i 9 o 3 ] NEARING HOME 85 



disbelief in ski, one is bound to confess that if we get back 

 safely Shackleton will owe much to the pair he is now using.' 



'January 25. — At last we have sunshine again and a grand 

 opportunity for sketches and angles. The surface is bad and 

 the work increasingly heavy, but Wilson and I are determined 

 to leave as little as possible to chance and to get our invalid 

 along as quickly as his state will allow. We start him off 

 directly our breakfast is over, and whilst we are packing up 

 camp he gets well ahead, so that he is able to take things easy ; 

 we follow on and gradually catch him up, and after lunch the 

 same procedure is adopted. At the night halt he sits quietly 

 while the tent is pitched, and only goes into it when all is 

 prepared. He feels his inactivity very keenly, poor chap, and 

 longs to do his share of the work, but luckily he has sense 

 enough to see the necessity of such precaution. 



' The Bluff looks delightfully close in the bright sunshine, 

 but the depot must still be twenty or thirty miles away. Just 

 before we camped to-night we could see a little round cloud 

 over the centre of the Bluff ridge, and as we "rose " it further, 

 we made it out to be the smoke of Erebus ; it was cheerful to 

 think that here was something which was beyond the ship j it 

 is more than a hundred miles away from us, but we are too 

 well accustomed to see things at a distance to treat this fact as 

 wonderful.' 



1 January 26. — Plodding on in our usual style this afternoon, 

 we suddenly saw a white line ahead, and drawing closer found 

 a sledge track ; it must have been Barne's, on his return from 

 his survey work to the west. Thinking over it to-night, it is 

 wonderful what that track told us. We could see that there 

 had been six men with two sledges, and that all the former had 

 been going sound and well on ski ; the sledge runners had 

 been slightly clogged. From the state of the track it was 

 evident that they had passed about four days before on the 

 homeward route, and from the zigzagging of the course we 

 argued that the weather must have been thick at the time. 

 Slight discolouration of the snow showed that two or three 

 had been wearing leather boots, and so on : every imprint in 



