rather uneventful black Friday, just the way we liked it in Antarctica. I thought to myself that our careful planning and faith in science had once more dispelled superstition.

The following morning was gorgeous, with the temperature at 16°F at 8:00 A.M., and it remained warm, sunny weather all day. In good humor we packed up camp and moved swiftly on to Escalade Peak, arriving there uneventfully at 3:00 P.M.After setting up the new camp we had a quick Skidoo run up to the saddle between Escalade and Tate Peaks to check out a possible plan of crossing down through the saddle to head on to the Boomerang Range later. The area below the saddle turned out to be riddled with large crevasses, so our only option for getting to our next site was to go round the long way, backtracking on our route.

Following dinner that night Margaret surprised us by producing a homemade cake which went down a treat. That night we invented yet another new cocktail: “Mock Kar-lua” (the recipe for which is also in Appendix 2). We then played a game that I introduced to the group where we would have readings from my little pocketbook of famous quotations, and everyone had to guess who was the originator of the quotation. The game became a popular recreation for us at nights for the rest of the trip.

I wrote a short health report in my notebook that day as it was our thirtieth day in the field:

So far, so good. Skin a bit scaly on legs and arms, cracked around fingernails; lower lip is blistered and split, almost healed now (has been like this since Nov. 28th). Teeth, mouth fine (regular brushing); nose a bit burnt, but O.K. Strength good, stamina improving; hands get cramped after driving the Skidoo for a day. All else fine.

On Sunday we worked up on the small outcrops of Hatherton Sandstone in the saddle between Tate Peak and Escalade Peak. There

were lots of excellent trace fossils exposed here. I stumbled upon one of the most amazing finds of the whole trip that day. On racing up to the outcrop I was the first there to wander around and examine the large slabs of Hatherton Sandstone. Suddenly I laid eyes on a humungous set of animal tracks, somewhat resembling two motorcycle tire tracks in parallel. They were a set of giant arthropod tracks beautifully preserved on a large flat slab of yellowish sandstone. The track way measured 84 centimeters wide with individual appendage traces up to 19 centimeters across. This sure was the mother of all arthropods. A few years earlier Margaret discovered similar large tracks from Perseus Peak near Gorgon's Head. She was excited by the new find and spent several hours studying it, even managing to chisel out a part of the opposite side of the track way (the positive mould), which she found nearby. She believes they were made by giant sea scorpions (called eurypterids) that grew to about two meters long from head to tail! These beasts lived largely in the sea and marginal river basins, where they hunted prey with their formidable crab-like claws.

The best-preserved tracks on this new slab showed individual segmented claw marks where the three legs on each side were overstepping each other. The 19-centimeter-wide trace had three clearly visible sets of digit marks. These monstrous sea scorpions occasionally emerged out of the water to venture onto dry land. Evidence for this is seen in well-preserved tracks in the Tumblagooda Sandstone exposed in the scenic gorges near Kalbarri, Western Australia. Here the tracks sometimes show fossilized “drips” of wet sand around them, indicating that the animal was completely out of water when it walked. In some places at Kalbarri there are also “slide marks” where the beasts were sliding down the muddy banks on their bellies into the water.

The age of the Hatherton Sandstone in Antarctica is still controversial. Some scientists, like Dr. Nigel Trewin of Aberdeen University, think it could be Early Devonian (about 400 million years old) because there are similar trace fossils to be seen in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. Yet recent findings from Australia on the age of the Tumblagooda Sandstone suggest that if the Hatherton Sandstone contains the same trace fossils as the Western Australian site, then it could be much, much older. The rich trace fossil assemblages of the Tum-

blagooda Sandstone have much in common with the Hatherton Sandstone. Both have Heimdallia, an intensely burrowed trace in the rock (looking like spaghetti rock), plus similar forms of arthropod tracks called Diplichnites and Beaconites burrows.

Quite recently it has been suggested that the Tumblagooda Sandstone could be as old as Late Ordovician age (about 440 million years ago), based on conodont microfossils. These are miniature jaw-like structures that come from a free-swimming worm-like animal, actually more closely related to fishes than to any of the other invertebrates. These fossils occur above the Tumblagooda Sandstone in limestone. If this is the case, then this is clearly the earliest evidence in the world of arthropods leaving the sea and walking on dry land. The footprints of the giant sea scorpion at Escalade Peak show a remarkable degree of topographic relief, showing the pushed up mounds of sand around each “step,” indicating an animal of huge weight sunk down into the soft sands as it lumbered along.

After lunch that day we climbed up the other side of the saddle to examine the base of the Beacon Heights Orthoquartzite, which formed almost vertical bluffs on Escalade Peak. Here we found a few trace fossils, but noticed how it graded into coarser sedimentary layers towards the top. In places the usually fine-grained Hatherton Sandstone appeared to have pebbles up to four centimeters wide scattered throughout, suggesting that it was a slightly shallower environment of deposition, perhaps heralding the transition from marine to freshwater habitats in the ancient sedimentary succession.

The amazing thing about being a geologist is how you can read the changes in the rocks, and then see how that environmental change reflects the changes in animal or plant communities of the time. It's just like being a fortuneteller in reverse. In this case it showed a clear decline in abundance and diversity of life forms, as indicated by their diminishing trace fossils. The steep bluffs of whitish-yellow Beacon Heights rocks were largely devoid of any fossils except near the top, where they sometimes contained rare fossil plants and scant fish remains. This indicated a clear transition to terrestrial conditions. In simple terms, we had left the sea and were now standing upon Devonian land. Had we been there 380 million years ago it would have just

taken us a few minutes to throw in a baited line and do some serious fishing. Instead, we reached for our geology hammers and had to be content with merely scratching away in the crumbly sandstone layers in the hope of landing a few fragmentary fossils. Unfortunately we found nothing of interest at that site, as we were still well below the base of the Aztec layers.

That night we all turned into bed early with expectations of another shift of venue the next day.