Page:The Worst Journey in the World volume 2.djvu/259

500 Our marching hours are nine per day. It is a long slog with a well-loaded sledge, and more tiring for me than the others, as I have no ski. However, as long as I can do my share all day and keep fit it does not matter much one way or the other.

"We had our first northerly wind on the plateau to-day, and a deposit of snow crystals made the surface like sand latterly on the march. The sledge dragged like lead. In the evening it fell calm, and although the temperature was −16° it was positively pleasant to stand about outside the tent and bask in the sun's rays. It was our first calm since we reached the summit too. Our socks and other damp articles which we hang out to dry at night become immediately covered with long feathery crystals exactly like plumes. Socks, mitts and finnesko dry splendidly up here during the night. We have little trouble with them compared with spring and winter journeys. I generally spread my bag out in the sun during the 1½ hours of lunch time, which gives the reindeer hair a chance to get rid of the damage done by the deposit of breath and any perspiration during the night."

Plenty of sun, heavy surfaces, iridescent clouds the worst windcut sastrugi I have seen, covered with bunches of crystals like gorse  ice blink all round  hairy faces and mouths dreadfully iced up on the march  hot and sweaty days' work, but sometimes cold hands in the loops of the ski sticks  windy streaky cirrus in every direction, all thin and filmy and scrappy  horizon clouds all being wafted about. These are some of the impressions here and there in Wilson's diary during the first ten days of the party's solitary march. On the whole he is enjoying himself, I think.

You should read Scott's diary yourself and form your own opinions, but I think that after the Last Return Party left him there is a load off his mind. The thing had worked so far, it was up to them now: that great mass of figures and weights and averages, those years of preparation, those months of anxiety—no one of them had been in vain.