THE POLAR JOURNEY 363 



Island and the Dominion Range, for the centre of which 

 Scott is going to-morrow. A pretty hard plug this after- 

 noon, but no disturbance, and gradually we have left the 

 bare ice, and are mostly travelling on neve. Much of the 

 ice is white. I have been writing down angles and times 

 for Birdie, and writing this in the intervals. Scott's heel is 

 troubling him again. ['I have bad bruises on knee and 

 thigh'], 1 and generally there has been a run on the medical 

 cases for chafes, and minor ailments. There is now a keen 

 southerly wind blowing. It gets a little colder each day, 

 and we are already beginning to feel it on our sunburnt 

 faces and hands." 2 



Of the crevasses met in the morning Bowers wrote : 

 ' So far nobody has dropped down the length of his 

 harness, as I did on the Cape Crozier journey. On this 

 blue ice they are pretty conspicuous, and as they are 

 mostly snow-bridged one is well advised to step over any 

 line of snow. With my short legs this was strenuous work, 

 especially as the weight of the sledge would often stop me 

 with a jerk just before my leading foot quite cleared a 

 crevasse, and the next minute one would be struggling out 

 so as to keep the sledge on the move. It is fatal to stop the 

 sledge as nobody waits for stragglers, and you have to pick 

 up your lost ground by strenuous hurry. Of course some 

 one often gets so far down a hole that it is necessary to stop 

 and help him out." 



December 20. " To-day has been a great march — over 

 two miles an hour, and on the whole rising a lot. Soon 

 after starting we got on to the most beautiful icy surface, 

 smooth except for cracks and only patches of snow, most 

 of which we could avoid. We came along at a great rate. 



"The most interesting thing to see was that the Mill 

 Glacier is not, as was supposed, a tributary, but prob- 

 ably is an outlet falling from this glacier, and a great 

 size. However it was soon covered up with dense black 

 cloud, and there were billows of cloud behind us and below. 



"At lunch Birdie made the disastrous discovery that 

 the registering dial of his sledge-meter was off. A screw 



1 Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 510. 2 My own diary. 



