But with the exception of Lashly and Crean that daydream never came true, for alas, those whose dearest lived for that Christmas never came home, and the one other spared lost his wife, besides his five companions.

The two teams struggled on until after 8 p.m., when at last Scott signalled to camp.  How tired we were—­almost cross.  But no sooner were the tents up than eyes looked out gladly from our dirty, bearded faces.  Once again the cooker boiled, and for that night we had a really good square meal—­more than enough of everything—­pemmican with pieces of pony meat in it, a chocolate biscuit, “ragout” raisins, caramels, ginger, cocoa, butter, and a double ration of biscuits.  How we watched Bowers cook that extra thick pemmican.  Had he put too much pepper in?  Would he upset it?  How many pieces of pony meat would we get each?  But the careful little Bowers neither burnt nor upset the hoosh:  it was up to our wildest expectations.  No one could have eaten more.

After the meal we gasped, we felt so comfortable.

But we had such yarns of home, such plans were made for next Christmas, and after all we got down our fur sleeping-bags, and for a change we were quite warm owing to the full amount of food which we so sorely needed.

After the others in my tent were asleep, little Birdie Bowers, bidding me “Good-night,” said, “Teddy, if all is well next Christmas we will get hold of all the poor children we can and just stuff them full of nice things, won’t we?”

It was unthinkable then that five out of the eight of us would soon be lying frozen on the Great Ice Barrier, their lives forfeited by a series of crushing defeats brought about by Nature, who alone metes out success or failure to win back for those who venture into the heart of that ice-bound continent.

Our Latitude was now 85 degrees 50 minutes S., we were 8000 feet above the Barrier.  Temperature -8 degrees, with a fresh southerly wind, but we didn’t care that night how hard it blew or whether it was Christmas or Easter.  We had done 17 miles distance and success lay within our grasp apparently.

On the following day we were up at six and marched a good 15 miles south with no opposition from crevasses or pressure ridges.  The march over the Plateau continued without incident—­excepting that on December 28 my team had a great struggle to keep up with Captain Scott’s.

The surface was awfully soft, and though we discarded our outer garments we sweated tremendously.  At about 11 a.m.  Scott and I changed places.  I found his sledge simply glided along whereas he found no such thing.  The difference was considerable.  After lunch we changed sledges and left Scott’s team behind with ease.  We stopped at the appointed time, and after supper Captain Scott came into our tent and told us that we had distorted our sledge by bad strapping or bad loading.  This was, I think, correct, because Oates had dropped his sleeping-bag off a few days back through erring in the other direction and not strapping securely—­we meant to have no recurrence and probably racked our sledge by heaving too hard on the straps.