Under these circumstances I became more than ever observant of the party's physical condition. I find a passage in one of my letters written during this period of waiting in which I boast of finding myself "still able to go up about 1,500 feet in an hour--not bad going at these altitudes"--a reassuring statement enough but for the one word "still," which betrays all my anxiety. In fact there was too much cause to be anxious. Three of our strongest coolies were ill at this camp; others seemed to be tired more easily than they should be. And what of the Sahibs? At least it must be said that several of them were not looking their best. Bullock, though he never complained, seemed no longer to be the fit man he was at the end of July. And for my part I began to experience a certain lack of exuberance when going up hill. I came to realise that all such efforts were unduly exhausting; my reserve of strength had somehow diminished. The whole machine, in fact, was running down; the days continued to pass with their cloud and rain and snow, always postponing our final effort to a later date and a colder season; and with them our chances of success were slowly vanishing. When at last the weather cleared, it was evident that the fate of our enterprise would be decided by the sun's power to melt the snow. In a subsequent chapter I shall have more to say about the snow's melting; it may suffice to remark here that, before we left the Advanced Base, I had good reason to expect that we should meet adverse conditions, and was resolved at the same time that nothing was to be gained by waiting. The coolies were lightly laden up to the First Advanced Camp and sufficiently unfatigued to proceed next day. On the 20th, therefore, leaving Bullock to accompany Wheeler, Morshead and I set forth to get fourteen loads up to Lhakpa La. We had one spare coolie who carried no load, and Sanglu, who was now our acting Sirdar, four of us in all, to break the trail for the loaded men. Snow-shoes were not carried because there were not enough to go round. Though our prospects of reaching a high point on Everest were already sufficiently dim, I intended to carry out the original plan until obliged by circumstances to modify it; it might prove necessary to spend an extra day in reaching Chang La, and in that case we could perhaps afford to stop short of Lhakpa La and establish our camp below its final slopes. But if the strain on this first day was likely to be severe, I argued that the coolies could rest to-morrow, and that the second journey in frozen tracks would be easy enough. That we should be passing the night a few hundred feet higher (at 22,500 feet) was a relatively unimportant consideration. The great matter was to put heart into the coolies; it would be infinitely more encouraging to reach the crest with a sense of complete achievement, to see the clear prospect ahead and to proceed downwards on the other side.