142 SCOTT'S’ LAST (EXPEDITION [FEBRUARY 
got worse and worse, and after many bumps and leaps and falls 
I decided to prospect. We had done half a mile in the hour. 
. . . We started again about 3 P.M. Awful heavy work over 
‘ glass-house ” and leaping three-foot chasms, between high fas- 
cines and across decomposing rivers of ice.’ 
About 4.30 we saw a ragged piece of skin projecting from 
under an ice-table and found that it was part of a large fish. 
We spent half an hour chipping it out and recovered the dorsal 
spines, skin, tail and the vertebre. ‘These were preserved in a 
yellow fatty substance smelling like vaseline and quite soft. I 
made rather a ludicrous mistake here. I carefully preserved a 
very hard irregular mass*coated with this flesh, thinking it was 
a bone, but later, after we had carried it for days on the sledge, 
we found that this ‘ pelvic bone’ as we called it—melted in warm 
water! No head was found and in this respect the fish—which 
was possibly about four feet long—agrees with the four large 
headless fish found by the Discovery Expedition. We had a hot 
discussion in the hut as to this problem of decapitation, but 
came to no definite conclusion, for it seemed too far for seals 
to carry it. 
That night we slept at Park Lane Camp. We had been 
traversing a frozen park, set out in circular beds with winding 
paths in every direction. The ‘ flower beds’ were represented 
by elevated masses of ice thirty feet across, exactly like an 
apple-pie with a raised crust—even to the four cuts made by 
the housewife across the top! The last two days we had only 
progressed seven miles, and for five of them we had carried 
the sledge rather than dragged it. [See Illustration, page 422. | 
Next day, however, we found that to the south the glacier 
was nearly continuous. It had not been dissected by thaw- 
waters to nearly the same extent, and by 4 P.M. we managed to 
advance ten miles to the south-west. We camped on a platform 
of weathered ice, so rotten that it resembled a layer of honey- 
comb. We found that this honeycomb ice was very common in 
this part of the Koettlitz. 
We tried to find an easier way out of the numerous undula- 
tions which now characterised the surface, but unsuccessfully 
and so plugged on south-west. We used to ‘ pully-haul’ up one 
side (i.e. hand over hand) and then toboggan down the other. 
P.O. Evans was an expert steersman, while we others used to 
