THE WINTER JOURNEY 249 
The temperature that night was - 75.8°, and I will not 
pretend that it did not convince me that Dante was right 
when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire. 
Still we slept sometimes, and always we lay for seven 
hours. Again and again Bill asked us how about going 
back, and always we said no. Yet there was nothing I 
should have liked better: 1 was quite sure that to dream 
of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy. That day we had 
advanced 14 miles by the utmost labour, and the usual 
relay work. This was quite a good march—-and Cape 
Crozier is 67 miles from Cape Evans! 
More than once in my short life I have been struck by 
the value of the man who 1s blind to what appears to bea 
common-sense certainty : he achieves the impossible. We 
never spoke our thoughts: we discussed the Age of Stone 
which was to come, when we built our cosy warm rock hut 
on the slopes of Mount Terror, and ran our stove with 
penguin blubber, and pickled little Emperors in warmth 
and dryness. We were quite intelligent people, and we 
must all have known that we were not going to see the 
penguins and that it was folly to go forward. And yet 
with quiet perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with 
gentleness those two men led on. I just did what I was 
told. 
It is desirable that the body should work, feed and 
sleep at regular hours, and this is too often forgotten when 
sledging. But just now we found we were unable to fit 
8 hours marching and 7 hours in our sleeping-bags into 
a 24-hour day: the routine camp work took more than 
g hours, such were the conditions. We therefore ceased to 
observe the quite imaginary difference between night and 
day, and it was noon on Friday (July 7) before we got 
away. Ihe temperature was - 68° and there was a thick 
white fog: generally we had but the vaguest idea where 
we were, and we camped at Io p.m. after managing 13 
miles for the day. But what a relief. Instead of labouring 
away, our hearts were beating more naturally : it was easier 
to camp, we had some feeling in our hands, and our feet 
had not gone to sleep. Birdie swung the thermometer and 
