In our case Wild developed dysentery, the cause of which we could only ascribe to the horse-meat; while just before we left the glacier I broke through some soft snow and plunged into a hidden crevasse. The harness jerked up under my heart, and it seemed as though the glacier were saying, "There is the last touch for you; don't you come up here again!" Certainly we were as tired of that glacier as it apparently was of us, and our joy at leaving it was tremendous; for although the Barrier gave us a most unfriendly greeting, we knew that a great many dangers were over, and thought that nothing except blizzards and thick weather were to be feared. The Barrier, however, did not mean to be beaten by the glacier in the way of treating us harshly, for during our first day on it we were attacked by a wind which froze solidly all our wet clothes, and five minutes after the wind had sprung up we were struck by a furious blizzard of snow and heavy drift. Under the circumstances we had to pitch our camp, and He in our bags, patching our worn-out clothes--a rather tedious, if useful, pursuit when one was literally aching to go on. During the following days there was a variety in our misfortunes--a variety, indeed, which was so terribly weakening that by the beginning of February our outlook had become more serious than it had ever been. Dysentery had attacked all of us acutely; but if there was a variety in our troubles, there was none in our food, for we had only four miserably thin biscuits a day to eke out our horse-meat. On February 2 we reached our next depot, and started on the following day with a new sledge and 150 lb. more weight. But on that day all of us were suffering from dysentery, and Wild was very bad indeed. On the 4th I wrote in my diary, "Cannot write more. All down with acute dysentery; terrible day. No march possible; outlook serious. Fine weather." It gives me joy now to think that, anxious and spent as we were, trusting indeed to God to pull us through, but too weary and weak to be very hopeful or to care very much, we still hung on to the geological specimens we had collected. By the 6th we were all better, but we were terribly hungry, and six biscuits per day and one pannikin of horse-meat each meal did nothing to enable us to regain our strength. Indeed, my fear was that this incessant hunger would weaken us so much that our return would never be accomplished. [Illustration: The Camp under the Granite Pillar, half a mile from the Lower Glacier Depot, where the Party camped on January 27 (_See page 151_)] On the 7th Adams and Marshall were again attacked by dysentery; and, though Wild and I were free of it, all of us were pitiably weak. Still we struggled on, starving for food, and talking about it all the time as we advanced slowly towards the north.