188 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
gifts to squander upon those who woo her, chiefest of these 
gifts isthatof her beauty. Next, perhaps, is that of grandeur 
and immensity, of giant mountains and limitless spaces, 
which must awe the most casual, and may well terrify the 
least imaginative of mortals. And there is one other gift 
which she gives with both hands, more prosaic, but almost 
more desirable. That is the gift of sleep. Perhaps it is true 
of others as is certainly the case with me, that the more 
horrible the conditions in which we sleep, the more sooth- 
ing and wonderful are the dreams which visit us. Some of 
us have slept in a hurricane of wind and a hell of drifting 
snow and darkness, with no roof above our heads, with no 
tent to help us home, with no conceivable chance that we 
should ever see our friends again, with no food that we 
could eat, and only the snow which drifted into our sleeping- 
bags which we could drink day after day and night after 
night. We slept not only soundly the greater part of these 
days and nights, but with a certain numbed pleasure. 
We wanted something sweet to eat: for preference tinned 
peaches in syrup! Well! That is the kind of sleep the 
Antarctic offers you at her worst, or nearly at her worst. 
And if the worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for 
you in the snow, he comes disguised as Sleep, and you 
ereet him rather as a welcome friend than as a gruesome 
foe. She treats you thus when you are in the extremity of 
peril and hardship; perhaps then you can imagine what 
draughts of deep and healthy slumber she will give a tired 
sledger at the end of a long day’s march in summer, when 
after a nice hot supper he tucks his soft dry warm furry bag 
round him with the light beating in through the green silk 
tent, the homely smell of tobacco in the air, and the only 
noise that of the ponies tethered outside, munching their 
supper in the sun. 
And so it came about that during our sojourn at Cape 
Evans, in our comfortable warm roomy home, we took our 
full allotted span of sleep. Most were in their bunks by 
IO P.M., sometimes with a candle and a book, not rarely 
with a piece of chocolate. The acetylene was turned off at 
10.30, for we had a limited quantity of carbide, and soon the 
