We stayed only for a few minutes, and then, taking the Queen's flag with us, we turned our backs upon the Pole and began to retrace our steps. Regretfully it is true, but conscious that, though failure was ours, we had done our best to avoid it.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE RETURN MARCH
Our homeward marches are a tale of sufferings from hunger and dysentery, of struggles against blizzards and crevasses and bad surfaces. One desire drove us on from depot to depot, and that was our supreme craving for food.
All of us had tragic dreams of getting food to eat, but rarely did we have the satisfaction of dreaming that we were actually eating. I did, however, once have a dream that I was eating bread and butter. Conscience is said to make men cowardly, and I am sure that it is as true to say that hunger makes them very peevish and irritable. We looked at each other as we ate our scanty meals, and felt a distinct grievance if one man managed to make his ration last longer than the rest of us. Sometimes we did our best to save a bit of biscuit for the next meal, but the problem whether it was better to eat the food at once or to keep a fragment to nibble afterwards was never solved.
At the start circumstances may be said to have favoured us, for we picked up the depot which we had ventured to leave on the great white plain, and the wind was so strongly behind that we were able to put the sail on the sledge.
In five days we had knocked off some eighty-six geographical miles of those which separated us from our home, and as we were left with only six days' biscuit on short ration and had to go 120 more miles before we reached our next depot, we decided to cut down our food by another biscuit.
A following wind continued to help us, and the sail was of such assistance that on one day we made a record of twenty-six and a half miles, and beat it on the next by doing twenty-nine miles.
But although to beat records is pleasant under any circumstances, my own pleasure was rather diminished by the facts that my heels were frost-bitten and cracked, and that there were also cracks under some of my toes.
We had, however, struggled on until we were within eight and a half miles of our depot, though had we been hindered instead of helped by the strong blizzard wind, it is no exaggeration to say that our chance of escaping starvation would have been inexpressibly small.
On the 20th we reached our depot at 12.30 P.M. with sore and aching bodies, and after a struggle against countless difficulties. For two hours we descended a snow-slope, with heavy sastrugi, and then we struck half a mile of badly crevassed névé. After that we got on to blue slippery ice, where we could obtain no foothold, and to add to the discomfort and danger of the situation, a gale was blowing which swept the sledge sideways and knocked us off our feet.