When he was down in the crevasse he wanted to
go off exploring, but we dissuaded him. Of course it was a great
opportunity. He kept on saying, 'I wonder why this is running the
way it is--you expect to find them at right angles.'
Scott found inside crevasse warmer than above, but had no
thermometer. It is a great wonder the whole sledge did not drop
through: the inside was like the cliff of Dover.
_Note_ 14, _p_. 136.--_February_ 28. Meares and I led off with a dog
team each, and leaving the Barrier we managed to negotiate the first
long pressure ridge of the sea ice where the seals all lie, without
much trouble--the dogs were running well and fast and we kept on
the old tracks, still visible, by which we had come out in January,
heading a long way out to make a wide detour round the open water
off Cape Armitage, from which a very wide extent of thick black fog,
'frost smoke' as we call it, was rising on our right. This completely
obscured our view of the open water, and the only suggestion it gave
me was that the thaw pool off the Cape was much bigger than when
we passed it in January and that we should probably have to make a
detour of three or four miles round it to reach Hut Point instead of
one or two. I still thought it was not impossible to reach Hut Point
this way, so we went on, but before we had run two miles on the sea
ice we noticed that we were coming on to an area broken up by fine
thread-like cracks evidently quite fresh, and as I ran along by the
sledge I paced them and found they curved regularly at every 30 paces,
which could only mean that they were caused by a swell.
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