i 9 ir] MT. TERROR 13 



ning across our path from Mt. Terror and here, if one wished 

 to avoid very long uphill drags one had to approach the pressure 

 ridges fairly closely a thing quite easy with daylight, but afford- 

 ing us constant trouble in the dark and fog which hampered us 

 all along this part of our journey. 



To-day no landmarks were visible at all. We made a little 

 over one mile in the forenoon and y mile more in the afternoon. 

 It was a great relief to have done so without relaying. The 

 moon was invisible [only a glow where she is] and everything 

 was obscured by fog, but the surface was improving every hour. 

 In the afternoon we ran into crevassed ground, after having sus- 

 pected we were pulling the sledges up and down several rises of 

 moderate gradient. As we expected this, however, before reach- 

 ing the second long snow cape, we went on. The surface was 

 again hard and icy in places, with sometimes six inches of snow 

 loose upon it. Our feet went through this snow and slipped upon 

 the ivory-hard surface underneath. This was often near the top 

 of the ridges. In the hollows the surface was deep and soft and 

 crusted. One could judge much of the nature of the surface, and 

 of the chance of finding crevasses, by the sound and by the feel 

 of one's feet on the snow, without seeing anything at all of the 

 surface one was covering. Occasionally the moonlit fog allowed 

 an edge to be lit up here and there, but the surface is so extraor- 

 dinarily uniform and featureless that we believe we are still well 

 out of the windswept line of southerly blizzard and still in an 

 area of eddying winds, heavy snowfall, and constant fogs formed 

 by the meeting of cold Barrier air with the warmer, moister air 

 which comes up from the sea ice, and especially from the innu- 

 merable fissures of the pressure ridges. We called this Fog Bay. 



The moon had again become visible almost overhead, but 

 nothing else, until just as we found ourselves going up a longer 

 rise and a steeper one than usual we saw a grey, irregular, moun- 

 tainous-looking horizon confronting us close ahead. So here we 

 unhitched from the sledges, and tying our lanyards together into 

 a central knot, we walked up about 50 yards of icy slope inter- 

 spersed with cracks, and having reached the top found we had an- 

 other similar broken and irregular horizon ahead of us and an- 

 other on our left. These were obviously the pressure ridges, and 

 when we stood still we could hear a creaking and groaning of the 

 ice underneath and around us, which convinced us, and later led 



