Perhaps all this sounds very greedy and uncivilised to anyone who has never been on the verge of starvation, but I wish to say again that hunger makes a man primitive. Not a smile broke from us as we planned wonderful feats of over-eating, in truth we were intensely serious about the matter, and we noted down in the back pages of our diaries details of feasts we would have when we got back to the land of plenty.
The dysentery from which we suffered was certainly due to the meat from the pony Grisi. This animal was shot when greatly fatigued, and I think that his flesh was poisoned by the presence of the poison of exhaustion, as is the case with animals that have been hunted. The manner in which we contrived to continue marching when suffering, and the speed with which we recovered when we got good food, were rather remarkable, and the reason doubtless was that the dysentery was due to poison, and was not produced by organic trouble.
Providentially we had a strong wind behind us during that period of distress and this assuredly saved us, for in our weakened state we could not have made long marches against a head-wind, and without long marches we would have starved between the depots.
In the early part of the journey over the level Barrier surface we felt the heat of the sun severely, although the temperature was very low. It was quite usual to feel one side of the face getting frozen while the other side was being sunburnt. Later on when our strength had begun to lessen, we found great difficulty in hoisting the sail on our sledge, because when we lifted our arms over our heads to adjust the sail, the blood ran from our fingers and they promptly froze. Our troubles with frost-bite were doubtless due partly to the lightness of our clothing, but there was compensation for this in the greater speed with which we were able to travel.
I am convinced that men engaged in polar exploration should be clothed as lightly as possible, even if they are in danger of being frost-bitten when they halt on the march. We owe many grudges against the glacier which caused us so many difficulties, but my chief one now is that we brought back no photographs of a very interesting portion of it. This was due to the facts that we expected to take as many photographs as we had plates to spare on our return journey, and that when we returned we were so short of food that we could not afford the time to unpack the camera.
The glacier itself presented every variety of surface, from soft snow to cracked and riven blue ice, but later the only constant feature were the crevasses, from which we were never free.
Some were entirely covered with a crust of soft snow, and we discovered them only when one of us broke through and hung by his harness from the sledge. Others occurred in mazes of rotten ice, and were even more difficult to negotiate than the other sort. The sledges, owing to their length, were not liable to slip down a crevasse, and when we were securely attached to them by their harness we felt fairly safe, but when the surface was so bad that relay work was necessary we used to miss the support of a sledge on the back journeys.
We would advance one sledge half a mile or a mile, put up a bamboo pole to mark the spot, and then go back for the other. For the walk back we were always roped together, but even then we felt a great deal less secure than when harnessed to one of the long, heavy sledges.
One piece—or two pieces—of fortune we assuredly did have upon the glacier, for both when we were struggling up and scrambling down it the wind was behind us. But on the glacier we were often troubled at night by the fact that there was no snow on which to pitch our tent, and consequently when we were weary after the day's march an hour had frequently to be spent in smoothing out a space for the camp on a rippled, sharp-pointed sea of ice.
The provision bags and sledges were packed on the snow cloths round the tents and it was indeed fortunate for us that we met no bad weather while we were marching up the glacier. Had a blizzard come on while we were asleep, it would have scattered our goods far and wide, and we would have been faced with a most serious situation.