THE WINTER JOURNEY 237 
worse—but because we were callous. I for one had come 
to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if 
only I could die without much pain. They talk of the 
heroism of the dying—they little know—it would be so 
easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and 
blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on... 
It was the darkness that did it. I don’t believe minus 
seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight, not com- 
paratively bad, when you could see where you were going, 
where you were stepping, where the sledge straps were, 
the cooker, the primus, the food ; could see your footsteps 
lately trodden deep into the soft snow that you might find 
your way back to the rest of your load; could see the lash- 
ings of the food bags ; could read a compass without strik- 
ing three or four different boxes to find one dry match; 
could read your watch to see if the blissful moment of 
getting out of your bag was come without groping in the 
snow all about; when it would not take you five minutes 
to lash up the door of the tent, and five hours to get 
started in the morning. ... 
But in these days we were never less than four hours 
from the moment when Bill cried “Time to get up”’ to 
the time when we got into our harness. It took two men 
to get one man into his harness, and was all they could 
do, for the canvas was frozen and our clothes were frozen 
until sometimes not even two men could bend them into 
the required shape. 
The trouble is sweat and breath. I never knew before 
how much of the body’s waste comes out through the 
pores of the skin. On the most bitter days, when we had 
to camp before we had done a four-hour march in order to 
nurse back our frozen feet, it seemed that we must be 
sweating. And all this sweat, instead of passing away 
through the porous wool of our clothing and gradually 
drying off us, froze and accumulated. It passed just away 
from our flesh and then became ice: we shook plenty of 
snow and ice down from inside our trousers every time we 
changed our foot-gear, and we could have shaken it from 
our vests and from between our vests and shirts, but of 
