236 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
usual arrangement by which one man was cook for the 
week would be intolerable. We settled to be cook alter- 
nately day by day. For food we brought only pemmican 
and biscuit and butter; for drink we had tea, and we drank 
hot water to turn in on. m 
Pulling out from Hut Point that evening we brought 
along our heavy loads on the two nine-foot sledges with 
comparative ease; it was the first, and though we did not 
know it then, the only bit of good pulling we were to have. 
Good pulling to the sledge traveller means easy pulling. 
Away we went round Cape Armitage and eastwards. We 
knew that the Barrier edge was in front of us and also that 
the break-up of the sea-ice had left the face of it as a low 
perpendicular cliff. We had therefore to find a place where 
the snow had formed a drift. This we came right up 
against and met quite suddenly a very keen wind flowing, 
as it always does, from the cold Barrier down to the com- 
paratively warm sea-ice. The temperature was —47° F., 
and I was a fool to take my hands out of my mitts to haul 
on the ropes to bring the sledges up. I started away from 
the Barrier edge with all ten fingers frost-bitten. They did 
not really come back until we were in the tent for our night 
meal, and within a few hours there were two or three large 
blisters, up to an inch long, on all of them. For many days 
those blisters hurt frightfully. 
We were camped that night about half a mile in from 
the Barrier edge. The temperature was — 56°. We had a 
baddish time, being very glad to get out of our shivering 
bags next morning (June 29). We began to suspect, as we 
knew only too well later, that the only good time of the 
twenty-four hours was breakfast, for then with reasonable 
luck we need not get into our sleeping-bags again for 
another seventeen hours. 
The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel 
from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re- 
experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a 
fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The 
weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not ~ 
because later our conditions were better—they were far — 
