THE WINTER JOURNEY 267 
day before—pulling ourselves and one another up ridges, 
slithering down slopes, tumbling into and out of crevasses 
and holes of all sorts, we made our way along under the 
cliffs which rose higher and higher above us as we neared 
the black lava precipices which form Cape Crozier itself. 
We straddled along the top of a snow ridge with a razor- 
backed edge, balancing the sledge between us as we 
wriggled: 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, and I can tell you it was 
exciting work in the more than 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, and here we had to 
leave the sledge. 
We roped up, and started to worry along under the 
cliffs, which had now changed from ice to rock, and rose 
800 feet above us. The tumult of pressure which climbed 
against them showed no order here. Four hundred miles 
of moving ice behind it had just tossed and twisted those 
giant ridges until Job himself would have lacked words to 
reproach their Maker. We scrambled over and under, 
hanging on with our axes, and cutting steps where we 
could not find a foothold with our crampons. And always 
we got towards the Emperor penguins, and it really began 
to look as if we were going to do it this time, when we came 
up against a wall of ice which a single glance told us we 
could never cross. One of the largest pressure ridges had 
been thrown, end on, against the cliff. We seemed to be 
stopped, when Bill found a black hole, something like a 
fox’s earth, disappearing into the bowels of the ice. We 
looked at it: ‘‘ Well, here goes!” he said, and put his 
head in, and disappeared. Bowers likewise. It was a longish 
way, but quite possible to wriggle along, and presently 
I found myself looking out of the other side with a deep 
gully below me, the rock face on one hand and the ice 
on the other. “ Put your back against the ice and your feet 
against the rock and lever yourself along,” said Bill, who 
was already standing on firm ice at the far end in a snow 
pit. We cut some fifteen steps to get out of that hole. 
