24 SCOTT’S LAST EXPEDITION [Jur 
The door was the difficulty, and for the present we left the cloth 
arching over the stones and forming a kind of portico. The 
whole was well packed over with slabs of hard snow, but there 
was no soft snow with which to fill up the gaps between the 
blocks.] We then had breakfast and got away in good time for 
the pressure ridges before day broke. We had the same equip- 
ment as yesterday, and crampons of the new canvas pattern which 
Cherry and I found most reliable and comfortable, though 
Bowers preferred the old pattern used at Hut Point. Going 
down to-day we made for a different and rather narrow slope 
leading much more directly down to the foot of the land ice cliffs. 
We had missed it yesterday in the bad light when walking along 
the cliff tops looking for a way down, but we had seen it from 
below [at a place where there was a break in the big ice cliff] and 
had decided to try for it to-day. It took us down the right direc- 
tion [twice we crept up to the edge of the cliff with no success, 
but the third time we found the ridge down], and we got down 
directly in under the old land ice cliffs which still cover the more 
southern portions of the basalt cliffs of the Knoll. These ice cliffs 
are a monument to what wind can do; they are more than a hun- 
dred feet high in places and are deeply scooped out into vast 
grooved and concave hollows as though by a colossal gouge. By 
following along the foot of these weather-worn and dirty-banded 
old relics of glaciation one comes by a series of slides and climbs 
and scrambles to quite recent exposures of dark rock cliffs which 
were not exposed when I was here ten years ago. 
Then, passing along the foot of these, one comes to more and 
loftier ice cliffs and more and still loftier rock cliffs, and along 
the very foot of these, in among rock débris and snow drifts and 
frozen thaw pools, and boulders which have fallen into the 
trough, we had to walk and climb and slide and crawl in the direc- 
tion of the sea ice rookery. [We got along till finally we climbed 
along the top of a snow ridge with a razor-back edge. On our 
right was a drop of great depth with crevasses at the bottom: 
on our left was a smaller drop, also crevassed. We crawled 
along: it was exciting work in the half darkness. At the end was 
a series of slopes full of crevasses, and finally we got right in 
under the rock on to moraine.] At one spot we appeared again 
to have come to an impasse, for one of the largest and most 
chaotic pressure ridges had actually come up against the rock 
