THE WINTER JOURNEY 24.5 
expeditions wintering in McMurdo Sound, where Erebus 
must have hidden the most brilliant displays. Now most 
of the sky was covered with swinging, swaying curtains 
which met in a great whirl overhead: lemon yellow, green 
and orange. 
The minimum this night was — 65°, and during July 3 
it ranged between — 52° and —58°. We got forward 
only 24 miles, and by this time I had silently made up my 
mind that we had not the ghost of a chance of reaching the 
penguins. I am sure that Bill was having a very bad time 
these nights, though it was an impression rather than any- 
thing else, for he never said so. We knew we did sleep, 
for we heard one another snore, and also we used to have 
dreams and nightmares ; but we had little consciousness of 
it, and we were now beginning to drop off when we halted 
on the march. 
Our sleeping-bags were getting really bad by now, and 
already it took a long time to thaw a way down into them 
at night. Bill spread his in the middle, Bowers was on 
his right, and I was on his left. Always he insisted that I 
should start getting my legs into mine before fe started: 
we were rapidly cooling down after our hot supper, and 
this was very unselfish of him. Then came seven shivering 
hours and first thing on getting out of our sleeping-bags 
in the morning we stuffed our personal gear into the mouth 
of the bag before it could freeze: this made a plug which 
when removed formed a frozen hole for us to push into as 
a start in the evening. 
We got into some strange knots when trying to per- 
suade our limbs into our bags, and suffered terribly from 
cramp in consequence. We would wait and rub, but 
directly we tried to move again down it would come and 
grip our legsina vice. Wealso, especially Bowers, suffered 
agony from crampinthestomach. We let the primus burn 
on after supper now for a time—it was the only thing 
which kept us going—and when one who was holding the 
primus was seized with cramp we hastily took the lamp 
from him until the spasm was over. It was horrible to see 
Birdie’s stomach cramp sometimes: he certainly got it 
