this or that man's heel with a thud that made the victim clench his teeth
to avoid crying out.

The whole forenoon we worked down towards the more even surface of the
great glacier itself, but the actual descent of the steep part of the
Shackleton Icefalls was accomplished in half an hour. We came down many
hundred feet in that time.

None of us can ever forget that exciting descent. The speed of the sledge
at one point must have been 60 miles an hour. We glissaded down a steep
blue ice slope; to brake was impossible, for the sledge had taken charge.
One or other of us may have attempted to check the sledge with his foot,
but to stop it in any way would have meant a broken leg. We held on for
our lives, lying face downwards on the sledge. Suddenly it seemed to
spring into the air, we had left the ice and shot over one yawning
crevasse before we had known of its existence almost--I do not imagine we
were more than a second in the air, but in that brief space of time I
looked at Crean, who raised his eyebrows as if to say, "What next!" Then
we crashed on to the ice ridge beyond this crevasse, the sledge capsized
and rolled over and over, dragging us three with it until it came to a
standstill.

How we ever escaped entirely uninjured is beyond me to explain. When we
had recovered our breath we examined ourselves and our sledge. One of my
ski-sticks had caught on a piece of ice during our headlong flight and
torn itself from the sledge. It rolled into the great blue-black chasm
over which we had come, and its fate made me feel quite cold when I
thought of what might have happened to us. When my heart had stopped
beating so rapidly from fright, and I had recovered enough to look round,
I realised that we were practically back on the Beardmore again, and that