All of us had heavy falls, and I had two very heavy ones which shook me severely. On several occasions one or more of us lost our footing and were swept by the wind down the ice-slope, only with the greatest difficulty getting back to our sledge and companions.
Bad, however, as that day was, and perilous as was our position, we had said a glad farewell to that awful plateau, and were on our way down the glacier.
On the next day I harnessed up for a while, but so bruised and battered was I by my falls that I soon had to give up pulling and to content myself by walking by the sledge. Fortunately we had a fair wind and a downhill course, so my inability to pull was not an important matter.
The 24th saw us with only two days' food left and one day's biscuit on much reduced ration, and we had to cover forty miles of crevasses before we could reach our next depot. Crevassed ice still added terribly to our troubles, but though weak I had almost recovered from my falls.
Farthest South, January 9, 1909. (See page 146)
Continually we seemed to be fighting for the same thing, to struggle on from one depot to the next to save ourselves from starvation. A lunch of a cup of tea, two biscuits, and two spoonsful of cheese does not make one exactly buoyant to attack the march of the afternoon, but by the 25th we were reduced to this, and at night the food, with the exception of one meal, was completely gone.
No biscuit was left, and all we had to sustain us was cocoa, tea, salt and pepper, and very little of these. On that night we were very tired indeed, and we knew that it was absolutely necessary for us to reach our depot on the following day. By 7 A.M. on the 26th we came to the end of all our provisions except a little tea and cocoa, and that day and the following one can never be erased from our memories, for they were the hardest and the most trying that any of us had ever spent in our lives.
From 7 A.M. on the 26th till 2 P.M. on the 27th we did sixteen miles over the worst surfaces and most dangerous crevasses we had encountered, only stopping for tea and cocoa till they were finished, and marching twenty hours at a stretch through snow 10 to 18 in. thick as a rule, with sometimes 2½ ft. of it. Often and often we fell into hidden crevasses, and were only saved by each other and by our harness. No words of mine could bring before you the mental and physical strain of those forty-eight hours. I will only say that had not an all-merciful Providence guided our steps we could never have arrived safely at the depot.
When we started at 7 A.M. on the 26th we had no biscuit left, and with only one pannikin of hoosh, mostly pony-maize, and one of tea, we marched till noon. Then we had another pannikin of tea and one ounce of chocolate and marched till 4.45 P.M. Having no food, we then had another pannikin of tea and marched until 10 P.M., when we had one small pannikin of cocoa. On again after that until 2 A.M., when we were utterly played out and slept until 8 A.M. Then we had a pannikin of cocoa and marched until 1 P.M., when we camped about half a mile from our depot.