It is at Cape Crozier that the Barrier edge, which runs for four hundred miles as an ice-cliff up to 200 feet high, meets the land.  The Barrier is moving against this land at a rate which 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 loathe them in full daylight when much can be done to avoid them, and when if you fall into them you can at any rate see where the sides are, which way they run and how best to scramble out; when your companions can see how to stop the sledge to which you are all attached by your harness; how most safely to hold the sledge