THE POLAR JOURNEY 375 



constant rallies to keep up. We certainly manage to do so, 

 but I am sure we cannot keep this up for long. We are all 

 pretty well done up to-night after doing 13.3 miles. 



Our salvation is on the summits of the ridges, where 

 hard neve and sastrugi obtain, and we skip over this slip- 

 pery stuff and make up lost ground easily. In soft snow 

 the other team draw steadily ahead, and it is fairly heart- 

 breaking to know you are putting your life out hour after 

 hour while they go along with little apparent effort. 



December 28. The last few days have been absol- 

 utely cloudless, with unbroken sunshine for twenty-four 

 hours. It sounds very nice, but the temperature never 

 comes above zero and what Shackleton called "the pitiless 

 increasing wind" of the great plateau continues to blow at 

 all times from the south. It never ceases, and all night it 

 whistles round the tents, all day it blows in our faces. 

 Sometimes it is S.S.E., or S.E. to S., and sometimes even 

 S. to W., but always southerly, chiefly accompanied by low 

 drift which at night forms quite a deposit round the sledges. 

 We expected this wind, so we must not growl at getting it. 

 It will be great fun sailing the sledges back before it. As 

 far as weather is concerned we have had remarkably fine 

 days up here on this limitless snow plain. I should like to 

 know what there is beneath us — mountains and valleys 

 simply levelled off to the top with ice ? We constantly 

 come across disturbances which I can only imagine are 

 caused by the peaks of ice-covered mountains, and no 

 doubt some of the ice-falls and crevasses are accountable 

 to the same source. Our coming west has not cleared them, 

 as we have seen more disturbances to the west, many miles 

 away. However, they are getting less and less, and are now 

 nothing but featureless rises with apparently no crevasses. 

 Our first two hours' pulling to-day. . . . 



From Lashlys Diary 



December 29, 191 1. A nasty head wind all day and 

 low drift which accumulates in patches and makes it the 

 deuce of a job to get along. We have got to put in long 

 days to do the distance. 



