“It was a very bad light all day, but after lunch it began to get worse, and by 5 o’clock it was snowing hard and we could see nothing.  We went on for nearly an hour, steering by the wind and any glimpse of sastrugi, and then, very reluctantly, Scott camped.  It looks better now.  The surface is much harder and more wind-swept, and as a rule the ice is only six inches underneath.  We are beginning to talk about Christmas.  We get very thirsty these days in the warm temperatures:  we shall feel it farther up when the cold gets into our open pores and sunburnt hands and cracked lips.  I am plastering some skin on mine to-night.  Our routine now is:  turn out 5.30, lunch 1, and camp at 7, and we get a short 8 hours’ sleep, but we are so dead tired we could sleep half into the next day:  we get about 91/2 hours’ march.  Tea at lunch a positive godsend.  We are raising the land to the south well, and are about 2500 feet up, latitude about 84 deg. 8’ S."[229]

The next day, December 16, Bowers wrote:  “We have had a really enjoyable day’s march, except the latter end of the afternoon.  At the outset in the forenoon my 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."[230]

“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."[231]

[Illustration:  MOUNT PATRICK—­E.  A. Wilson, del.]

“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 Keltie 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 11/2 hours in big pressure, crossing big and smaller