Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/50

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 featureless 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