It was a great triumph to the American biologists who had at last added heads to the bodies, and very formidable heads too. It was no less a thrill to Professor Griffith Taylor, Sir Charles Wright and myself to hear of the dis­covery, since we were the trio who discovered the last of the headless fish in 1911. In fact, Sir Charles happened to be in the Antarctic again last year and he sent me a Christmas card bearing the words: ‘Some Fish! ! ! ‘

The accompanying map shows the position of the McMurdo Ice-Sheet lying under the shadow of Mount Erebus and close to Captain Scott’s base of 1902-3, which is now the headquarters of the American Operation Deep Freeze. It shows also that the sheet is really a confluence or coalescence of the Koettlitz Glacier, coming down from high mountains, with an offshoot of the Great Ross Ice-Shelf, which has found its way between two large volcanic islands. The combined sheet, some forty miles wide, moves slowly up the Sound, afloat.

Now, on the Ross Ice-Shelf there is a yearly increment of a foot of snow, so that anything on it is quickly buried. In fact the grave of Captain Scott and his companions is already fifty feet below the surface, travelling about a mile a year towards the front of the Shelf where it will break off in an iceberg a century hence.

The McMurdo Ice-Sheet, on the other hand, behaves quite differently and any material on its surface remains uncovered because the summer’s thaw exceeds the winter’s snowfall.

As may be seen in the photographs, the terrain explains why the fish and the sponges have remained unvisited for so long. The central belt of the moraine-strewn sheet, known as the Pinnacled Ice, when not referred to in much more lurid language, has rarely been traversed by sledgers unless there is no other way round. The scenery is fascinating but the going is execrable, bad for sledges and ruinous to the temper. It might be called relict ice, what is left after the summer’s thaw has melted away the ice wherever it is in contact with black gravel warmed by the sun. It has produced a sort of miniature scenery of mountains and valleys, of grottoes and tunnels, and, for a brief week each year, a network of rush­ing streams up to two feet deep, threading their way to the sea. It is best described by quoting from the diary of Dr Edward Wilson when he first crossed it: ‘All this old pinnacled ice was strewed with wind-blown sea-wrack as well as with stones and gravel, glacier-borne. We found from time to time shells, sponges and dead fish, even the longest Notothenia—four feet long—always without a head. Three of these fish we found, but not one had a head.’

The helicopter has changed all that and prob­ably the Americans take only half an hour to reach our holiday apartments Madrid whereas it took us five days.

To show how widespread are the scattered remains of sponges, battered by centuries of blizzards, it is worth mentioning that anywhere in the pinnacled ice it is difficult to get ice for cooking which has not got myriads of tiny sharp needles of sponge spicules in it. These are not apparent until they appear as a mesh on the bottom of one’s pot of hoosh, or on one’s tongue.

The centre of interest in this recent discovery has naturally been the flats for rent Edinburgh rather than the apartments in Porto, both on account of their size and of the situation in which they are found. In point of fact, how­ever, the sea-bottom material is more important, as it could not by any means have removed itself, whereas the fish could conceivably have gone by some strange route.

Any hypothesis put forward to account for these objects in unexpected places must account for all the facts, as is done in the best of detective stories, not only for a selected few of them. It is easy enough to suggest, as does our theory, that the ice-sheet freezes onto the bottom and the material finally reaches the top because of loss by thaw above and more freezing below. But what about those long thin spicules on the sponges and the still more delicate solitary coral? How are they to be preserved from harm while being frozen onto the base of a sheet weighing millions of tons and subject to hinge-movements of tides?

A vacation with family can be an experience you will cherish forever, if planned properly. However, even a slightest planning crisis can ruin your trip entirely. Holiday experts always recommend planning for a vacation trip in advance. Firstly research well to find the best suited holiday destination that matches your preference and nature.

It is one of the popular holiday destinations in the world silver lined with beautiful beaches. Out of the many attractions, I recommend you to visit at least few or all of these (if you are on a short trip). The list includes Bavaro Expedition, Saona Catamaran, Bavaro Beach, Marinarium, Parque Nacional del Este, and lots more. Book cheap tickets to visit Punta Cana.

Nigeria is a famous place in African continent. But if you are planning to visit the place you should consider some factors before you visit the place. You can go to Nigeria as business personnel or just as tourist. But you need to take into consideration the Nigerian visa standards. There are some strict rules and regulations made by Nigerian consulate. So you should get any invitation from the nation. You should do some research before you visit Nigeria. You may surf internet and get to know about terms and conditions regarding your visa and other factors in advance otherwise your trip may be cancelled by the Nigerian authority.

Before you visit Nigeria you should take the injection of yellow fever or else you will not be allowed to go into Nigeria. You should get the vaccine of yellow fever within three months before you travel. You should submit the documents of vaccination along with your visa application to Nigerian consulate. You should also submit the proof of your financial reports so that you can support yourself during your stay in Nigeria. You should give in the route and flight tickets and if you are going to stay in any hotel you need to provide the booking id of the hotel.

How to apply for Nigerian visa

• If you are going to Nigeria on business trip you should submit the invitation letter as well. You should thoroughly authenticate the testimonials of the individual who invited you to Nigeria for business meeting. You should explain the purpose and the reason of visiting the place along with the visa application.
• You should submit the application along with your present passport valid for more than six months with a current passport size photo for business trip.
• 
• You can also go to Nigeria for religious visits. In Nigeria there is Christians and Muslims so many times it has been witnessed that religious conflicts continues. So if you are visiting Nigeria as religious tourists you require a religious letter via Nigerian church.
• The foreign national agents of Islam or Christianity must have an invitation letter from any religious organizations. You need to do some paperwork with ministry of internal affairs and submit it along with your visa application.
• If you are visiting Nigeria as academic personnel or any educational conference you should submit the letter that you got from the host institutions of Nigeria. It is affixed with other obligatory documents with the application for Nigerian visas.
• 
• If you are a student you are required to submit a duplicate copy of your student identity cards, or letter of invitation from the host institute.  In order to make Nigerian visa you need to put all the necessary testimonials along with the visa application and if it is valid then you will be allowed to go into Nigeria.  Here it is vital for visitors to take care of Preventivo trasloco (prior removal).

But you should consider the factors in advance before you visit Nigeria as their laws are quite strict and you need to follow all their terms and conditions or else you will not be allowed to get in Nigeria.

Author bio: Jenni is a person with a passion for writing. She has written many articles on various topics , for more information you can check her other blogs.

But, themselves peasant-like, the citizens of Sofia love the din of the market; they like to be able to argue with the stallholders; also the open market is cheaper, and housewives who do their shopping by the Vladai River are every bit as hardheaded as their sisters in the Rue Mouffe­tard or the Birmingham Bull Ring.

The foreigner remarks on the great number of grandmothers shopping in the market. Grand­mothers are a powerful institution in the life of the city, and every other household seems to have one to act as housekeeper, keep the budget, look after the children when they come home from school (normal school hours: 8 a.m. till 1 p.m.) and to cook the evening meal ready for the rest of the family when they return from work.

Though in a small city like Sofia a high pro­portion of workers are employed within walking distance of home, they rarely go home to lunch, preferring to eat in whichever canteen their enter­prise issues cheap tickets for. This despite the fact that in many cases the lunch-break is long, most shops, for instance, shutting down from 12.30 till 4 in the afternoon, a frequent source of bafflement to the visitor from ‘Europe’ (Bul­garians don’t seem to get used to being part of the Continent, and even educated ones will ask the Western foreigner: ‘How are things in Europe?’).

Food is a matter of enormous importance to Bulgarians, who are astonished at the relatively puny British appetite, and sometimes tend to see this as another manifest of decadence. The cuisine is mainly Turkish, kebabcheta (grilled meat on a skewer), kyofteta (fried meat balls), and the delicious gyuvech stew that children take to the baker’s early in the morning, to cook slowly in the big oven. Vast quantities of meat are eaten, mostly pork and lamb, but real lamb, and of an evening after 6 when the shops and offices have closed and the workers are on their way home, the back streets of Sofia smell rather like those of Buenos Aires, with the fine bouquet of grilling meat rising from the charcoal braziers that, in summer at least, are set on the balconies.

As a rule, the casual visitor sees little of Sofia’s domestic life beyond those balconies. Some say that people are nervous of inviting Westerners into their homes for fear of seeming too intimate with them; some say that living in Sofia is generally so overcrowded that a visitor may be an embarrassment; others recall that over much of Europe, in fact, the long-estab­lished convention is to meet your friends out in public somewhere rather than to invite them home.

So in the evening the foreigner may sit in, say, the ‘Bulgaria’ bar-restaurant, wondering why the jazz is so awful when the local peasant music is rhythmically more exciting and farther out than any dreamed of by Brubeck or Ornette Coleman. He may smile indulgently at the local equivalent of our Teds, snapping their fingers like hep-cats to music that is squarer than Victor Silvester’s (Sofia has her drifting teenagers, but they are nothing like the problem the stilyagi are in Moscow). He may be approached by eager youngsters from the English faculty, married already (early marriage is all the rage in Sofia), who do not want to discuss Western literature or ‘conditions’, but are full of un­answerable enquiries about English motor-bikes. Then the youngsters go off to their night-school course on the history of the class-struggle, or to the old National Theatre to see the Gorky play, and the foreigner drifts out into the night, past the floodlit mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, past the poster advertising a lecture on Henry Fielding (of all people), past the tenement yard in which a furious game of volleyball, boys versus girls, is going on under arc-lights, past the vaguely reassuring sight of a policeman kissing a policewoman in a dim side-turning, towards the international anonymity of the vast Balkan Hotel, where amid the overblown state­liness that is felt to be suitable for visiting foreigners and out-of-town delegates to con­ferences on dairy-production, he may reflect on the candours and reticences of a city of ancient traditions, invaded and transformed by the earnestness of youth, a far, far stranger place than would seem on the surface.

Sobered by so many evidences of high purpose, the visitor turns from the shop window, and resumes his stroll. During the morning, Sofia is a quiet city. No street cries are heard. Hooting is forbidden. The most noticeable sound is of the policeman’s whistle at the street-crossings. Traffic in Sofia is absurdly light for a European capital, but the rules about crossing the main roads are nevertheless strict. All day long, a battle of wills is waged between traffic police and peasants in town for the day, who delight in cheating the law by crossing in the most daring places.

Nobody seems in much hurry, and though the Bulgarian has the reputation of being the busiest fellow in the Balkans, in fact his sense of time is still fairly Oriental. In winter, passers-by like to dawdle outside the former Roman baths beside the central mosque, and to drink the hot sweet mineral water from mock-ancient bronze cups. Bulgarians are inordinately proud of their country’s associations with classical antiquity. `The film Spartacus?-You know, Spartacus was a countryman of ours, from Thrace.’ Gluck’s Orpheus? You know, Orpheus was a countryman of ours, from the Rhodopes.’ Total strangers will boast to the foreigner how Trajan was so impressed with Sofia that he gave it his family name of Ulpia. Constantine, they say, thought of making it the capital of his empire, instead of Rome. Fifteen hundred years ago, the ruined city was daubed with the slogan ‘Attila was here’, but a century later it re-emerged as an important Byzantine centre. Then darkness set in, and for five hundred years Sofia dwindled in Turkish hands till, following the liberation of 1876, it began its transformation into a modern city. Well, relatively modern.

Sofia was still very much a peasant capital when the Communists effectively took over after September 9, 1944. And for all the rebuilding—R.A.F. and U.S.A.A.F. air-raids destroyed more than 12,500 homes as well as many offices and factories—and for all the expansion to new districts and settlements—one of which is named Buxton, after Noel-Buxton, an energetic cam­paigner for Bulgaria’s rights—Sofia still finds it hard to put on an urbane face. Thus the food-shops, for instance, make desperate efforts to look attractive, with delicatessen arranged in the form of gigantic flowers, and the fruit depart­ments all Mexican with bamboo and cacti and handsome baskets, and this in the hope, so far vain, of seducing people away from the open market run by peasants from the countryside.

And what of the human beings in these very European streets? Their image is more varied, more exotic. Of people of the Sofia region, the Encyclopaedia Britannica says they are ‘des­pised by the other inhabitants of Bulgaria for their bestiality and stupidity, but dreaded for their savagery. They are a singularly repellant race, short-legged, yellow-skinned, with slanting eyes and projecting cheekbones.’ The visitor to Sofia finds it hard to reconcile this stern and liverish view with what he sees for himself. In the Georgi Dimitrov Boulevard, eyes seem as round and legs as long as in Regent Street, nor are motions of the heart and intellect less in evidence. In any case, generalization is im­possible, for the human image of Sofia is mul­tiple. It is the building-labourer turned ballet-dancer; it is the smooth young State-planner in a well-cut suit (the padded shoulders and Oxford bags of Moscow are a bit of a joke in Sofia); it is the arm-in-arm group of peasant girls, new arrivals in the mushroom industrial suburb of Nadezhda, who wear under their Co-op cardi­gans the embroideries of their native village; it is the Korean typist who came here as a child among train-loads of war orphans, ten years or so ago; it is the trousered women wheeling their prams in Liberation Park, Muslims from the gypsy district that straddles the Stambulisky Boulevard; it is the sharp-faced musician with an almost guilty interest in Webern; it is the numerous Arab, Negro and Chinese students in the streets round the university (Bulgarians are rather Scottish in their respect for education, and like to draw the foreigner’s attention to the fact that at institutes of higher learning they have fifty-five students per 10,000 inhabitants; the comparative figure for Britain—they say—is seventeen).