The light was already very bad and it was well that my
companions were quick in returning: we had to do everything in a great
hurry. I hauled up the eggs in their mitts (which we fastened together
round our necks with lampwick lanyards) and then the skins, but failed to
help Bill at all. "Pull," he cried, from the bottom: "I am pulling," I
said. "But the line's quite slack down here," he shouted. And when he had
reached the top by climbing up on Bowers' shoulders, and we were both
pulling all we knew Birdie's end of the rope was still slack in his
hands. Directly we put on a strain the rope cut into the ice edge and
jammed--a very common difficulty when working among crevasses. We tried
to run the rope over an ice-axe without success, and things began to look
serious when Birdie, who had been running about prospecting and had
meanwhile put one leg through a crack into the sea, found a place where
the cliff did not overhang. He cut steps for himself, we hauled, and at
last we were all together on the top--his foot being by now surrounded by
a solid mass of ice.
We legged it back as hard as we could go: five eggs in our fur mitts,
Birdie with two skins tied to him and trailing behind, and myself with
one. We were roped up, and climbing the ridges and getting through the
holes was very difficult. In one place where there was a steep rubble and
snow slope down I left the ice-axe half way up; in another it was too
dark to see our former ice-axe footsteps, and I could see nothing, and so
just let myself go and trusted to luck.
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