got into the warmer
weather on the glacier their food satisfied them, "but we must march to
keep on the full ration, and we want rest, yet we shall pull through all
right, D.V. We are by no means worn out."[334]

There are no germs in the Antarctic, save for a few isolated specimens
which almost certainly come down from civilization in the upper air
currents. You can sleep all night in a wet bag and clothing, and sledge
all day in a mail of ice, and you will not catch a cold nor get any
aches. You can get deficiency diseases, like scurvy, for inland this is a
deficiency country, without vitamines. You can also get poisoned if you
allow your food to remain thawed out too long, and if you do not cover
the provisions in a depot with enough snow the sun will get at them, even
though the air temperature is far below freezing. But it is not easy to
become diseased.

On the other hand, once something does go wrong it is the deuce and all
to get it right: especially cuts. And the isolation of the polar
traveller may place him in most difficult circumstances. There are no
ambulances and hospitals, and a man on a sledge is a very serious weight.
Practically any man who undertakes big polar journeys must face the
possibility of having to commit suicide to save his companions, and the
difficulty of this must not be overrated, for it is in some ways more
desirable to die than to live if things are bad enough: we got to that
stage on the Winter Journey. I remember discussing this question with
Bowers, who had a scheme of doing himself in with a pick-axe if necessity
arose, though how he could have accomplished it I don't know: or, as he
said, there might be a crevasse and at any rate there was the medical
case. I was horrified at the time: I had never faced the thing out with
myself like that.

They left the Upper Glacier Depot under Mount Darwin on February 8. This
day they collected the most important of those geological specimens to
which, at Wilson's special request, they clung to the end, and which were
mostly collected by him. Mount Darwin and Buckley Island, which are
really the tops of high mountains, stick out of the ice at the top of the
glacier, and the course ran near to both of them, but not actually up
against them. Shackleton found coal on Buckley Island, and it was clear
that the place was of great geological importance, for it was one of the
only places in the Antarctic where fossils could be found, so far as we