24 SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION [JULY 



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 debris 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 



