“It was a sad job saying good-bye.  It was thick, snowing and drifting clouds when we started back after making the depot, and the last we saw of them as we swung the sledge north was a black dot just disappearing over the next ridge and a big white pressure wave ahead of them....  Scott said some nice things when we said good-bye.  Anyway he has only to average seven miles a day to get to the Pole on full rations—­it’s practically a cert for him.  I do hope he takes Bill and Birdie.  The view over the ice-falls and pressure by the Mill Glacier from the top of the ice-falls is one of the finest things I have ever seen.  Atch is doing us proud."[254]

No five hundred mile journey down the Beardmore and across the Barrier can be uneventful, even in midsummer.  We had the same dreary drag, the same thick weather, fears and anxieties which other parties have had.  A touch of the same dysentery and sickness:  the same tumbles and crevasses:  the same Christmas comforts, a layer of plum pudding at the bottom of our cocoa, and some rocks collected from a moraine under the Cloudmaker:  the same groping for tracks:  the same cairns lost and found, the same snow-blindness and weariness, nightmares, food dreams....  Why repeat?  Comparatively speaking it was a very little journey:  and yet the distance from Cape Evans to the top of the Beardmore Glacier and back is 1164 statute miles.  Scott’s Southern Journey of 1902-3 was 950 statute miles.

One day only is worth recalling.  We got into the same big pressure above the Cloudmaker which both the other parties experienced.  But where the other two parties made east to get out of it, we went west at Wright’s suggestion:  west was right.  The day really lives in my memory because of the troubles of Keohane.  He fell into crevasses to the full length of his harness eight times in twenty-five minutes.  Little wonder he looked a bit dazed.  And Atkinson went down into one chasm head foremost:  the worst crevasse fall I’ve ever seen.  But luckily the shoulder straps of his harness stood the strain and we pulled him up little the worse.

All three parties off the plateau owed a good deal to Meares, who, on his return with the two dog-teams, built up the cairns which had been obliterated by the big blizzard of December 5-8.  The ponies’ walls were drifted level with the surface, and Meares himself had an anxious time finding his way home.  The dog tracks also helped us a good deal:  the dogs were sinking deeply and making heavy weather of it.

[Illustration:  ADAMS MOUNTAINS]

[Illustration:  Cherry-Garrard.  Keohane.  Atkinson—­FIRST RETURN PARTY]