There are no germs in the Antarctic, save for a few isolated specimens which almost certainly come down from civilization in the upper air currents.  You can sleep all night in a wet bag and clothing, and sledge all day in a mail of ice, and you will not catch a cold nor get any aches.  You can get deficiency diseases, like scurvy, for inland this is a deficiency country, without vitamines.  You can also get poisoned if you allow your food to remain thawed out too long, and if you do not cover the provisions in a depot with enough snow the sun will get at them, even though the air temperature is far below freezing.  But it is not easy to become diseased.

On the other hand, once something does go wrong it is the deuce and all to get it right:  especially cuts.  And the isolation of the polar traveller may place him in most difficult circumstances.  There are no ambulances and hospitals, and a man on a sledge is a very serious weight.  Practically any man who undertakes big polar journeys must face the possibility of having to commit suicide to save his companions, and the difficulty of this must not be overrated, for it is in some ways more desirable to die than to live if things are bad enough:  we got to that stage on the Winter Journey.  I remember discussing this question with Bowers, who had a scheme of doing himself in with a pick-axe if necessity arose, though how he could have accomplished it I don’t know:  or, as he said, there might be a crevasse and at any rate there was the medical case.  I was horrified at the time:  I had never faced the thing out with myself like that.

They left the Upper Glacier Depot under Mount Darwin on February 8.  This day they collected the most important of those geological specimens to which, at Wilson’s special request, they clung to the end, and which were mostly collected by him.  Mount Darwin and Buckley Island, which are really the tops of high mountains, stick out of the ice at the top of the glacier, and the course ran near to both of them, but not actually up against them.  Shackleton found coal on Buckley Island, and it was clear that the place was of great geological importance, for it was one of the only places in the Antarctic where fossils could be found, so far as we knew.  The ice-falls stretched away as far as you could see towards the mountains which bound the glacier on either side, and as you looked upwards towards Buckley Island they were like a long breaking wave.  One of the great difficulties about the Beardmore was that you saw the ice-falls as you went up, and avoided them, but coming down you knew nothing of their whereabouts until you fell into the middle of pressure and crevasses, and then it was almost impossible to say whether you should go right or left to get out.

Evans was unable to pull this day, and was detached from the sledge, but this was not necessarily a very serious sign:  Shackleton on his return journey was not able to pull at this place.  Wilson wrote as follows: