Page:The Worst Journey in the World volume 2.djvu/91

358 sledge was a bit in the lurch, and Scott drew steadily away from us. I knew I could ordinarily hold my own with him, but for the first two hours we dropped till we were several hundred yards astern; try as I would to rally up my team we could gain nothing. On examining the runners however we soon discovered the cause by the presence of a thin film of ice. After that we ran easily. The thing one must avoid doing is to touch them with the hand or mitt, as anything damp will make ice on them. We usually turn the sledge on its side and scrape one runner at a time with the back of our knives so as to avoid any chance of cutting or chipping them. In the afternoon either the tea or the butter we had at lunch made us so strong that we fairly overran the other team."

"We must push on all we can, for we are now 6 days behind Shackleton, all due to that wretched storm. So far, since we got among the disturbances we have not seen such alarming crevasses as I had expected; certainly dogs could have come up as far as this."

"At lunch we could see big pressure ahead having done first over five miles. Soon after lunch, having gone down a bit, we rose among very rough stuff. We plugged on until 4.30, when ski became quite impossible, and we put them on the sledges and started on foot. We immediately began putting legs down: one step would be on blue ice and the next two feet down into snow: very hard going. The pressure ahead seemed to stretch right into a big glacier next the Keltic Glacier to the east, and so we altered course for a small bluff point about two-thirds of the way along the base of the Cloudmaker. We were to camp at 6, but did not do so until about 6.30, the last 1½ hours in big pressure, crossing big and smaller waves, and hundreds of crevasses which one of us generally found. We are now camped in very big pressure, and with difficulty we found a patch big enough to pitch the tent free from crevasses. We are pretty well past the Keltic Glacier which is a vast tumbled mass: there is a long line of ice falls ahead, and I think there is a hard day ahead of us to