ll, and
Wild, each leading a pony which dragged a sledge with food for
ninety-one days.

"A glorious day for our start," wrote Shackleton in his diary,
"brilliant sunshine and a cloudless sky. As we left the hut where we
had spent so many months in comfort we had a feeling of real regret
that never again would we all be together there. A clasp of the hands
means more than many words, and as we turned to acknowledge the men's
cheer, and saw them standing on the ice by the familiar cliffs, I felt
we must try to do well for the sake of every one concerned in the
expedition."

New land in the shape of ice-clad mountains greeted the explorers on
22nd November. "It is a wonderful place we are in, all new to the world,"
says Shackleton; "there is an impression of limitless solitude about
it that makes us feel so small as we trudge along, a few dark specks
on the snowy plain."

They now had to quit the Barrier in order to travel south. Fortunately
they found a gap, called the Southern Gateway, which afforded a direct
line to the Pole. But their ponies had suffered badly during the march;
they had already been obliged to shoot three of them, and on 7th
December the last pony fell down a crevasse and was killed. They had
now reached a great plateau some seven thousand feet above the sea;
it rose steadily toward the south, and Christmas Day found them "lying
in a little tent, isolated high on the roof of the world, far from
the ways trodden by man." With forty-eight degrees of frost, drifting
snow, and a biting wind, they spent the next few days hauling their
sledges up a steep incline. They had now only a month's food left.
Pressing on with reduced rations, in the face of freezing winds, they
reached a height of ten thousand and fifty feet.

It was the 6th of January, and they were in latitude 88 degrees, when
a "blinding, shrieking blizzard" made all further advance impossible.
For sixty hours the four hungry explorers lay in their sleeping-bags,
nearly perished with cold. "The most trying day we have yet spent,"
writes Shackleton, "our fingers and faces being continually
frostbitten. To-morrow we will rush south with the flag. It is our
last outward march."

The gale breaking, they marched on till 9th January, when they stopped
within ninety-seven miles of the Pole, where they hoisted the Union
Jack, and took possession of the great plateau in the King's name.

"We could see nothing but the dead-white snow plain. There