BYRD IN THE ANTARCTIC.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3887, 22 December 1928, Page 3

BYRD IN THE ANTARCTIC.

LYING IN A WfORLD OF DRIFTING WpiTE. Vancouver, December 19. In a copyright message from the Byrd expedition in the Antarctic, December 18, Mr. Russell Owen says: “We are lying in a world of drifting white. For hours our ship has not moved. We are shut in by solid ice stretches many miles. It is snowing hard, so that one cannot see more than fifty yards, and in the wind it shifts past us in a curtain that opens and closes, giving swft glimpses of a tortured sui’facc which is quickly hidden. “Overhead is a pale glow where the sun is trying to break through, but it (Only succeeds in making a diffused light that hurts the eyes as they strain to pierce the obscuring diaft. There is the fascination of the mysterious in the eerie .concealment. It is not liaze or mist, but an enshroiiding impalpable light that closes about us. When it opens for a moment we realise that our microcosm is not the limit of this frozen sea, but almost instantly that quick stabbing rift is bottled out, and we are alone.

“What is ahead for us in that forbidden land we are approaching? Day and night we have been living in this grey silence, broken only by the whistle of the wind in the rigging and the whine of the dogs. Voices are lost in this vast emptiness. “Every hour light and colour have changed the painting of scenes which can, never be forgotten. Before the snow there was the wind, which lifted clouds of scurrying drift from the surface of the ice and concealed the horizon. “It changed its density constantly and lifted up cakes and hummocks which pushed out the gloom. Then they were swiftly hidden as if an opaque, but invisible, hand had swept down over them.” WILKINS UP AGAINST IT. FAILS TO GET OFF THE WATER. London, December 19. In a copyright message from Deception Island, 'Sir George Wilkins says: “W]e made repeated efforts, to get off the water with an aeroplane equipped with pontoons, but failed owing to the heavy load. We ran the ’plane four miles out before we abandoned the attempt. Meanwhile, the shovelling away of ice and snow is almost completed on the land flying field from ■which the next attempt will be made when the weather permits.”