Our difficulties during the next four days were increased by the snow-blindness of half the men.  The evening we reached the glacier Bowers wrote:  “I am afraid I am going to pay dearly for not wearing goggles yesterday when piloting the ponies.  My right eye has gone bung, and my left one is pretty dicky.  If I am in for a dose of snow glare it will take three or four days to leave me, and I am afraid I am in the ditch this time.  It is painful to look at this paper, and my eyes are fairly burning as if some one had thrown sand into them.”  And then:  “I have missed my journal for four days, having been enduring the pains of hell with my eyes as well as doing the most back-breaking work I have ever come up against....  I was as blind as a bat, and so was Keohane in my team.  Cherry pulled alongside me, with Crean and Keohane behind.  By sticking plaster over my glasses except one small central spot I shut off most light and could see the points of my ski, but the glasses were always fogged with perspiration and my eyes kept on streaming water which cannot be wiped off on the march as a ski stick is held in each hand; and so heavy were our weights [we had now taken on the weights which had been on the dog sledges] that if any of the pair slacked a hand even, the sledge stopped.  It was all we could do to keep the sledge moving for short spells of a few hundred yards, the whole concern sinking so deeply into the soft snow as to form a snow-plough.  The starting was worse than pulling as it required from ten to fifteen desperate jerks on the harness to move the sledge at all.”  Many others were also snowblind, caused partly by the strain of the last march of the ponies, partly by not having realized that now that we were day-marching the sun was more powerful and more precautions should be taken.  The cocaine and zinc sulphate tablets which we had were excellent, but we also found that our tea leaves, which had been boiled twice and would otherwise have been thrown away, relieved the pain if tied into some cotton and kept pressed against the eyes.  The tannic acid in the tea acted as an astringent.  A snowblind man can see practically nothing anyhow and so he is not much worse off if a handkerchief is tied over his eyes.

“Beardmore Glacier. Just a tiny note to be taken back by the dogs.  Things are not so rosy as they might be, but we keep our spirits up and say the luck must turn.  This is only to tell you that I find I can keep up with the rest as well as of old."[224]

[Illustration:  MOUNT F. L. SMITH AND THE LAND TO THE NORTH-WEST—­E.  A. Wilson, del.  Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]

Then for the first time we were left with our full loads of 800 lbs. a sledge.  Even Bowers asked Scott whether he was going to try it without relaying.  That night Scott’s diary runs: