g twilight, cold winds, snow, the rare aurora and
the frequent moon.

But the worst fact was that our spirits were low, and do what I would to
keep a good heart and cheer up the splendid fellows who had come with
me, I could not help feeling the deepening effect of that sunless gloom.

In spite of this, I broke camp on April 25, and started straight as a
die for the South.

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 froze