1 4 2 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 vertebras. 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 



