fourteen hours' march, their flanks heaving,
their black eyes dull, shrivelled and wasted. The poor beasts had stood,
with their legs stuck out in strange attitudes, mere wrecks of the
beautiful little animals that we took away from New Zealand, and I could
not help likening our condition to theirs on that painful day. The three
of us sat on the sledge--hollow-eyed and gaunt looking. We were done, our
throats were dry, and we could scarcely speak. There was no wind, the
atmosphere was perfectly still, and the sun slowly crept towards the
southern meridian, clear cut in the steel blue sky. It gave us all the
sympathy it could, for it shed warm rays upon us as it silently moved on
its way like a great eye from Heaven, looking but unable to help. We
should have gone mad with another day like this, and there were times
when we came perilously close to being insane. Something had to be done.
I got up from the sledge, cast my harness adrift, and said, "I am going
to look for a way out; we can't go on." My companions at first persuaded
me not to go, but I pointed out that we could not continue in our
exhausted condition. If only we could find a camping place, and we could
rest, perhaps we should be able to make a final effort to get clear.

I moved along a series of ice bridges, and the excitement gave me
strength once more. I was surprised at myself for not being more giddy
when I walked along the narrow ice spines, but the crampons attached to
my finneskoe were like cat's claws, and without the weight of the sledge
I seemed to develop a panther-like tenacity, for I negotiated the
dangerous parts with the utmost ease. After some twenty minutes hunting
round I came to a great ice hollow.

Down into it I went and up the other side. This hollow was free from
crevasses, and when I got to the top of the ice mound opposite I saw yet
another hollow. Turning round I gazed back towards where I had left our
sledge. Two tiny, disconsolate figures were silhouetted against the
sunlight--my two companions on our great homeward march, one sitting and
one standing, probably looking for my reappearance as I vanished and was
sighted again from time to time. I felt a tremendous love for those two
men that day. They had trusted me so implicitly and believed in my
ability to win through. I turned northward again, stepped down into the
next hollow and stopped. I was in an enormous depression but not a
crevasse to be seen, for the sides of the depr