Tongue and pencil would sadly fail to describe the magic of the colouring in the days when the sun was leaving us. The very clouds at this time were iridescent with rainbow hues. The change from twilight into night, sometimes lit by a crescent moon, was extraordinarily beautiful, for the white cliffs gave no part of their colour away, and the rocks beside them did not part with their blackness; so the effect of deepening night over these contrasts was singularly weird. Throughout April hardly a day passed without an auroral display, and about the beginning of that month the temperature began to drop considerably, and in calm, still weather the thermometer often registered 40° below zero.
On April 6 Marshall decided that it was necessary to amputate Brocklehurst's big toe, as there was no sign of its recovery from frost-bite; and the patient having been put under chloroform, the bone was removed, and the sufferer moved to my room, where he remained till just before mid-winter's day.
When mid-winter's day had passed, and the twilight became daily more marked, I set on foot arrangements for the sledging work in the following spring. For it was desirable that, at the earliest possible date, a depot of stores should be placed at a point to the south, in preparation for the departure of the Southern Party, which was to march towards the Pole. This depot I hoped to make at least a hundred miles from the winter quarters.
It was also desirable that definite information should be obtained regarding the condition of the snow surface on the Barrier; and I also wanted various members of the party to have practice in sledging before the serious work began. Considering our scarcity of ponies, I resolved that these preliminary sledging journeys should be performed by man-haulage.
During the winter I had given earnest consideration to the question of the date on which the party that was to march towards the Pole should leave the hut. Our hoped-for goal lay over 880 statute miles to the south, and the brief summer was all too short a time in which to march so far into the unknown and return. The ship would have to leave for the north about the end of February, for the ice would then be closing in; and, moreover, we could not hope to carry on our sledges much more than a three months' supply of provisions on anything like full rations.
Finally, I resolved that the Southern Party should leave mid-winter quarters on October 28, for by starting earlier the ponies would probably suffer from the severe cold at nights; and if the ponies were quickly incapacitated, we should have gained no advantage from our early start.
Preparing a Sledge during the Winter
But the date having been fixed, it became necessary to arrange for the laying of the depot during the early spring, and I thought that the first step towards this should be a preliminary journey on the Barrier surface, so that we might gain an idea of the prevailing conditions, and find out if the motor-car would be of service for at any rate the early portion of the journey.