“Crean got some dry clothes here, and the cross has had a coat of white paint and is drying.  We went up Observation Hill and have found a good spot right on the top, and have already dug a hole which will, with the rock alongside, give us three feet.  From there we can see that this year’s old ice is in a terrible state, open water and open water slush all over near the land—­I have never seen anything like it here.  Off Cape Armitage and at the Pram Point pressure it is extra bad.  I only hope we can find a safe way back.”

“You would not think Crean had had such a pair of duckings to hear him talking so merrily to-night....”

“I really do think the cross is going to look fine."[361]

Observation Hill was clearly the place for it, it knew them all so well.  Three of them were Discovery men who lived three years under its shadow:  they had seen it time after time as they came back from hard journeys on the Barrier:  Observation Hill and Castle Rock were the two which always welcomed them in.  It commanded McMurdo Sound on one side, where they had lived:  and the Barrier on the other, where they had died.  No more fitting pedestal, a pedestal which in itself is nearly 1000 feet high, could have been found.

“Tuesday, January 22. Rousing out at 6 A.M. we got the large piece of the cross up Observation Hill by 11 A.M.  It was a heavy job, and the ice was looking very bad all round, and I for one was glad when we had got it up by 5 o’clock or so.  It is really magnificent, and will be a permanent memorial which could be seen from the ship nine miles off with a naked eye.  It stands nine feet out of the rocks, and many feet into the ground, and I do not believe it will ever move.  When it was up, facing out over the Barrier, we gave three cheers and one more.”

We got back to the ship all right and coasted up the Western Mountains to Granite Harbour; a wonderfully interesting trip to those of us who had only seen these mountains from a distance.  Gran went off to pick up a depot of geological specimens.  Lillie did a trawl.

This was an absorbing business, though it was only one of a long and important series made during the voyages of the Terra Nova.  Here were all kinds of sponges, siliceous, glass rope, tubular, and they were generally covered with mucus.  Some fed on diatoms so minute that they can only be collected by centrifuge:  some have gastric juices to dissolve the siliceous skeletons of the diatoms on which they feed:  they anchor themselves in the mud and pass water in and out of their bodies:  sometimes the current is stimulated by cilia.  There were colonies of Gorgonacea, which share their food unselfishly; and corals and marine degenerate worms, which started to live in little cells like coral, but have gone down in the world.  And there were starfishes, sea-urchins, brittle-stars, feather-stars and sea-cucumbers.  The sea-urchins are formed of hexagonal plates, the