358 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 



sledge was a bit in the lurch, and Scott drew steadily away 

 from us. I knew I could ordinarily hold my own with him, 

 but for the first two hours we dropped till we were several 

 hundred yards astern ; try as I would to rally up my team 

 we could gain nothing. On examining the runners how- 

 ever we soon discovered the cause by the presence of a thin 

 film of ice. After that we ran easily. The thing one must 

 avoid doing is to touch them with the hand or mitt, as any- 

 thing damp will make ice on them. We usually turn the 

 sledge on its side and scrape one runner at a time with the 

 back of our knives so as to avoid any chance of cutting or 

 chipping them. In the afternoon either the tea or the 

 butter we had at lunch made us so strong that we fairly 

 overran the other team." * 



"We must push on all we can, for we are now 6 days 

 behind Shackleton, all due to that wretched storm. So far, 

 since we got among the disturbances we have not seen such 

 alarming crevasses as I had expected; certainly dogs could 

 have come up as far as this." 2 



"At lunch we could see big pressure ahead having 

 done first over five miles. Soon after lunch, having gone 

 down a bit, we rose among very rough stuff. We plugged 

 on until 4.30, when ski became quite impossible, and we 

 put them on the sledges and started on foot. We imme- 

 diately began putting legs down : one step would be on 

 blue ice and the next two feet down into snow : very hard 

 going. The pressure ahead seemed to stretch right into a 

 big glacier next the Keltie Glacier to the east, and so we 

 altered course for a small bluff point about two-thirds of 

 the way along the base of the Cloudmaker. We were to 

 camp at 6, but did not do so until about 6.30, the last ijr 

 hours in big pressure, crossing big and smaller waves, and 

 hundreds of crevasses which one of us generally found. 

 We are now camped in very big pressure, and with diffi- 

 culty we found a patch big enough to pitch the tent free 

 from crevasses. We are pretty well past the Keltie Glacier 

 which is a vast tumbled mass : there is a long line of ice 

 falls ahead, and I think there is a hard day ahead of us to- 



1 Bowers. 2 Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 506. 



