oathe them in full daylight when much can
be done to avoid them, and when if you fall into them you can at any rate
see where the sides are, which way they run and how best to scramble out;
when your companions can see how to stop the sledge to which you are all
attached by your harness; how most safely to hold the sledge when
stopped; how, if you are dangling fifteen feet down in a chasm, to work
above you to get you up to the surface again. And then our clothes were
generally something like clothes. Even under the ideal conditions of good
light, warmth and no wind, crevasses are beastly, whether you are pulling
over a level and uniform snow surface, never knowing what moment will
find you dropping into some bottomless pit, or whether you are rushing
for the Alpine rope and the sledge, to help some companion who has
disappeared. I dream sometimes now of bad days we had on the Beardmore
and elsewhere, when men were dropping through to be caught up and hang at
the full length of the harnesses and toggles many times in an hour. On
the same sledge as myself on the Beardmore one man went down once head
first, and another eight times to the length of his harness in 25
minutes. And always you wondered whether your harness was going to hold
when the jerk came. But those days were a Sunday School treat compared to
our days of blind-man's buff with the Emperor penguins among the
crevasses of Cape Crozier.

Our troubles were greatly increased by the state of our clothes. If we
had been dressed in lead we should have been able to move our arms and
necks and heads more easily than we could now. If the same amount of
icing had extended to our legs I believe we should still be there,
standing unable to move: but happily the forks of our trousers still
remained movable. To get into our canvas harnesses was the most absurd
business. Quite in the early days of our journey we met with this
difficulty, and somewhat foolishly decided not to take off our harness
for lunch. The harnesses thawed in the tent, and froze back as hard as
boards. Likewise our clothing was hard as boards and stuck out from our
bodies in every imaginable fold and angle. To fit one board over the
other required the united efforts of the would-be wearer and his two
companions, and the process had to be repeated for each one of us twice a
day. Goodness knows how long it took; but it cannot have been less than
five minutes' thumping at each man.

As we approached Terro