Page:The Worst Journey in the World volume 2.djvu/102

Rh Island and the Dominion Range, for the centre of which Scott is going to-morrow. A pretty hard plug this afternoon, but no disturbance, and gradually we have left the bare ice, and are mostly travelling on névé. 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'], 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."

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 probably 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