Although the first day northward bound was radiantly fine and the travelling surface all that could be desired, we were compelled to push on until quite late to ensure covering the prescribed distance—­for a short march on the first day would have augured a gloomy future for us.

Reluctant as I was to confess it to myself, I soon realised that the ceding of one man from my party had been too great a sacrifice, but there was no denying it, and I was eventually compelled to explain the situation to Lashly and Crean and lay bare the naked truth.  No man was ever better served than I was by these two; they cheerfully accepted the inevitable, and throughout our home-ward march the three of us literally stole minutes and seconds from each day in order to add to our marches, but it was a fight for life:  The rarified air made our breathing more difficult, and we suffered from shortness of breath whenever the inequalities of the surface became severe, and sudden jerks conveyed themselves to our tired bodies through the medium of the rope traces.

Day after day we fought our way northward over the high Polar tableland.  The silence now that we had no other party with us was ghastly, for beyond the sound of our own voices and the groaning of the sledge runners when the surface was bad there was no sound whatever to remind us of the outer world.  As mile after mile was covered our thoughts wandered from the Expedition to those in our homeland, and thought succeeded thought while the march progressed until the satisfying effect of the last meal had vanished and life became one vast yearning for food.

Three days after leaving Captain Scott we encountered a blizzard and were forced to continue our marches although faced with navigational difficulties which made it impossible for us to maintain more than a very rough northward direction.  Muffled up tightly in our wind-proof clothing, -we did all in our power to prevent the dust-fine snow-flakes which whirled around from penetrating into the tiniest opening in our clothes.  The blizzard blinded and baffled us, forcing us always to turn our faces from it.  The stinging wind cut and slashed our cheeks like the constant jab of a thousand frozen needle points.

This first blizzard which fell upon us lasted for three whole days, and at the end of that time we found ourselves considerably wide of our course.

On the 7th January, in spite of a temperature of 22 degrees below zero, a fresh southerly wind and driving snow, Lashly, Crean, and myself laid 19 miles behind us.

On the 8th we again covered this distance, although the weather was so bad that we entirely lost the track, and on the following day, when the blizzard was at its worst, we fought our way forward for over 16 miles.  When the blizzard eventually abated we had hazy weather, but got an occasional glimpse of the sun, with which we corrected our course, and on the 13th January my party found itself right above the Shackleton Icefalls, and gazed down upon the more regular surface of the Beardmore Glacier hundreds of feet below us.