er the cause may have been
we had no more of this colic, and the improvement in their condition
until we started sledging was uninterrupted.

All the ponies were treated for worms; it was also found that they had
lice, which were eradicated after some time and difficulty by a wash of
tobacco and water. I know that Oates wished that he had clipped the
ponies at the beginning of the winter, believing that they would have
grown far better coats if this had been done. He also would have wished
for a loose box for each pony.

No account of the ponies would be complete without mention of our Russian
pony boy, Anton. He was small in height, but he was exceedingly strong
and had a chest measurement of 40 inches.

[Illustration: EREBUS AND LANDS END]

[Illustration: EREBUS BEHIND GREAT RAZORBACK]

I believe both Anton and Dimitri, the Russian dog driver, were brought
originally to look after the ponies and dogs on their way from Siberia to
New Zealand. But they proved such good fellows and so useful that we were
very glad to take them on the strength of the landing party. I fear that
Anton, at any rate, did not realize what he was in for. When we arrived
at Cape Crozier in the ship on our voyage south, and he saw the two great
peaks of Ross Island in front and the Barrier Cliff disappearing in an
unbroken wall below the eastern horizon, he imagined that he reached
the South Pole, and was suitably elated. When the darkness of the winter
closed down upon us, this apparently unnatural order of things so preyed
upon his superstitious mind that he became seriously alarmed. Where the
sea-ice joined the land in front of the hut was of course a working
crack, caused by the rise and fall of the tide. Sometimes the sea-water
found its way up, and Anton was convinced that the weird phosphorescent
lights which danced up out of the sea were devils. In propitiation we
found that he had sacrificed to them his most cherished luxury, his
scanty allowance of cigarettes, which he had literally cast upon the
waters in the darkness. It was natural that his thoughts should turn to
the comforts of his Siberian home, and the one-legged wife whom he was
going to marry there, and when it became clear that a another year would
be spent in the South his mind was troubled. And so he went to Oates and
asked him, "If I go away at the end of this year, will Captain Scott
disinherit me?" In order to try and express his idea, for he knew little
English, he