To our sorrow we had to lie during the whole of the next day in our sleeping-bags except when we went out of them to feed the ponies, for a blizzard was upon us with thick drift. One can scarcely realise how trying it is to be held up by blizzards, unless one has been on a polar expedition and knows that each lost day means also the consumption of 40 lb. of pony feed alone. Nevertheless, we endeavoured to make the best of an irritating situation, and in our one-man sleeping-bags each of us had a little home, where he could read and write and look at his household gods--if he had brought any with him. During the morning I passed the time reading _Much Ado About Nothing_--an inappropriate play perhaps for me to be reading when I was worrying over our delay and thought that I had good cause to be. The blizzard would not have mattered so much if we had only to consider ourselves, for we could save on the food, but if the ponies were to be of much use to us they had to be properly fed. On the 7th the weather was better, though still very thick and overcast, and cheered by the supporting-party, who were returning to winter quarters, we started off with the ponies pulling splendidly. But almost immediately we found ourselves in a maze of crevasses. The first one which Marshall crossed with Grisi was 6 ft. wide, and when I looked down there was nothing to be seen but a black yawning void. Crevasses were here, there, and everywhere, and we had to camp between two large ones and wait until the light became better, for to proceed in such weather was to court disaster. At last we were quite on our own resources, and as regards comfort in the tents were very well off, for with only two men in each tent there was plenty of room. Adams began by sharing a tent with me, but we decided to shift about so that we could take turns with each other as tent-mates. [Illustration: The Southern Party marching into the White Unknown, (_See page 112_)] In respect to books also we were well supplied, for I took Shakespeare's Comedies with me, Marshall had Borrow's "The Bible in Spain," Adams, Arthur Young's "Travels in France," and Wild "Sketches by Boz." By changing round when we had finished, we had literature enough to keep us going for many hours when we were unable to march. No literature, however, could prevent us from chafing at the weather which kept us in our bags until the morning of November 9, but the difficulties of travelling over snow and ice in a bad light are practically insurmountable. When the light is diffused by clouds or mist, it casts no shadows on the dead white surface, which consequently appears to the eye to be uniformly level. Often when we thought that we were marching on a level surface, we would suddenly fall two or three feet, and the strain on the eyes under these conditions was very great.