Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/37

three or four cracks and lines of pressure chiefly radiating from Hut Point itself. The sledgemeter showed 13 m. 1500 yds., but we had not come in a direct line from Cape Evans. We lunched in the hut and had no difficulty with the door, as there was hardly any snowdrift against it.

After lunch we made better going to Cape Armitage, though there was still no snow here on the rough, rubbly ice, but it was not so bad as what we had been on during the forenoon, where the sea ice was still salt and crunchy, with humps everywhere, formed from the old weathered ice and salt flowers, none bigger than one's fist, allowing the feet to crush between them every step at a different angle. After Cape Armitage the surface became hard and snow-covered; and with the best going we met with the whole journey for a short two miles, we quickly reached the edge of the Barrier, finding a good slope of snowdrift where we struck it, and having no difficulty in drawing our sledges up one at a time. There was a snow-covered crack as usual at the top of the drift, not a working crack, and invisible until broken into.

Unfortunately, both in going out and in coming back, we reached the Barrier edge in too bad a light to see whether these snowdrifts were quite continuous all along the edge, but from the fact that they were so at the two different points at which we struck the edge in the dark, I think it is probable that the slope is now continuous pretty well everywhere. We rose about 12 ft. off the sea ice.

Coming down the snow slope off the Barrier was a stream of very cold air which we felt first when we were only a few yards from the foot, and lost very soon after