118. WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
possible to shelter the beasts from the cold wind. Weary 
was the most annoying, he would deliberately back into 
his wall and knock the whole structure down. In the case 
of my own pony, I had to put the wall out of his reach as 
his aim in life was to eat it, generally beginning at the 
bottom. He would diligently dislodge a block, and bring 
down the whole fabric. One cannot be angry with the silly 
beggars—Titus says a horse has practically no reasoning 
power, the thing to do is simply to throw up another wall 
and keep on at it. 
The weather cleared during the night, and the next day, 
February 19, we started off under ideal conditions, the sun 
was already dipping pretty low, marks easy to pick up, 
and on this occasion we could plainly see a cairn over seven 
miles away, raised by the mirage; the only trouble about 
seeing things so far off is that they take such an awful time 
to reach. Mirage is a great feature down here and one of 
the most common of optical phenomena on the Barrier ; 
it is often difficult to persuade oneself that open water does 
not lieahead. We passed the scene of Weary Willie’s fight 
with the dogs during the march and also had an amusing 
argument as to a dark object on the snow ahead. At first 
we thought it was the dog camp again, but it turned out to 
be an empty biscuit tin, such is the deceptive nature of the 
light. Later we sighted our old blizzard camp and decided 
to utilize the walls again. Weary Willie was decidedly 
worse and had to be literally jumped along by the pony to 
which he was attached. Within half a mile of the walls 
Weary refused to go farther, and after wasting some time 
in vain efforts to urge him on we had to camp where we 
were, having only done 104 miles. This was very sad, but 
I took hope from the fact that Titus, who is usually pretty 
pessimistic, had not yet given up hopes of getting him 
back alive. He had an extra whack of oats at the expense 
of the other ponies, and my big beast made up for his 
shortage by hauling the sledge towards him with his 
tethered leg, and forcing his nose into our precious biscuit 
tank, out of which he helped himself liberally at our ex- | 
pense. The sledges were now too light to anchor the 
