252 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
A last look round before turning in, a good day’s march 
behind, enough fine fat pemmican inside you to make you 
happy, the homely smell of tobacco from the tent, a pleas- 
ant sense of soft fur and the deep sleep to come. And 
all the softest colours God has made are in the snow; on 
Erebus to the west, where the wind can scarcely move his 
cloud of smoke; and on Terror to the east, not so high, 
and more regular in form. How peaceful and dignified it 
all is. 
That was what you might have seen four months ago 
had you been out on the Barrier plain. Low down on the 
extreme right or east of the land there was a black smudge 
of rock peeping out from great snow-drifts: that was the 
Knoll, and close under it were the cliffs of Cape Crozier, 
the Knoll looking quite low and the cliffs invisible, al- 
though they are eight hundred feet high, a sheer precipice 
falling to the sea. 
It is at Cape Crozier that the Barrier edge, which runs 
for four hundred miles as an ice-cliff up to 200 feet high, 
meets the land. The Barrier is moving against this land 
at a rate which is sometimes not much less than a mile ina 
year. Perhaps you can imagine the chaos which it piles up: 
there are pressure ridges compared to which the waves 
of the sea are like a ploughed field. These are worst at 
Cape Crozier itself, but they extend all along the southern 
slopes of Mount Terror, running parallel with the land, 
and the disturbance which Cape Crozier makes 1s apparent 
at Corner Camp some forty miles back on the Barrier in 
the crevasses we used to find and the occasional ridges we 
had to cross. 
In the Discovery days the pressure just where it hit 
Cape Crozier formed a small bay, and on the sea-ice 
frozen in this bay the men of the Discovery found the only 
Emperor penguin rookery which had ever been seen. The 
ice here was not blown out by the blizzards which cleared 
the Ross Sea, and open water or open leads were never far 
away. This gave the Emperors a place to lay their eggs and 
an opportunity to find their food. We had therefore to find 
our way along the pressure to the Knoll, and thence pene- 
