244 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
candle in favour of the rising moon. We had started before 
the moon on purpose, but as we shall see she gave us little 
light. However, we owed our escape from a very sticky 
death to her on one occasion. 
It was a little later on when we were among crevasses, 
with Terror above us, but invisible, somewhere on our left, 
and the Barrier pressure on our right. We were quite lost 
in the darkness, and only knew that we were running 
downhill, the sledge almost catching our heels. ‘There had 
been no light all day, clouds obscured the moon, we had 
not seen her since yesterday. And quite suddenly a little 
patch of clear sky drifted, as it were, over her face, and she 
showed us three paces ahead a great crevasse with just a 
shining icy lid not much thicker than glass. We should 
all have walked into it, and the sledge would certainly have 
followed us down. After that I felt we had a chance of 
pulling through: God could not be so cruel as to have 
saved us just to prolong our agony. 
But at present we need not worry about crevasses; for 
we had not reached the long stretch where the moving 
Barrier, with the weight of many hundred miles of ice 
behind it, comes butting up against the slopes of Mount 
Terror, itself some eleven thousand feet high. Now we 
were still plunging ankle-deep in the mass of soft sandy 
snow which lies in the windless area. It seemed to have no 
bottom at all, and since the snow was much the same tem- 
perature as the air, our feet, as well as our bodies, got colder 
and colder the longer we marched : in ordinary sledging 
you begin to warm up after a quarter of an hour’s pulling, 
here it was just the reverse. Even now I find myself un- 
consciously kicking the toes of my right foot against the 
heel of my left: a habit I picked up on this journey by doing 
it every time we halted. Well no. Not always. For there 
was one halt when we just lay on our backs and gazed up 
into the sky, where, so the others said, there was blazing 
the most wonderful aurora they had ever seen. I did not 
see it, being so near-sighted and unable to wear spectacles — 
owing to the cold. The aurora was always before us as 
we travelled east, more beautiful than any seen by previous 
