e
freighting.

[Sidenote: Crevasses]

For the glacier difficulties now confronted us in the fullest degree.
Immediately above our tent the ice rose steeply a couple of hundred
feet, and at that level began to be most intricately crevassed. It took
several days to unravel the tangle of fissures and discover and prepare
a trail that the dogs could haul the sleds along. Sometimes a bridge
would be found over against one wall of the glacier, and for the next we
might have to go clear across to the other wall. Sometimes a block of
ice jammed in the jaws of a crevasse would make a perfectly safe bridge;
sometimes we had nothing upon which to cross save hardened snow. Some of
the gaps were narrow and some wide, yawning chasms. Some of them were
mere surface cracks and some gave hundreds of feet of deep blue ice with
no bottom visible at all. Sometimes there was no natural bridge over a
crevasse, and then, choosing the narrowest and shallowest place in it,
we made a bridge, excavating blocks of hard snow with the shovels and
building them up from a ledge below, or projecting them on the
cantilever principle, one beyond the other from both sides. Many of
these crevasses could be jumped across by an unencumbered man on his
snow-shoes that could not have been jumped with a pack and that the dogs
could not cross at all. As each section of trail was determined it was
staked out with willow shoots, hundreds of which had been brought up
from below. And in all of this pioneering work, and, indeed,
thenceforward invariably, the rope was conscientiously used. Every step
of the way up the glacier was sounded by a long pole, the man in the
lead thrusting it deep into the snow while the two behind kept the rope
always taut. More than one pole slipped into a hidden crevasse and was
lost when vigor of thrust was not matched by tenacity of grip; more than
once a man was jerked back just as the snow gave way beneath his feet.
The open crevasses were not the dangerous ones; the whole glacier was
crisscrossed by crevasses completely covered with snow. In bright
weather it was often possible to detect them by a slight depression in
the surface or by a faint, shadowy difference in tint, but in the
half-light of cloudy and misty weather these signs failed, and there was
no safety but in the ceaseless prodding of the pole. The ice-axe will
not serve--one cannot reach far enough forward with it for safety, and
the incessant stooping is an unnecessar