20 
SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION [July 
of the chance of finding crevasses, by the sound and by 
the feel of one's feet on the snow, without seeing anything 
at all of the surface one was covering. Occasionally the 
moonlit fog allowed an edge to be lit up here and there, 
but the surface is so extraordinarily uniform and feature- 
less that we believe we are still well out of the windswept 
line of southerly blizzard and still in an area of eddying 
winds, heavy snowfall, and constant fogs formed by the 
meeting of cold Barrier air with the warmer, moister air 
which comes up from the sea ice, and especially from 
the innumerable fissures of the pressure ridges. We 
called this Fog Bay. 
The moon had again become visible almost overhead, 
but nothing else, until just as we found ourselves going 
up a longer rise and a steeper one than usual we saw a 
grey, irregular, mountainous-looking horizon confronting 
us close ahead. So here we unhitched from the sledges, 
and tying our lanyards together into a central knot, we 
walked up about 50 yards of icy slope interspersed with 
cracks, and having reached the top found we had another 
similar broken and irregular horizon ahead of us and 
another on our left. These were obviously the pressure 
ridges, and when we stood still we could hear a creaking 
and groaning of the ice underneath and around us, which 
convinced us, and later led us to think that the tidal 
action of the coast here was taken up in part at any rate 
by the pressure ridges without forming any definite tide 
crack. 
This excursion from our sledges gave us, as we thought, 
our right direction for the safer land ice, but on turning 
