Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/341

Rh of shreds of lichen on Possession Island and on the mainland of Cape Adare opposite, this being the first landing on what may properly be designated mainland. Borchgrevink confirms in almost every particular the observations of Ross, and from the two accounts we learn that Victoria Land is a region of lofty mountains, largely and perhaps almost entirely of a volcanic nature, and almost entirely buried within a mantle of snow and ice. The covering of snow and ice is not sufficiently massive to obliterate the relief of the land—differing in this respect from the interior of Greenland—and the contours of valley and mountain are well and clearly retained. Giant glaciers descend toward and into the sea, terminating in vertical cliffs of ice of one hundred, one hundred and fifty, and two hundred feet in height. A vast ice barrier of vertical cliffs, whether of glacial formation or otherwise, and retaining a nearly uniform elevation of one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty feet—with a reduction at one point to nearly eighty feet (or less—defines a considerable part of the north and south coast line; beyond the seventy-eighth parallel of latitude this ice barrier trends eastward for at least three hundred miles, but it is not known that any approximate coast line lies back of it with a similar trend.

Westward of the one hundred and seventieth parallel of east longitude, and situated close upon the Antarctic Circle—now to the south of it, then to the north—and forming, as it were, a continuation of Victoria Land through some seventy degrees of longitude, are a number of designated land patches (such as Clarie Land, Adélie Land, Sabrina Land), which, with the uniting ice-cliff barriers, constitute the coast line of the antarctic continent of Wilkes—sometimes also known as Wilkes Land. How much of this continuous frontage of some two thousand miles is really land no one knows. The mountain undulations mark some parts as being indisputably such; yet a reasonable doubt may be entertained regarding some of the presumed land masses of Wilkes, and it is known that one of his mountain chains was sailed over by Ross in the region of the Bellany Islands. A reference likewise to the admirable illustration of Clarie Land in D'Urville's monumental work on The South Polar Regions makes one suspicious as to the true nature of this cóte, and forces one to inquire if it is not merely a portion of the great Antarctic Barrier.

Still farther west lie Kemp Land (probably island) and Enderby Land or Island, and finally, almost due south of the South American continent, the complex of Graham and Palmer Lands, with Terre Louis Philippe, Isle Joinville, and the more recently discovered or named King Oscar II Land, which was traced in 1893 by Larsen to nearly the sixty-ninth parallel of latitude, he himself attaining 68° 10′. This series of lands, which are closely