It was a stiff fight over the upper glacier in latitude 85, with its razor-shaped ice, full of snow-covered crevasses, and three days out two of our best men fell into one of the worst of them.
I saw the accident from a dozen yards away, and running up I lay on my stomach and shouted down, but it was a black bottomless gulf and not a sound or a sign came back to me.
This cast a still deeper gloom on our company, who could not be cheered up, though I kept telling them we should be on the great plateau soon, please God, and then we should have a clear road to the Pole.
We were not much better on top though, for the surface was much broken up, and in that brewing place of the winds there seemed to be nothing but surging seas of cumulus cloud and rolling waves of snow.
The Polar march was telling on us badly. We were doing no more than seven miles at a stretch. So to help my shipmates to keep up their spirits (and perhaps to give a bit of a "heise" to my own) I had to sing all day long—though my darling is right that I have no more voice than a corn-crake.
Sometimes I sang "Ramsey Town," because it did not want much music, but generally "Sally's the gel for me," because it had a rattling chorus. The men all joined in (scientific experts included), and if the angels took any heed of us, I think it must have touched them up to look down on our little company of puny men singing away as we trudged through that snowy wilderness which makes a man feel so small.
But man can only do his best, and as Father Dan (God bless his old heart!) used to say, the angels can do no more. We were making middling hard work of it in the 88th parallel, with a temperature as low as 50 degrees of frost, when a shrieking, blinding blizzard came sweeping down on us from the south.
I thought it might blow itself out, but it didn't, so we struck camp in a broad half-circle, building igloos (snow huts) with their backs (like rain-beaten cattle) to the storm.
There we lay nine days—and it is not worth while now to say how much some of our men suffered from frozen fingers, and more from falling spirits.
Sometimes I heard them saying (in voices that were intended to be loud enough for me to hear) it would have been better to have built winter quarters on the north of Darwin and settle there until the return of summer. And at other times I heard them counting the distance to the Pole—a hundred geographical miles, making twenty days' march at this season, with the heavy weights we had to carry, and the dwindling of our dogs and ponies, for we had killed a lot of them for food.