SOUTH POLE IN PICTURES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 843, 11 December 1929, Page 9

SOUTH POLE IN PICTURES

FASCINATING PHOTOGRAPHS OF FLIGHT GREAT PEAKS OF BARRIER By BUSSELL OWEN Copyrighted, 1928, by the “New York Times” company and the St. Boms ”PostDispatch." All rights for publication reserved throughout the world. Wireless to the “Kew York Times.” (Received 9 a.m.) BAY OF WHALES, Monday. The photographs of Byrd’s polar flight are fascinating. The flight through the mountains up the deep gorge of the glacier, where the walls at times seem only a few feet away from the plane, shows the rising surface of the Barrier coming closer and closer, which necessitated the throwing overboard of food to lighten the plane, and then the final bump over which the plane staggered to the long slope of the plateau. The scenery is magnificent—great peaks rising above the plane, cloaked with snow, except where the black, precipitous sides are too steep to hold it; rivers of ice pouring down between •a jumbled mass of mountains as impressive as any in the world, rising along the edge of the interior plateau. As the plane went southward from them, at the point where it entered the plateau, the photographs were taken at intervals, so that they overlapped. They show the mountains stretched away to the east, and gradually curving north until the plane reached the interior of the polar plateau, when even the mightiest of them disappeared below the horizon, and there was only a limitless plain beneath, without landmarks or guides, except the sun and the magnetic compass. Nothing could so well make clear the difficulty of this flight as these photographs. The whole trip to the Pole can be brought home to anyone when these strips are combined with the ones from Little America to the mountains, taken on the base-laying flight, and there is, such astoundingmountain scenery that everyone has been poring over them since. These mountains are particularly interesting, because they are separated from any known land heretofore placed on the charts. Byrd on his eastern flight flew north and east and south of the Alexandra Mountains, which run in a different direction from that shown on the chaxts. There is a considerable distance between the eastern and the new mountains, at least 50 miles, and probably more than that.

BYRD THANKS N.Z. MESSAGE TO PRIME MINISTER VALUABLE HELP GIVEN The Prime Minister has received the following radiogram from Commander Richard Byrd in response to a congratulatory message on the success of his recent Polar flight;“My companions on the Polar flight and the members of the expedition at Little America and Dunedin join me in offering their deep thanks for your kind message. The assistance that the Government and people oi New Zealand have given has been a most important contribution to the success of our expedition, in sincere appreciation of which we carried on the Polar flight the New Zealand flag presented by your Department of Internal Affairs. “The inhabitants of Little America send greetings and the best of good wishes from the Ross Dependency to the citizens of New Zealand as well as our kindest personal regards.”

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