which we hoped to carry safely in our fur mitts to our igloo upon Mount
Terror, where we could pickle them in the alcohol we had brought for the
purpose. We also wanted oil for our blubber stove, and they killed and
skinned three birds--an Emperor weighs up to 61/2 stones.

The Ross Sea was frozen over, and there were no seal in sight. There were
only 100 Emperors as compared with 2000 in 1902 and 1903. Bill reckoned
that every fourth or fifth bird had an egg, but this was only a rough
estimate, for we did not want to disturb them unnecessarily. It is a
mystery why there should have been so few birds, but it certainly looked
as though the ice had not formed very long. Were these the first
arrivals? Had a previous rookery been blown out to sea and was this the
beginning of a second attempt? Is this bay of sea-ice becoming unsafe?

Those who previously discovered the Emperors with their chicks saw the
penguins nursing dead and frozen chicks if they were unable to obtain a
live one. They also found decomposed eggs which they must have incubated
after they had been frozen. Now we found that these birds were so anxious
to sit on something that some of those which had no eggs were sitting on
ice! Several times Bill and Birdie picked up eggs to find them lumps of
ice, rounded and about the right size, dirty and hard. Once a bird
dropped an ice nest egg as they watched, and again a bird returned and
tucked another into itself, immediately forsaking it for a real one,
however, when one was offered.

Meanwhile a whole procession of Emperors came round under the cliff on
which I stood. 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. With infinite patience Bill said:
"Cherry, you _must_ learn how to use an ice-axe." For the rest of the
trip my wind-clothes were in rags.

We found the sledge, and none too soon, and now had three eggs left,
more or less whole. Both mine had burst in my mitts: the first I emptied
out, the second I left in my mitt to put into the cooker; it never got
there, but on the return journey I had my mitts far more easily thawed
out than Birdie's (Bill had none) and I believe the grease in the egg did
them good. When we got into the hollows under the ridge where we had to
cross, it was too dark to do anything but feel our way. We did so over
many crevasses, found the ridge and crept over it. Higher up we could see
more, but to follow our tracks soon became impossible, and we plugged
straight ahead and luckily found the slope down which we had come. All
day it had been blowing a nasty cold wind with a temperature between -20 deg.
and 30 deg., which we felt a good deal. Now it began to get worse. The
weather was getting thick and things did not look very nice when we
started up to find our tent. Soon it was blowing force 4, and soon we
missed our way entirely. We got right up above the patch of rocks which
marked our igloo and only found it after a good deal of search.

I have heard tell of an English officer at the Dardanelles who was left,
blinded, in No Man's Land between the English and Turkish trenches.
Moving only at night, and having no sense to tell him which were his own
trenches, he was fired at by Turk and English alike as he groped his
ghastly way to and from them. Thus he spent days and nights until, one
night, he crawled towards the English trenches, to be fired at as usual.
"Oh God! what can I do!" some one heard him say, and he was brought in.

Such extremity of suffering cannot be measured: madness or death may give
relief. But this I know: we on this journey were already beginning to
think of death as a friend. As we groped our way back that night,
sleepless, icy, and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, a
crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift.

"Things must improve," said Bill next day, "I think we reached bed-rock
last night." We hadn't, by a long way.

It was like this.

We moved into the igloo for the first time, for we had to save oil by
using our blubber stove if we were to have any left to travel home with,
and we did not wish to cover our tent with the oily black filth which the
use of blubber necessitates. The blizzard blew all night, and we were
covered with drift which came in through hundreds of leaks: in this
wind-swept place we had found no soft snow with which we could pack our
hard snow blocks. As we flensed some blubber from one of our penguin
skins the powdery drift covered everything we had.

Though uncomfortable this was nothing to worry about overmuch. Some of
the drift which the blizzard was bringing would collect to leeward of our
hut and the rocks below which it was built, and they could be used to
make our hut more weather-proof. Then with great difficulty we got the
blubber stove to start, and it spouted a blob of boiling oil into Bill's
eye. For the rest of the night he lay, quite unable to stifle his groans,
obviously in very great pain: he told us afterwards that he thought his
eye was gone. We managed to cook a meal somehow, and Birdie got the stove
going afterwards, but it was quite useless to try and warm the place. I
got out and cut the green canvas outside the door, so as to get the roof
cloth in under the stones, and then packed it down as well as I could
with snow, and so blocked most of the drift coming in.

It is extraordinary how often angels and fools do the same thing in this
life, and I have never been able to settle which we were on this journey.
I never heard an angry word: once only (when this same day I could not
pull Bill up the cliff out of the penguin rookery) I heard an impatient
one: and these groans were the nearest approach to complaint. Most men
would have howled. "I think we reached bed-rock last night," was strong
language for Bill. "I was incapacitated for a short time," he says in his
report to Scott.[158] Endurance was tested on this journey under unique
circumstances, and always these two men with all the burden of
responsibility which did not fall upon myself, displayed that quality
which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make
for success, self-control.

We spent the next day--it was July 21--in collecting every scrap of soft
snow we could find and packing it into the crevasses between our hard
snow blocks. It was a pitifully small amount but we could see no cracks
when we had finished. To counteract the lifting tendency the wind had on
our roof we cut some great flat hard snow blocks and laid them on the
canvas top to steady it against the sledge which formed the ridge
support. We also pitched our tent outside the igloo door. Both tent and
igloo were therefore eight or nine hundred feet up Terror: both were
below an outcrop of rocks from which the mountain fell steeply to the
Barrier behind us, and from this direction came the blizzards. In front
of us the slope fell for a mile or more down to the ice-cliffs, so
wind-swept that we had to wear crampons to walk upon it. Most of the tent
was in the lee of the igloo, but the cap of it came over the igloo roof,
while a segment of the tent itself jutted out beyond the igloo wall.

That night we took much of our gear into the tent and lighted the blubber
stove. I always mistrusted that stove, and every moment I expected it to
flare up and burn the tent. But the heat it gave, as it burned furiously,
with the double lining of the tent to contain it, was considerable.

It did not matter, except for a routine which we never managed to keep,
whether we started to thaw our way into our frozen sleeping-bags at 4 in
the morning or 4 in the afternoon. I think we must have turned in during
the afternoon of that Friday, leaving the cooker, our finnesko, a deal of
our foot-gear, Bowers' bag of personal gear, and many other things in the
tent. I expect we left the blubber stove there too, for it was quite
useless at present to try and warm the igloo. The tent floor-cloth was
under our sleeping-bags in the igloo.

"Things must improve," said Bill. After all there was much for which to
be thankful. I don't think anybody could have made a better igloo with
the hard snow blocks and rocks which were all we had: we would get it
air-tight by degrees. The blubber stove was working, and we had fuel for
it: we had also found a way down to the penguins and had three complete,
though frozen eggs: the two which had been in my mitts smashed when I
fell about because I could not wear spectacles. Also the twilight given
by the sun below the horizon at noon was getting longer.

But already we had been out twice as long in winter as the longest
previous journeys in spring. The men who made those journeys had daylight
where we had darkness, they had never had such low temperatures,
generally nothing approaching them, and they had seldom worked in such
difficult country. The nearest approach to healthy sleep we had had for
nearly a month was when during blizzards the temperature allowed the
warmth of our bodies to thaw some of the ice in our clothing and
sleeping-bags into water. The wear and tear on our minds was very great.
We were certainly weaker. We had a little more than a tin of oil to get
back on, and we knew the conditions we had to face on that journey across
the Barrier: even with fresh men and fresh gear it had been almost
unendurable.

And so we spent half an hour or more getting into our bags. Cirrus cloud
was moving across the face of the stars from the north, it looked rather
hazy and thick to the south, but it is always difficult to judge weather
in the dark. There was little wind and the temperature was in the minus
twenties. We felt no particular uneasiness. Our tent was well dug in, and
was also held down by rocks and the heavy tank off the sledge which were
placed on the skirting as additional security. We felt that no power on
earth could move the thick walls of our igloo, nor drag the canvas roof
from the middle of the embankment into which it was packed and lashed.

"Things must improve," said Bill.

I do not know what time it was when I woke up. It was calm, with that
absolute silence which can be so soothing or so terrible as circumstances
dictate. Then there came a sob of wind, and all was still again. Ten
minutes and it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of
hysterics. The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar
of it all cannot be imagined.

"Bill, Bill, the tent has gone," was the next I remember--from Bowers
shouting at us again and again through the door. It is always these early
morning shocks which hit one hardest: our slow minds suggested that this
might mean a peculiarly lingering form of death. Journey after journey
Birdie and I fought our way across the few yards which had separated the
tent from the igloo door. I have never understood why so much of our gear
which was in the tent remained, even in the lee of the igloo. The place
where the tent had been was littered with gear, and when we came to
reckon up afterwards we had everything except the bottom piece of the
cooker, and the top of the outer cooker. We never saw these again. The
most wonderful thing of all was that our finnesko were lying where they
were left, which happened to be on the ground in the part of the tent
which was under the lee of the igloo. Also Birdie's bag of personal gear
was there, and a tin of sweets.

Birdie brought two tins of sweets away with him. One we had to celebrate
our arrival at the Knoll: this was the second, of which we knew nothing,
and which was for Bill's birthday, the next day. We started eating them
on Saturday, however, and the tin came in useful to Bill afterwards.

To get that gear in we fought against solid walls of black snow which
flowed past us and tried to hurl us down the slope. Once started nothing
could have stopped us. I saw Birdie knocked over once, but he clawed his
way back just in time. Having passed everything we could find in to Bill,
we got back into the igloo, and started to collect things together,
including our very dishevelled minds.

There was no doubt that we were in the devil of a mess, and it was not
altogether our fault. We had had to put our igloo more or less where we
could get rocks with which to build it. Very naturally we had given both
our tent and igloo all the shelter we could from the full force of the
wind, and now it seemed we were in danger not because they were in the
wind, but because they were not sufficiently in it. The main force of the
hurricane, deflected by the ridge behind, fled over our heads and
appeared to form by suction a vacuum below. Our tent had either been
sucked upwards into this, or had been blown away because some of it was
in the wind while some of it was not. The roof of our igloo was being
wrenched upwards and then dropped back with great crashes: the drift was
spouting in, not it seemed because it was blown in from outside, but
because it was sucked in from within: the lee, not the weather, wall was
the worst. Already everything was six or eight inches under snow.

Very soon we began to be alarmed about the igloo. For some time the heavy
snow blocks we had heaved up on to the canvas roof kept it weighted down.
But it seemed that they were being gradually moved off by the hurricane.
The tension became well-nigh unendurable: the waiting in all that welter
of noise was maddening. Minute after minute, hour after hour--those snow
blocks were off now anyway, and the roof was smashed up and down--no
canvas ever made could stand it indefinitely.

We got a meal that Saturday morning, our last for a very long time as it
happened. Oil being of such importance to us we tried to use the blubber
stove, but after several preliminary spasms it came to pieces in our
hands, some solder having melted; and a very good thing too, I thought,
for it was more dangerous than useful. We finished cooking our meal on
the primus. Two bits of the cooker having been blown away we had to
balance it on the primus as best we could. We then settled that in view
of the shortage of oil we would not have another meal for as long as
possible. As a matter of fact God settled that for us.

We did all we could to stop up the places where the drift was coming in,
plugging the holes with our socks, mitts and other clothing. But it was
no real good. Our igloo was a vacuum which was filling itself up as soon
as possible: and when snow was not coming in a fine black moraine dust
took its place, covering us and everything. For twenty-four hours we
waited for the roof to go: things were so bad now that we dare not unlash
the door.

Many hours ago Bill had told us that if the roof went he considered that
our best chance would be to roll over in our sleeping-bags until we were
lying on the openings, and get frozen and drifted in.

Gradually the situation got more desperate. The distance between the
taut-sucked canvas and the sledge on which it should have been resting
became greater, and this must have been due to the stretching of the
canvas itself and the loss of the snow blocks on the top: it was not
drawing out of the walls. The crashes as it dropped and banged out again
were louder. There was more snow coming through the walls, though all our
loose mitts, socks and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst
places: our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks
over the door. The rocks were lifting and shaking here till we thought
they would fall.

We talked by shouting, and long before this one of us proposed to try and
get the Alpine rope lashed down over the roof from outside. But Bowers
said it was an absolute impossibility in that wind. "You could never ask
men at sea to try such a thing," he said. He was up and out of his bag
continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof to try and
prevent the flapping and so forth. He was magnificent.

And then it went.

Birdie was over by the door, where the canvas which was bent over the
lintel board was working worse than anywhere else. Bill was practically
out of his bag pressing against some part with a long stick of some kind.
I don't know what I was doing but I was half out of and half in my bag.

The top of the door opened in little slits and that green Willesden
canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments in fewer seconds than it
takes to read this. The uproar of it all was indescribable. Even above
the savage thunder of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of
the canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips. The highest rocks
which we had built into our walls fell upon us, and a sheet of drift came
in.

Birdie dived for his sleeping-bag and eventually got in, together with a
terrible lot of drift. Bill also--but he was better off: I was already
half into mine and all right, so I turned to help Bill. "Get into your
own," he shouted, and when I continued to try and help him, he leaned
over until his mouth was against my ear. "_Please_, Cherry," he said, and
his voice was terribly anxious. I know he felt responsible: feared it was
he who had brought us to this ghastly end.

The next I knew was Bowers' head across Bill's body. "We're all right,"
he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we
knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement
was helpful. Then we turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the
bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath
us. And we lay and thought, and sometimes we sang.

I suppose, wrote Wilson, we were all revolving plans to get back without
a tent: and the one thing we had left was the floor-cloth upon which we
were actually lying. Of course we could not speak at present, but later
after the blizzard had stopped we discussed the possibility of digging a
hole in the snow each night and covering it over with the floor-cloth. I
do not think we had any idea that we could really get back in those
temperatures in our present state of ice by such means, but no one ever
hinted at such a thing. Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and
hymns, snatches of which reached me every now and then, and I chimed in,
somewhat feebly I suspect. Of course we were getting pretty badly drifted
up. "I was resolved to keep warm," wrote Bowers, "and beneath my debris
covering I paddled my feet and sang all the songs and hymns I knew to
pass the time. I could occasionally thump Bill, and as he still moved I
knew he was alive all right--what a birthday for him!" Birdie was more
drifted up than we, but at times we all had to hummock ourselves up to
heave the snow off our bags. By opening the flaps of our bags we could
get small pinches of soft drift which we pressed together and put into
our mouths to melt. When our hands warmed up again we got some more; so
we did not get very thirsty. A few ribbons of canvas still remained in
the wall over our heads, and these produced volleys of cracks like pistol
shots hour after hour The canvas never drew out from the walls, not an
inch The wind made just the same noise as an express train running fast
through a tunnel if you have both the windows down.

I can well believe that neither of my companions gave up hope for an
instant. They must have been frightened but they were never disturbed. As
for me I never had any hope at all; and when the roof went I felt that
this was the end. What else could I think? We had spent days in reaching
this place through the darkness in cold such as had never been
experienced by human beings. We had been out for four weeks under
conditions in which no man had existed previously for more than a few
days, if that. During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer
physical exhaustion, as men sleep on the rack; and every minute of it we
had been fighting for the bed-rock necessaries of bare existence, and
always in the dark. We had kept ourselves going by enormous care of our
feet and hands and bodies, by burning oil, and by having plenty of hot
fatty food. Now we had no tent, one tin of oil left out of six, and only
part of our cooker. When we were lucky and not too cold we could almost
wring water from our clothes, and directly we got out of our
sleeping-bags we were frozen into solid sheets of armoured ice. In cold
temperatures with all the advantages of a tent over our heads we were
already taking more than an hour of fierce struggling and cramp to get
into our sleeping-bags--so frozen were they and so long did it take us to
thaw our way in. No! Without the tent we were dead men.

[Illustration: MT. EREBUS]

[Illustration: ICE PRESSURE AT A]

And there seemed not one chance in a million that we should ever see our
tent again. We were 900 feet up on the mountain side, and the wind blew
about as hard as a wind can blow straight out to sea. First there was a
steep slope, so hard that a pick made little impression upon it, so
slippery that if you started down in finnesko you never could stop: this
ended in a great ice-cliff some hundreds of feet high, and then came
miles of pressure ridges, crevassed and tumbled, in which you might as
well look for a daisy as a tent: and after that the open sea. The
chances, however, were that the tent had just been taken up into the air
and dropped somewhere in this sea well on the way to New Zealand.
Obviously the tent was gone.

Face to face with real death one does not think of the things that
torment the bad people in the tracts, and fill the good people with
bliss. I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but
candidly I did not care. I could not have wept if I had tried. I had no
wish to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to have been a
bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road
to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.

I wanted those years over again. What fun I would have with them: what
glorious fun! It was a pity. Well has the Persian said that when we come
to die we, remembering that God is merciful, will gnaw our elbows with
remorse for thinking of the things we have not done for fear of the Day
of Judgment.

And I wanted peaches and syrup--badly. We had them at the hut, sweeter
and more luscious than you can imagine. And we had been without sugar for
a month. Yes--especially the syrup.

Thus impiously I set out to die, making up my mind that I was not going
to try and keep warm, that it might not take too long, and thinking I
would try and get some morphia from the medical case if it got very bad.
Not a bit heroic, and entirely true! Yes! comfortable, warm reader. Men
do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.

And then quite naturally and no doubt disappointingly to those who would
like to read of my last agonies (for who would not give pleasure by his
death?) I fell asleep. I expect the temperature was pretty high during
this great blizzard, and anything near zero was very high to us. That
and the snow which drifted over us made a pleasant wet kind of snipe
marsh inside our sleeping-bags, and I am sure we all dozed a good bit.
There was so much to worry about that there was not the least use in
worrying; and we were so _very_ tired. We were hungry, for the last meal
we had had was in the morning of the day before, but hunger was not very
pressing.

And so we lay, wet and quite fairly warm, hour after hour while the wind
roared round us, blowing storm force continually and rising in the gusts
to something indescribable. Storm force is force 11, and force 12 is the
biggest wind which can be logged: Bowers logged it force 11, but he was
always so afraid of overestimating that he was inclined to underrate. I
think it was blowing a full hurricane. Sometimes awake, sometimes dozing,
we had not a very uncomfortable time so far as I can remember. I knew
that parties which had come to Cape Crozier in the spring had experienced
blizzards which lasted eight or ten days. But this did not worry us as
much as I think it did Bill: I was numb. I vaguely called to mind that
Peary had survived a blizzard in the open: but wasn't that in the summer?

It was in the early morning of Saturday (July 22) that we discovered the
loss of the tent. Some time during that morning we had had our last meal.
The roof went about noon on Sunday and we had had no meal in the interval
because our supply of oil was so low; nor could we move out of our bags
except as a last necessity. By Sunday night we had been without a meal
for some thirty-six hours.

The rocks which fell upon us when the roof went did no damage, and though
we could not get out of our bags to move them, we could fit ourselves
into them without difficulty. More serious was the drift which began to
pile up all round and over us. It helped to keep us warm of course, but
at the same time in these comparatively high temperatures it saturated
our bags even worse than they were before. If we did not find the tent
(and its recovery would be a miracle) these bags and the floor-cloth of
the tent on which we were lying were all we had in that fight back
across the Barrier which could, I suppose, have only had one end.

Meanwhile we had to wait. It was nearly 70 miles home and it had taken us
the best part of three weeks to come. In our less miserable moments we
tried to think out ways of getting back, but I do not remember very much
about that time. Sunday morning faded into Sunday afternoon,--into Sunday
night,--into Monday morning. Till then the blizzard had raged with
monstrous fury; the winds of the world were there, and they had all gone
mad. We had bad winds at Cape Evans this year, and we had far worse the
next winter when the open water was at our doors. But I have never heard
or felt or seen a wind like this. I wondered why it did not carry away
the earth.

In the early hours of Monday there was an occasional hint of a lull.
Ordinarily in a big winter blizzard, when you have lived for several days
and nights with that turmoil in your ears, the lulls are more trying than
the noise: "the feel of not to feel it."[159] I do not remember noticing
that now. Seven or eight more hours passed, and though it was still
blowing we could make ourselves heard to one another without great
difficulty. It was two days and two nights since we had had a meal.

We decided to get out of our bags and make a search for the tent. We did
so, bitterly cold and utterly miserable, though I do not think any of us
showed it. In the darkness we could see very little, and no trace
whatever of the tent. We returned against the wind, nursing our faces and
hands, and settled that we must try and cook a meal somehow. We managed
about the weirdest meal eaten north or south. We got the floor-cloth
wedged under our bags, then got into our bags and drew the floor-cloth
over our heads. Between us we got the primus alight somehow, and by hand
we balanced the cooker on top of it, minus the two members which had been
blown away. The flame flickered in the draughts. Very slowly the snow in
the cooker melted, we threw in a plentiful supply of pemmican, and the
smell of it was better than anything on earth. In time we got both tea
and pemmican, which was full of hairs from our bags, penguin feathers,
dirt and debris, but delicious. The blubber left in the cooker got burnt
and gave the tea a burnt taste. None of us ever forgot that meal: I
enjoyed it as much as such a meal could be enjoyed, and that burnt taste
will always bring back the memory.

It was still dark and we lay down in our bags again, but soon a little
glow of light began to come up, and we turned out to have a further
search for the tent. Birdie went off before Bill and me. Clumsily I
dragged my eider-down out of my bag on my feet, all sopping wet: it was
impossible to get it back and I let it freeze: it was soon just like a
rock. The sky to the south was as black and sinister as it could possibly
be. It looked as though the blizzard would be on us again at any moment.

I followed Bill down the slope. We could find nothing. But, as we
searched, we heard a shout somewhere below and to the right. We got on a
slope, slipped, and went sliding down quite unable to stop ourselves, and
came upon Birdie with the tent, the outer lining still on the bamboos.
Our lives had been taken away and given back to us.

We were so thankful we said nothing.

The tent must have been gripped up into the air, shutting as it rose. The
bamboos, with the inner lining lashed to them, had entangled the outer
cover, and the whole went up together like a shut umbrella. This was our
salvation. If it had opened in the air nothing could have prevented its
destruction. As it was, with all the accumulated ice upon it, it must
have weighed the best part of 100 lbs. It had been dropped about half a
mile away, at the bottom of a steep slope: and it fell in a hollow, still
shut up. The main force of the wind had passed over it, and there it was,
with the bamboos and fastenings wrenched and strained, and the ends of
two of the poles broken, but the silk untorn.

If that tent went again we were going with it. We made our way back up
the slope with it, carrying it solemnly and reverently, precious as
though it were something not quite of the earth. And we dug it in as
tent was never dug in before; not by the igloo, but in the old place
farther down where we had first arrived. And while Bill was doing this
Birdie and I went back to the igloo and dug and scratched and shook away
the drift inside until we had found nearly all our gear. It is wonderful
how little we lost when the roof went. Most of our gear was hung on the
sledge, which was part of the roof, or was packed into the holes of the
hut to try and make it drift-proof, and the things must have been blown
inwards into the bottom of the hut by the wind from the south and the
back draught from the north. Then they were all drifted up. Of course a
certain number of mitts and socks were blown away and lost, but the only
important things were Bill's fur mitts, which were stuffed into a hole in
the rocks of the hut. We loaded up the sledge and pushed it down the
slope. I don't know how Birdie was feeling, but I felt so weak that it
was the greatest labour. The blizzard looked right on top of us.

We had another meal, and we wanted it: and as the good hoosh ran down
into our feet and hands, and up into our cheeks and ears and brains, we
discussed what we would do next. Birdie was all for another go at the
Emperor penguins. Dear Birdie, he never would admit that he was beaten--I
don't know that he ever really was! "I think he (Wilson) thought he had
landed us in a bad corner and was determined to go straight home, though
I was for one other tap at the Rookery. However, I had placed myself
under his orders for this trip voluntarily, and so we started the next
day for home."[160] There could really be no common-sense doubt: we had
to go back, and we were already very doubtful whether we should ever
manage to get into our sleeping-bags in very low temperature, so ghastly
had they become.

I don't know when it was, but I remember walking down that slope--I don't
know why, perhaps to try and find the bottom of the cooker--and thinking
that there was nothing on earth that a man under such circumstances
would not give for a good warm sleep. He would give everything he
possessed: he would give--how many--years of his life. One or two at any
rate--perhaps five? Yes--I would give five. I remember the sastrugi, the
view of the Knoll, the dim hazy black smudge of the sea far away below:
the tiny bits of green canvas that twittered in the wind on the surface
of the snow: the cold misery of it all, and the weakness which was biting
into my heart.

For days Birdie had been urging me to use his eider-down lining--his
beautiful dry bag of the finest down--which he had never slipped into his
own fur bag. I had refused: I felt that I should be a beast to take it.

We packed the tank ready for a start back in the morning and turned in,
utterly worn out. It was only -12 deg. that night, but my left big toe was
frost-bitten in my bag which I was trying to use without an eider-down
lining, and my bag was always too big for me. It must have taken several
hours to get it back, by beating one foot against the other. When we got
up, as soon as we could, as we did every night, for our bags were nearly
impossible, it was blowing fairly hard and looked like blizzing. We had a
lot to do, two or three hours' work, packing sledges and making a depot
of what we did not want, in a corner of the igloo. We left the second
sledge, and a note tied to the handle of the pickaxe.

"We started down the slope in a wind which was rising all the time and
-15 deg.. My job was to balance the sledge behind: I was so utterly done I
don't believe I could have pulled effectively. Birdie was much the
strongest of us. The strain and want of sleep was getting me in the neck,
and Bill looked very bad. At the bottom we turned our faces to the
Barrier, our backs to the penguins, but after doing about a mile it
looked so threatening in the south that we camped in a big wind, our
hands going one after the other. We had nothing but the hardest
wind-swept sastrugi, and it was a long business: there was only the
smallest amount of drift, and we were afraid the icy snow blocks would
chafe the tent. Birdie lashed the full biscuit tin to the door to
prevent its flapping, and also got what he called the tent downhaul round
the cap and then tied it about himself outside his bag: if the tent went
he was going too.

"I was feeling as if I should crack, and accepted Birdie's eider-down. It
was wonderfully self-sacrificing of him: more than I can write. I felt a
brute to take it, but I was getting useless unless I got some sleep which
my big bag would not allow. Bill and Birdie kept on telling me to do
less: that I was doing more than my share of the work: but I think that I
was getting more and more weak. Birdie kept wonderfully strong: he slept
most of the night: the difficulty for him was to get into his bag without
going to sleep. He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but some of
these nights he had to give it up for the time because he could not keep
awake. He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his hand and let it
fall: and sometimes he had the primus.

"Bill's bag was getting hopeless: it was really too small for an
eider-down and was splitting all over the place: great long holes. He
never consciously slept for nights: he did sleep a bit, for we heard him.
Except for this night, and the next when Birdie's eider-down was still
fairly dry, I never consciously slept; except that I used to wake for
five or six nights running with the same nightmare--that we were drifted
up, and that Bill and Birdie were passing the gear into my bag, cutting
it open to do so, or some other variation,--I did not know that I had
been asleep at all."[161]

"We had hardly reached the pit," wrote Bowers, "when a furious wind came
on again and we had to camp. All that night the tent flapped like the
noise of musketry, owing to two poles having been broken at the ends and
the fit spoilt. I thought it would end matters by going altogether and
lashed it down as much as I could, attaching the apex to a line round my
own bag. The wind abated after 11/2 days and we set out, doing five or six
miles before we found ourselves among crevasses."[162]

We had plugged ahead all that day (July 26) in a terrible light,
blundering in among pressure and up on to the slopes of Terror. The
temperature dropped from -21 deg. to -45 deg.. "Several times [we] stepped into
rotten-lidded crevasses in smooth wind-swept ice. We continued, however,
feeling our way along by keeping always off hard ice-slopes and on the
crustier deeper snow which characterizes the hollows of the pressure
ridges, which I believed we had once more fouled in the dark. We had no
light, and no landmarks to guide us, except vague and indistinct
silhouetted slopes ahead, which were always altering and whose distance
and character it was impossible to judge. We never knew whether we were
approaching a steep slope at close quarters or a long slope of Terror,
miles away, and eventually we travelled on by the ear, and by the feel of
the snow under our feet, for both the sound and the touch told one much
of the chances of crevasses or of safe going. We continued thus in the
dark in the hope that we were at any rate in the right direction."[163]
And then we camped after getting into a bunch of crevasses, completely
lost. Bill said, "At any rate I think we are well clear of the pressure."
But there were pressure pops all night, as though some one was whacking
an empty tub.

It was Birdie's picture hat which made the trouble next day. "What do you
think of _that_ for a hat, sir?" I heard him say to Scott a few days
before we started, holding it out much as Lucille displays her latest
Paris model. Scott looked at it quietly for a time: "I'll tell you when
you come back, Birdie," he said. It was a complicated affair with all
kinds of nose-guards and buttons and lanyards: he thought he was going to
set it to suit the wind much as he would set the sails of a ship. We
spent a long time with our housewifes before this and other trips, for
everybody has their own ideas as to how to alter their clothing for the
best. When finished some looked neat, like Bill: others baggy, like Scott
or Seaman Evans: others rough and ready, like Oates and Bowers: a few
perhaps more rough than ready, and I will not mention names. Anyway
Birdie's hat became improper immediately it was well iced up.

"When we got a little light in the morning we found we were a little
north of the two patches of moraine on Terror. Though we did not know it,
we were on the point where the pressure runs up against Terror, and we
could dimly see that we were right up against something. We started to
try and clear it, but soon had an enormous ridge, blotting out the
moraine and half Terror, rising like a great hill on our right. Bill said
the only thing was to go right on and hope it would lower; all the time,
however, there was a bad feeling that we might be putting any number of
ridges between us and the mountain. After a while we tried to cross this
one, but had to turn back for crevasses, both Bill and I putting a leg
down. We went on for about twenty minutes and found a lower place, and
turned to rise up it diagonally, and reached the top. Just over the top
Birdie went right down a crevasse, which was about wide enough to take
him. He was out of sight and out of reach from the surface, hanging in
his harness. Bill went for his harness, I went for the bow of the sledge:
Bill told me to get the Alpine rope and Birdie directed from below what
we could do. We could not possibly haul him up as he was, for the sides
of the crevasse were soft and he could not help himself."[164]

"My helmet was so frozen up," wrote Bowers, "that my head was encased in
a solid block of ice, and I could not look down without inclining my
whole body. As a result Bill stumbled one foot into a crevasse and I
landed in it with both mine [even as I shouted a warning[165] ], the
bridge gave way and down I went. Fortunately our sledge harness is made
with a view to resisting this sort of thing, and there I hung with the
bottomless pit below and the ice-crusted sides alongside, so narrow that
to step over it would have been quite easy had I been able to see it.
Bill said, 'What do you want?' I asked for an Alpine rope with a bowline
for my foot: and taking up first the bowline and then my harness they got
me out."[166] Meanwhile on the surface I lay over the crevasse and gave
Birdie the bowline: he put it on his foot: then he raised his foot,
giving me some slack: I held the rope while he raised himself on his
foot, thus giving Bill some slack on the harness: Bill then held the
harness, allowing Birdie to raise his foot and give me some slack again.
We got him up inch by inch, our fingers getting bitten, for the
temperature was -46 deg.. Afterwards we often used this way of getting people
out of crevasses, and it was a wonderful piece of presence of mind that
it was invented, so far as I know, on the spur of the moment by a frozen
man hanging in one himself.

"In front of us we could see another ridge, and we did not know how many
lay beyond that. Things looked pretty bad. Bill took a long lead on the
Alpine rope and we got down our present difficulty all right. This method
of the leader being on a long trace in front we all agreed to be very
useful. From this moment our luck changed and everything went for us to
the end. When we went out on the sea-ice the whole experience was over in
a few days, Hut Point was always in sight, and there was daylight. I
always had the feeling that the whole series of events had been brought
about by an extraordinary run of accidents, and that after a certain
stage it was quite beyond our power to guide the course of them. When on
the way to Cape Crozier the moon suddenly came out of the cloud to show
us a great crevasse which would have taken us all with our sledge without
any difficulty, I felt that we were not to go under this trip after such
a deliverance. When we had lost our tent, and there was a very great
balance of probability that we should never find it again, and we were
lying out the blizzard in our bags, I saw that we were face to face with
a long fight against cold which we could not have survived. I cannot
write how helpless I believed we were to help ourselves, and how we were
brought out of a very terrible series of experiences. When we started
back I had a feeling that things were going to change for the better, and
this day I had a distinct idea that we were to have one more bad
experience and that after that we could hope for better things.

[Illustration: DOWN A CREVASSE]

"By running along the hollow we cleared the pressure ridges, and
continued all day up and down, but met no crevasses. Indeed, we met no
more crevasses and no more pressure. I think it was upon this day that a
wonderful glow stretched over the Barrier edge from Cape Crozier: at the
base it was the most vivid crimson it is possible to imagine, shading
upwards through every shade of red to light green, and so into a deep
blue sky. It is the most vivid red I have ever seen in the sky."[167]

It was -49 deg. in the night and we were away early in -47 deg.. By mid-day we
were rising Terror Point, opening Erebus rapidly, and got the first
really light day, though the sun would not appear over the horizon for
another month. I cannot describe what a relief the light was to us. We
crossed the point outside our former track, and saw inside us the ridges
where we had been blizzed for three days on our outward journey.

The minimum was -66 deg. the next night and we were now back in the windless
bight of Barrier with its soft snow, low temperatures, fogs and mists,
and lingering settlements of the inside crusts. Saturday and Sunday, the
29th and 30th, we plugged on across this waste, iced up as usual but
always with Castle Rock getting bigger. Sometimes it looked like fog or
wind, but it always cleared away. We were getting weak, how weak we can
only realize now, but we got in good marches, though slow--days when we
did 41/2, 71/4 63/4, 61/2, 71/2 miles. On our outward journey we had been relaying