THE WINTER JOURNEY 235 
But the sweat was freezing in our clothing and we 
moved on. All we could see was a black patch away to our 
left which was Turk’s Head: when this disappeared we 
knew that we had passed Glacier Tongue which, unseen 
by us, eclipsed the rocks behind. And then we camped for 
lunch. 
That first camp only lives in my memory because it 
began our education of camp work in the dark. Had we 
now struck the blighting temperature which we were to 
MICCE.. i. 
There was just enough wind to make us want to hurry : 
down harness, each man to a strap on the sledge—quick 
with the floor-cloth—the bags to hold it down—now a 
good spread with the bamboos and the tent inner lining— 
hold them, Cherry, and over with the outer covering— 
snow on to the skirting and inside with the cook with his 
candle,and a box of matches.... 
That is how we tied it: that is the way we were accus- 
tomed to do it, day after day and night after night when 
the sun was still high or at any rate only setting, sledging 
on the Barrier in spring and summer and autumn; pull- 
ing our hands from our mitts when necessary—plenty of 
time to warm up afterwards; in the days when we took 
pride in getting our tea boiling within twenty minutes of 
throwing off our harness: when the man who wanted to 
work in his fur mitts was thought a bit too slow. 
But now it didn’t work. ‘We shall have to go a bit 
slower,” said Bill, and “‘ we shall get more used to working 
in the dark.”’ At this time, I remember, I was still trying 
to wear spectacles. 
We spent that night on the sea-ice, finding that we were 
too far in towards Castle Rock; and it was not until the 
following afternoon that we reached and lunched at Hut 
Point. I speak of day and night, though they were much 
the same, and later on when we found that we could not 
get the work into a twenty-four-hour day, we decided to 
carry on as though such a convention did not exist; as in 
actual fact it did not. We had already realized that cook- 
ing under these conditions would be a bad job, and that the 
