Owing to the heavy weights we had to transport our progress was slow, much slower than we had expected; and though the going was fair and we kept a steady pace, travelling a good deal by night, it was not until the end of March that we reached Mount Darwin, which I had fixed on for the second of our electric power stations.

By this time winter was approaching, the nights were beginning to be dark and cold, and the altitude (8000 ft.) was telling on some of us.

Nevertheless our second installation got finished about the last week in April, and again we gathered round (not quite such a hearty company as before) while the wireless man spoke to the operator we had left on Erebus.

Again the electrical radiations went crackling into space, and again we gave a cheer when the answer came back—­all well and instruments in perfect order.

Then, late as it was, we began on the last stage of our journey, which we knew would be a hard one.  Three hundred geographical miles in front; temperature down to minus 40 deg.; the sun several weeks gone, and nothing before us but thickening twilight, cold winds, snow, the rare aurora and the frequent moon.

But the worst fact was that our spirits were low, and do what I would to keep a good heart and cheer up the splendid fellows who had come with me, I could not help feeling the deepening effect of that sunless gloom.

In spite of this, I broke camp on April 25, and started straight as a die for the South.

It was a stiff fight over the upper glacier in latitude 85, with its razor-shaped ice, full of snow-covered crevasses, and three days out two of our best men fell into one of the worst of them.

I saw the accident from a dozen yards away, and running up I lay on my stomach and shouted down, but it was a black bottomless gulf and not a sound or a sign came back to me.

This cast a still deeper gloom on our company, who could not be cheered up, though I kept telling them we should be on the great plateau soon, please God, and then we should have a clear road to the Pole.

We were not much better on top though, for the surface was much broken up, and in that brewing place of the winds there seemed to be nothing but surging seas of cumulus cloud and rolling waves of snow.

The Polar march was telling on us badly.  We were doing no more than seven miles at a stretch.  So to help my shipmates to keep up their spirits (and perhaps to give a bit of a “heise” to my own) I had to sing all day long—­though my darling is right that I have no more voice than a corn-crake.

Sometimes I sang “Ramsey Town,” because it did not want much music, but generally “Sally’s the gel for me,” because it had a rattling chorus.  The men all joined in (scientific experts included), and if the angels took any heed of us, I think it must have touched them up to look down on our little company of puny men singing away as we trudged through that snowy wilderness which makes a man feel so small.