Southern Party. I told him a crevasse. He says he does not think so:
he thinks it is scurvy. Talking about crevasses he says that, on the
return of the Second Return Party, they came right over the ice-falls
south of Mount Darwin,--descending about 2000 feet into a great valley,
down which they travelled towards the west, and so to the Upper Glacier
Depot. I believe Scott told Evans (Lieut.) that he meant to come back
this same way."

"Then the stuff they got into above the Cloudmaker must have been
horrible. 'Why, there are places there you could put St. Paul's into, and
that's no exaggeration, neither,' and they spent two nights in it. All
the way down to the Gateway he says there were crevasses, great big
fellows thirty feet across, which we of the First Return Party had
crossed both going and coming back and which we never saw. But then much
of the snow had gone and they were visible. Lieut. Evans was very badly
snowblind most of this time. Then outside the Gateway, on the Barrier,
they crossed many crevasses, and some had fallen in where we had passed
over them."

"This makes one think. Is the state of affairs in which we found the
glacier an extraordinary one, the snow being a special phenomenon due to
that great blizzard and snowfall? Are we going to find blue ice this year
where we found thick soft snow last? Well! I have got a regular bad
needle again, just as I have had before. But somehow the needle has
always worked off when we get right into it. What a blessing it is that
things are seldom as bad in the reality as you expect they are going to
be in your imagination: though I must say the Winter Journey was worse
even than I had imagined. I remember that this time last year the thought
of the Beardmore was very terrible: but the reality was never very bad."

"Lashly thinks it would be practically impossible for five men to
disappear down a crevasse. Where three men got through (and he said it
would be impossible to get worse stuff than they came through), five men
would be still better off. This is not my view, however. I think that the
extra weight of one man might make all the difference in crossing a big
crevasse: and if several men fell through one of those great bridges when
sledge and men were all on it, I do not think the bridge would hold the
sledge."[286]

Several trips were made to Cape Royds over the Barne Glacier, and then by
portaging over the rocks to Shackleton's old hut. The sea was open