204 
SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION [February 
pressed sideways into the sole when it was wet clung 
like a leech ! 
Each morning we had a painful ceremony when it 
was necessary to don our frozen boots. Remarks more 
fervid than polite flew about the tent, and some of us 
found that quotations from the poet philosopher lubricated 
the process. 
' . . . Gritstone,- — gritstone a-crumble : 
Clammy squares that sweat, as if the corpse they keep 
Were oozing through * 
was supposed to be a very potent incantation. We carried 
no blacking, but this ceremony was called ' Browning the 
Boots.' 
Open water washed the face of the Blue Glacier. 
Black snaky heads — reminding me of prehistoric plesio- 
saurs — could be seen darting about amid the brash ice. 
They were Emperor penguins, which swim with their 
bodies submerged. 
To the south of us stretched the sea ice, which was 
evidently rotten and ready to move north. Beyond 
the Blue Glacier on the right stretched a broad fringe of 
moraine which extended fairly continuously along the 
north side of the Koettlitz Glacier. Immediately ahead 
of us was a fifty-foot ice cliff, but some distance to the 
south we found a lower place and managed with the 
Alpine rope to lower the sledges down to the sea ice. We 
crossed the ^ pressure ice ' — where great cakes had been 
up-ended to form a frozen rampart — and reached a good 
sledging surface at last. Near by was a great pool of water 
