[285] Scott, Voyage of the Discovery, vol. i. pp. 480-487.

CHAPTER XV

ANOTHER SPRING

    O to dream, O to awake and wander
    There, and with delight to take and render,
    Through the trance of silence,
    Quiet breath;
    Lo! for there among the flowers and grasses,
    Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
    Only winds and rivers,
    Life and death.

The flowers were of snow, the rivers of ice, and if Stevenson had been to the Antarctic he would have made them so.

God sent His daylight to scatter the nightmares of the darkness.  I can remember now the joy of an August day when the sun looked over the rim of the Barne Glacier, and my shadow lay clear-cut upon the snow.  It was wonderful what a friendly thing that ice-slope became.  We put the first trace upon the sunshine recorder; there was talk of expeditions to Cape Royds and Hut Point, and survey parties; and we ate our luncheon by the daylight which shone through the newly cleared window.

The coming Search Journey was organized to reach the Upper Glacier Depot, and the plans were modelled upon the Polar Journey of the year before.  But now we had no extensive depots on the Barrier.  It was intended that the dogs should run two trips out to Corner Camp during this spring.  It was hoped that two parties of four men each might be able to ascend the Beardmore, one of them remaining about half-way up and doing geological and other scientific work while the other went up to the top.

In our inmost thoughts we were full of doubts and fears.  “I had a long talk with Lashly, who asked me what I candidly thought had happened to the Southern Party.  I told him a crevasse.  He says he does not think so:  he thinks it is scurvy.  Talking about crevasses he says that, on the return of the Second Return Party, they came right over the ice-falls south of Mount Darwin,—­descending about 2000 feet into a great valley, down which they travelled towards the west, and so to the Upper Glacier Depot.  I believe Scott told Evans (Lieut.) that he meant to come back this same way.”

“Then the stuff they got into above the Cloudmaker must have been horrible.  ’Why, there are places there you could put St. Paul’s into, and that’s no exaggeration, neither,’ and they spent two nights in it.  All the way down to the Gateway he says there were crevasses, great big fellows thirty feet across, which we of the First Return Party had crossed both going and coming back and which we never saw.  But then much of the snow had gone and they were visible.  Lieut.  Evans was very badly snowblind most of this time.  Then outside the Gateway, on the Barrier, they crossed many crevasses, and some had fallen in where we had passed over them.”