34 SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION 



on to Bowers and Cherry, happily without hurting them, and in 

 a smother of drift Bowers and I bolted into our bags, and in them 

 the three of us lay listening to the flap of the ragged ends of can- 

 vas over our heads, which sounded like a volley of pistol shots 

 going on for hour after hour. As we lay there I think we were 

 all revolving plans for making a tent now to get back to Hut 

 Point with, out of the floorcloth on which we lay the only 

 piece of canvas now left us, except for the pieces still firmly em- 

 bedded in the hut walls. We were all warm enough, though wet, 

 as we had carried a great deal of snow into the bags with us, and 

 every time we looked out more drift which was accumulating 

 over us would fall in. I hoped myself that this would not prove 

 to be one of the five or eight-day blizzards which we had experi- 

 enced at Cape Crozier in days gone by. 



Monday, July 24, 1911. The storm continued unabated 

 until midnight, and then dropped to force 9 with squalls inter- 

 spersed by short lulls. At 6.30 A.M. the wind had dropped to 

 force 2. At 10 A.M. it was about force 3, and we awaited the 

 moment when there would be light enough for us to look for our 

 tent. Meanwhile Bowers suggested an alfresco meal under the 

 floorcloth as we sat in our bags. We lit the primus and got the 

 cooker going and had a good hot meal, the first for 48 hours, 

 the tent floorcloth resting on our heads. 



As it was still dark when we had finished we lay in our bags 

 again for a bit. Daylight appeared, and we at once turned out, 

 and it was by no means reassuring to find that the weather in the 

 south still looked as bad and thick as it possibly could. We there- 

 fore lost no time at all in getting away down wind to look for the 

 tent. Everywhere we found shreds of green canvas roof the size 

 of a pocket-handkerchief, but not a sign of the tent, until a loud 

 shout from Bowers, who had gone more east to the top of a ridge 

 than Cherry and I, told us he had seen it. He hurried down, and 

 slid about a hundred yards down a hard snow slope sitting in his 

 haste, and there we joined him where he had found the whole tent 

 hardly damaged at all, a quarter of a mile from where we had 

 pitched it. One of the poles had been twisted right out of the 

 cap, and the lower stops of the tent lining had all carried away 

 more or less, but the tent itself was intact and untorn. 



We brought it back, pitched it in the old spot in the snow 

 hollow below our hut, and then brought down our bags and 



