Both Adams and Wild had fallen exhausted in their harness, but had recovered and gone on again. Marshall went on to the depot for food, and at 2 P.M. we got the meal we so desperately needed. And after this very near call we turned in and slept, thankful indeed to have escaped so far with our lives.
CHAPTER XXIX
STRUGGLING BACK
At last we were on the Barrier again, and with six days' food and only fifty miles between us and our next supply I thought that grave danger was behind us. But the man who congratulates himself that anxieties and perils are over, before he has reached the very end of his polar exploration work is wasting his time.
In our case Wild developed dysentery, the cause of which we could only ascribe to the horse-meat; while just before we left the glacier I broke through some soft snow and plunged into a hidden crevasse. The harness jerked up under my heart, and it seemed as though the glacier were saying, "There is the last touch for you; don't you come up here again!"
Certainly we were as tired of that glacier as it apparently was of us, and our joy at leaving it was tremendous; for although the Barrier gave us a most unfriendly greeting, we knew that a great many dangers were over, and thought that nothing except blizzards and thick weather were to be feared.
The Barrier, however, did not mean to be beaten by the glacier in the way of treating us harshly, for during our first day on it we were attacked by a wind which froze solidly all our wet clothes, and five minutes after the wind had sprung up we were struck by a furious blizzard of snow and heavy drift. Under the circumstances we had to pitch our camp, and He in our bags, patching our worn-out clothes—a rather tedious, if useful, pursuit when one was literally aching to go on.
During the following days there was a variety in our misfortunes—a variety, indeed, which was so terribly weakening that by the beginning of February our outlook had become more serious than it had ever been.
Dysentery had attacked all of us acutely; but if there was a variety in our troubles, there was none in our food, for we had only four miserably thin biscuits a day to eke out our horse-meat.
On February 2 we reached our next depot, and started on the following day with a new sledge and 150 lb. more weight. But on that day all of us were suffering from dysentery, and Wild was very bad indeed.
On the 4th I wrote in my diary, "Cannot write more. All down with acute dysentery; terrible day. No march possible; outlook serious. Fine weather."