arried these depressing conditions for three more marches, that is
till the morning of November 13. The surface was wretched, the weather
horrid, the snow persistent, covering everything with soft downy flakes,
inch upon inch, and mile upon mile. There are glimpses of despondency in
the diaries. "If this should come as an exception, our luck will be truly
awful. The camp is very silent and cheerless, signs that things are going
awry."[194] "The weather was horrid, overcast, gloomy, snowy. One's
spirits became very low."[195] "I expected these marches to be a little
difficult, but not near so bad as to-day."[196] Indefinite conditions
always tried Scott most: positive disasters put him into more cheerful
spirits than most. In the big gale coming South when the ship nearly
sank, and when we lost one of the cherished motors through the sea-ice,
his was one of the few cheerful faces I saw. Even when the ship ran
aground off Cape Evans he was not despondent. But this kind of thing
irked him. Bowers wrote: "The unpleasant weather and bad surface, and
Chinaman's indisposition, combined to make the outlook unpleasant, and on
arrival [in camp] I was not surprised to find that Scott had a grievance.
He felt that in arranging the consumption of forage his own unit had not
been favoured with the same reduction as ours, in fact accused me of
putting upon his three horses to save my own. We went through the weights
in detail after our meal, and, after a certain amount of argument,
decided to carry on as we were going. I can quite understand his
feelings, and after our experience of last year a bad day like this makes
him fear our beasts are going to fail us. The Talent [i.e. the doctors]
examined Chinaman, who begins to show signs of wear. Poor ancient little
beggar, he ought to be a pensioner instead of finishing his days on a job
of this sort. Jehu looks pretty rocky too, but seeing that we did not
expect him to reach the Glacier Tongue, and that he has now done more
than 100 miles from Cape Evans, one really does not know what to expect
of these creatures. Certainly Titus thinks, as he has always said, that
they are the most unsuitable scrap-heap crowd of unfit creatures that
could possibly be got together."[197]

"The weather was about as poisonous as one could wish; a fresh breeze and
driving snow from the E. with an awful surface. The recently fallen snow
thickly covered the ground with powdery stuff that the unfortunate ponies