1 58 SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION [NOVEMBER 



We left a depot of one week's stores here, as ordered by 

 Captain Scott. We stuck a bright tin on the pole (as well as 

 the flag) which shows up well when the sun is bright. 



The outlook was not promising. Ahead of us was a wide 

 bay filled with screw-pack. This is sea ice which has been jammed 

 haphazard on to the coast. Many of the upturned blocks were 

 eight feet high. Snow had fallen on this surface and filled in 

 some of the hollows, and a more inviting man-trap or leg- 

 breaker it would be difficult to imagine. However, by next day's 

 noon we were through the worst of it. It was such hurried, tiring 

 work that we had no leisure for photography. There was a 

 quaint spoor standing up in relief two inches above the snow 

 and made by an Emperor penguin, of which I should have much 

 liked a stereo-photo. 



On the 2 ist we came up to an old friend. Nearly filling 

 a small bay was a giant berg about two miles long with a black 

 spot near the north-east corner. This was the end of Glacier 

 Tongue which had broken away on March i in the big gale 

 and settled down fifty miles or so away on the other side of 

 the Sound. 



The fodder depot had been left on the Tongue by Oates in 

 January and served as a useful survey mark. Our best route 

 lay within this mass of transported ice. It was a good omen 

 that there were some twenty seals basking off the cape, for we 

 knew we should have to live largely on seal meat during our 

 stay at Granite Harbour. 



As we pulled under the thirty-foot ice cliffs of the broken 

 Tongue we could see remarkable snow folds apparent in some 

 fresh sections which tend to show that much of it had grown 

 in situ (in its former position) from snow cornices and drift 

 rather than from mainland ice. 



The mainland shore was now almost wholly covered by the 

 southern portion of the huge piedmont glacier which extends 

 in an unbroken ' Chinese Wall ' of ice to Granite Harbour. It 

 was an imposing sight and an ugly one to a sledging party 

 travelling over the sea ice for as one moves north there are 

 fewer and fewer places where it can be ascended, and its thirty- 

 foot barrier affords a poor lee in time of trouble. This piedmont 

 was moulded over hill and dale in an alternation of icy dimples 

 and pimples, but several rounded domes and ridges projected as 



