Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/300

the east end of the lake—the first of many cold meals, and like all of them consisting chiefly of biscuit and butter, varied by biscuit without butter. However, we had a cake of chocolate each afternoon and a little cheese.

Hereabouts the wide valley was filled with morainic débris, and we passed close to several of the cliff glaciers. I was much surprised to find that the bed of the valley now commenced to rise, for we knew we were approaching the sea. We continued to ascend and could see no way out of the trough. Immediately ahead was a great rock barrier across the valley and evidently several thousand feet high. [See Illustration, p. 420.] However, in the next few miles I counted no less than thirteen dead seals which had somehow come up from the coast, and I felt sure we could easily manage anything they could traverse.

Soon we began to open up a narrow defile down the north side of the valley, but this outlet—a sort of notch one thousand feet deep scored in the bottom of the trough—was apparently barred by a tributary cliff glacier.

It was now nearly six o'clock and my shoulder was aching with my pack. Judging from the readiness of the others to drop their loads, I concluded that they felt the same. But we all had an idea that a few minutes later would give us a view of the sea.

We wondered if we could pass around the snout of this wonderful tributary immediately in front. It opposed a face of ice 40 feet high, but just where it butted into the steep (south) slope of the defile there was a gap. So narrow was this that one could almost touch the ice face on one