t 5.30,
lunch 1, and camp at 7, and we get a short 8 hours' sleep, but we are so
dead tired we could sleep half into the next day: we get about 91/2 hours'
march. Tea at lunch a positive godsend. We are raising the land to the
south well, and are about 2500 feet up, latitude about 84 deg. 8' S."[229]

The next day, December 16, Bowers wrote: "We have had a really enjoyable
day's march, except the latter end of the afternoon. At the outset in the
forenoon my sledge was a bit in the lurch, and Scott drew steadily away
from us. I knew I could ordinarily hold my own with him, but for the
first two hours we dropped till we were several hundred yards astern; try
as I would to rally up my team we could gain nothing. On examining the
runners however we soon discovered the cause by the presence of a thin
film of ice. After that we ran easily. The thing one must avoid doing is
to touch them with the hand or mitt, as anything damp will make ice on
them. We usually turn the sledge on its side and scrape one runner at a
time with the back of our knives so as to avoid any chance of cutting or
chipping them. In the afternoon either the tea or the butter we had at
lunch made us so strong that we fairly overran the other team."[230]

"We must push on all we can, for we are now 6 days behind Shackleton, all
due to that wretched storm. So far, since we got among the disturbances
we have not seen such alarming crevasses as I had expected; certainly
dogs could have come up as far as this."[231]

[Illustration: MOUNT PATRICK--E. A. Wilson, del.]

"At lunch we could see big pressure ahead having done first over five
miles. Soon after lunch, having gone down a bit, we rose among very rough
stuff. We plugged on until 4.30, when ski became quite impossible, and we
put them on the sledges and started on foot. We immediately began putting
legs down: one step would be on blue ice and the next two feet down into
snow: very hard going. The pressure ahead seemed to stretch right into a
big glacier next the Keltie Glacier to the east, and so we altered course
for a small bluff point about two-thirds of the way along the base of the
Cloudmaker. We were to camp at 6, but did not do so until about 6.30, the
last 11/2 hours in big pressure, crossing big and smaller waves, and
hundreds of crevasses which one of us generally found. We are now camped
in very big pressure, and with difficulty we found a patch big enough to
pitch the tent free from crevasses.