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138
SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION
and try to get over the Southern Road[1] to-morrow morning. One breathes a prayer that the Road holds for the few remaining hours. It goes in one place between a berg in open water and a large pool of the glacier face—it may be weak in that part, and at any moment the narrow isthmus may break away. We are doing it on a very narrow margin.
If all is well I go to the ship to-morrow morning after the ponies have started, and then to Glacier Tongue.
- ↑ The Southern Road was the one feasible line of communication between the new station at C. Evans and the Discovery hut at Hut Point, for the rugged mountains and crevassed ice slopes of Ross Island forbade a passage by land. The Road afforded level going below the cliffs of the ice-foot, except where disturbed by the descending glacier, and there it was necessary to cross the body of the glacier itself. It consisted of the more enduring ice in the bays and the sea-ice along the coast, which only stayed fast for the season.
Thus it was of the utmost importance to get safely over the precarious part of the Road before the seasonal going-out of the sea-ice. To wait until all the ice should go out and enable the ship to sail to Hut Point would have meant long uncertainty and delay. As it happened, the Road broke up the day after the party had gone by.
