“This makes one think.  Is the state of affairs in which we found the glacier an extraordinary one, the snow being a special phenomenon due to that great blizzard and snowfall?  Are we going to find blue ice this year where we found thick soft snow last?  Well!  I have got a regular bad needle again, just as I have had before.  But somehow the needle has always worked off when we get right into it.  What a blessing it is that things are seldom as bad in the reality as you expect they are going to be in your imagination:  though I must say the Winter Journey was worse even than I had imagined.  I remember that this time last year the thought of the Beardmore was very terrible:  but the reality was never very bad.”

“Lashly thinks it would be practically impossible for five men to disappear down a crevasse.  Where three men got through (and he said it would be impossible to get worse stuff than they came through), five men would be still better off.  This is not my view, however.  I think that the extra weight of one man might make all the difference in crossing a big crevasse:  and if several men fell through one of those great bridges when sledge and men were all on it, I do not think the bridge would hold the sledge."[286]

Several trips were made to Cape Royds over the Barne Glacier, and then by portaging over the rocks to Shackleton’s old hut.  The sea was open here, except for small niches of ice, and the hut and the cape were comparatively free from drifts; probably the open water had swallowed the drifting snow.  Not so Hut Point, which was surrounded by huge drifts:  the verandah which we had built up as a stable was filled from floor to roof:  there was no ice-foot to be seen, only a long snow-slope from the door to the sea-level.  The hut itself, when we had dug our way into it, was clear.  We took down stores for the Search Journey, and brought back with us the only surviving sledge-meter.

These instruments, which indicate by a clockwork arrangement the distance travelled in miles and yards, are actuated by a wheel which runs behind the sledge.  They are of the greatest possible use, especially when sledging out of sight of land on the Barrier or Plateau, and we bitterly regretted that we had no more.  They do not have an easy time on a glacier, and we lost the mechanism of one of our three Polar Journey meters when on the Beardmore.  Dog-driving is hard on them; and pony-driving when the ponies are like Christopher plays the very deuce.  Anyway we found we had only one left for this year, and this was more or less a dud.  It was mended so far as possible but was never really reliable, and latterly was useless.  A lot of trouble was taken by Lashly to make another with a bicycle wheel from one of our experimental trucks, the revolutions of which were marked on a counter which was almost exactly similar to one of our anemometer registers.  A bicycle wheel of course stood much higher than our proper sledge-meters, and a difficulty rose in fixing it to the sledge so as to prevent its wobbling and at the same time allow it the necessary amount of play.