190 SCOT TS  LAst EXPEDITION © [FEBRUARY 
However we had plenty of seal meat, and as we were not work- 
ing we required much less food. | 
So passed several days. Gran spent all one afternoon mak- 
ing chupatties. The lid of the camera box was his pudding- 
board. He used the wheat meal ‘ thickers’ for dough, and col- 
lared our allowance of raisins. The cakes were cut out with the 
rim of a cup, and then fried in a mixture of butter, fat, blubber, 
and soot. Anyhow the result was highly successful, though the 
inside was somewhat wet and the whole cake I should now con- 
sider distinctly heavy! 
Each day we started the last bag of something precious. First 
the pemmican, then the chocolate, then the butter. Only one 
seal had been visible for some days, and I decreed her doom. 
She lay on a large piece of ice which was rising and falling with 
the swell. We reached this across an ice island, surging about in 
a large pool. In spite of all this movement, no more of the ice 
moved north as far as we could judge. 
On the evening of February 1st I held a council. Captain 
Scott’s instructions read: ‘I am of the opinion that the retreat 
should not be commenced until the bays have refrozen, probably 
towards the end of March. An attempt to retreat overland 
might involve you in difficulties—whereas you could build a 
stone hut—provision it with seal meat and remain in safety in 
any convenient station on the coast.’ 
However, he gave me permission to begin the retreat in 
February if we were not relieved in January, and I began to 
prepare for this event, for I felt sure we could traverse the pied- 
mont glacier. 
Cracks seemed to be spreading on the sea ice even while one 
was watching it. The surging ice-blocks in the tide-crack, now 
twenty feet wide, rose several feet. Now and again a huge 
shock, as of a big rock bumping on another, announced a new 
crack, while a constant roar, like that of a distant lion, announced 
the periods of maximum of the swell rolling in from twenty miles 
away. 
On February 3 Debenham, Gran, and I climbed the glacier 
slope behind our camp to prospect for a path. We roped up and © 
proceeded about three miles southward, keeping well behind the 
crevasses. [hese are numerous on the steep seaward slope, but 
we met with none on the fairly level ground, though we could 
