ch is sometimes not much less than
a mile in a year. Perhaps you can imagine the chaos which it piles up:
there are pressure ridges compared to which the waves of the sea are like
a ploughed field. These are worst at Cape Crozier itself, but they extend
all along the southern slopes of Mount Terror, running parallel with the
land, and the disturbance which Cape Crozier makes is apparent at Corner
Camp some forty miles back on the Barrier in the crevasses we used to
find and the occasional ridges we had to cross.

In the Discovery days the pressure just where it hit Cape Crozier formed
a small bay, and on the sea-ice frozen in this bay the men of the
Discovery found the only Emperor penguin rookery which had ever been
seen. The ice here was not blown out by the blizzards which cleared the
Ross Sea, and open water or open leads were never far away. This gave the
Emperors a place to lay their eggs and an opportunity to find their food.
We had therefore to find our way along the pressure to the Knoll, and
thence penetrate _through_ the pressure to the Emperors' Bay. And we had
to do it in the dark.

Terror Point, which we were approaching in the fog, is a short twenty
miles from the Knoll, and ends in a long snow-tongue running out into the
Barrier. The way had been travelled a good many times in Discovery days
and in daylight, and Wilson knew there was a narrow path, free from
crevasses, which skirted along between the mountain and the pressure
ridges running parallel to it. But it is one thing to walk along a
corridor by day, and quite another to try to do so at night, especially
when there are no walls by which you can correct your course--only
crevasses. Anyway, Terror Point must be somewhere close to us now, and
vaguely in front of us was that strip of snow, neither Barrier nor
mountain, which was our only way forward.

We began to realize, now that our eyes were more or less out of action,
how much we could do with our feet and ears. The effect of walking in
finnesko is much the same as walking in gloves, and you get a sense of
touch which nothing else except bare feet could give you. Thus we could
feel every small variation in surface, every crust through which our feet
broke, every hardened patch below the soft snow. And soon we began to
rely more and more upon the sound of our footsteps to tell us whether we
were on crevasses or solid ground. From now onwards we were working among
crevasses fairly constantly. I l