Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/70

bad light when walking along the cliff tops looking for a way down, but we had seen it from below [at a place where there was a break in the big ice cliff] and had decided to try for it to-day. It took us down the right direction [twice we crept up to the edge of the cliff with no success, but the third time we found the ridge down], and we got down directly in under the old land ice cliffs which still cover the more southern portions of the basalt cliffs of the Knoll. These ice cliffs are a monument to what wind can do; they are more than a hundred feet high in places and are deeply scooped out into vast grooved and concave hollows as though by a colossal gouge. By following along the foot of these weather-worn and dirty-banded old relics of glaciation one comes by a series of slides and climbs and scrambles to quite recent exposures of dark rock cliffs which were not exposed when I was here ten years ago.

Then, passing along the foot of these, one comes to more and loftier ice cliffs and more and still loftier rock cliffs, and along the very foot of these, in among rock débris and snow drifts and frozen thaw pools, and boulders which have fallen into the trough, we had to walk and climb and slide and crawl in the direction of the sea ice rookery. [We got along till finally we climbed along the top of a snow ridge with a razor-back edge. On our right was a drop of great depth with crevasses at the bottom: on our left was a smaller drop, also crevassed. We crawled along: it was exciting work in the half darkness. At the end was a series of slopes full of crevasses, and finally we got right in under the rock on to moraine.]