Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/506

bad surface, we completed another fifteen miles and reached Corner Camp. There we had a very reassuring note from Wright. He said that the mules were going well together and, instead of having to be split up into fast and slow mules, they broke camp and pitched camp, with one exception, all together, for Khan Sahib, Nelson's mule, was peculiarly slow, and in the temperature we were encountering on the march Nelson found it of the greatest difficulty to keep himself at all warm. This mule would usually lose three-fourths of a mile on the others while they were completing two miles. Nelson invented a method of walking two steps forward and jumping one back, in order to keep his circulation up to the mark.

They proceeded, building cairns of snow at intervals of from two to four miles in order that we might follow their tracks.

I saw from the way that the dogs were going that we should have great difficulty, with their present weights, in catching the mules before they reached One Ton Depôt. On Wright's satisfactory report I decided to entrust everything to the mules and to use the dogs as a means of lightening their heavy loads. The mules' weights had increased from Corner Camp up to nearly 700 lbs. per mule. This was far in excess of any weights hauled by the ponies in the previous season, and here we saw the advantage of having tapered runners to our sledges. The beasts, with comparative ease, were able to move these heavy loads on the sledges, where they would have been unable to do so with the broad runners of the previous 12-foot sledge.

Wright proceeded the next day to Demetri Depôt,