164 WITH SCOTT: THE SILVER LINING 



after saying he had never seen any one do it by sheer luck 

 before, he proceeded to teach us the dodge ; and later Deben- 

 ham became quite a knot-master under his willing tuition. 



" A fine sunny morning, the first for many days. Even 

 this scene of desolation looks cheerful." Thus my sledge 

 diary for the 2ist. But the route did not improve. I wrote : 

 " We got going on awful stuff" — rounded pools of ice, between 

 tables. It 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 c glass-house ' and leaping three-foot chasms, 

 between high fascines 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 vertebrae. These were pre- 

 served in a yellow fatty substance smelling like vaseline and 

 quite soft. I made rather a ludicrous mistake here. I care- 

 fully 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 repre- 

 sented 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. 



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 



