460 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 



maining about half-way up and doing geological and other 

 scientific work while the other went up to the top. 



In our inmost thoughts we were full of doubts and fears. 

 " I had a long talk with Lashly, who asked me what I can- 

 didly thought had happened to the Southern Party. I told 

 him a crevasse. He says he does not think so : he thinks it 

 is scurvy. Talking about crevasses he says that, on the 

 return of the Second Return Party, they came right over 

 the ice-falls south of Mount Darwin, — descending about 

 2000 feet into a great valley, down which they travelled 

 towards the west, and so to the Upper Glacier Depot. I 

 believe Scott told Evans (Lieut.) that he meant to come 

 back this same way." 



" Then the stuff they got into above the Cloudmaker 

 must have been horrible. ' Why, there are places there you 

 could put St. Paul's into, and that's no exaggeration, 

 neither,' and they spent two nights in it. All the way down 

 to the Gateway he says there were crevasses, great big 

 fellows thirty feet across, which we of the First Return 

 Party had crossed both going and coming back and which 

 we never saw. But then much of the snow had gone and 

 they were visible. Lieut. Evans was very badly snowblind 

 most of this time. Then outside the Gateway, on the Bar- 

 rier, they crossed many crevasses, and some had fallen in 

 where we had passed over them." 



" This makes one think. Is the state of affairs in which 

 we found the glacier an extraordinary one, the snow being 

 a special phenomenon due to that great blizzard and snow- 

 fall ? Are we going to find blue ice this year where we 

 found thick soft snow last ? Well ! I have got a regular 

 bad needle again, just as I have had before. But somehow 

 the needle has always worked off when we get right into it. 

 What a blessing it is that things are seldom as bad in the 

 reality as you expect they are going to be in your imagina- 

 tion : though I must say the Winter Journey was worse 

 even than I had imagined. I remember that this time last 

 year the thought of the Beardmore was very terrible : but 

 the reality was never very bad." 



"Lashly thinks it would be practically impossible for 



