THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



foolishly not roped, when I happened to look round 

 to speak to my companion, and found that he had 

 disappeared," wrote Mackintosh. " Suddenly I heard 

 my name called faintly from the bowels of the glacier, 

 and immediately rushed towards the place from which 

 the sound proceeded. I found McGillan in a yawning 

 chasm, many feet beneath me, and held up on a 

 projection of ice. I took off my straps from my pack 

 and to them tied my waist lashing, and lowered this 

 extemporised rope down to him. It just reached his 

 hand, and with much pulling on my part and knee- 

 climbing on his, he got safely to the surface of the 

 glacier again. The Primus stove and our supply of 

 food had gone further down the crevasse. We tried 

 to hook them up, and in doing so I lost my straps and 

 line which I had attached to a ski-stick, so we were 

 left almost without equipment. As soon as McGillan 

 had recovered from the shock he had received we 

 started off again, with the spare strap tying the two 

 of us together. We crossed over many snow-bridges 

 that covered the dangers underneath, but soon we were 

 in a perfect hot-bed of crevasses. They were impassable 

 and lay right across our path, so that we could look 

 down into awful depths. We turned and climbed 

 higher in order to get a clear passage round the top. We 

 were roped together and I was in the lead, with McGillan 

 behind, so that when I fell, as I often did, up to my 

 waist in a crevasse, he could pull me out again. We 

 found a better surface higher up, but when we began 

 to descend we again got into crevassed regions. At 

 first the crevasses were ice-covered gaps, but later we 

 came to huge open ones, whose yawning depths made 

 us shudder. It was not possible to cross them. We 

 started to ascend again, and soon came to a bridge of 



46 



