THE WINTER JOURNEY 2G 
is 100 degrees of frost, then everything in the air is about 
100 degrees of frost too. You have only to untie the lash- 
ings of one bag in a — 70° temperature, with your feet 
frozen and your fingers just nursed back after getting a 
match to strike for the candle (you will have tried several 
boxes—metal), to realize this as an advantage. 
_ The immediate and increasingly pressing disadvantage 
is that you have no sugar. Have you ever had a craving for 
sugar which never leaves you, even when asleep ? It is un- 
pleasant. As a matter of fact the craving for sweet things 
never seriously worried us on this journey, and there must 
have been some sugar in our biscuits which gave a pleasant 
sweetness to our mid-day tea or nightly hot water when 
broken up and soaked in it. These biscuits were specially 
made for us by Huntley and Palmer: their composition 
was worked out by Wilson and that firm’s chemist, and is a 
secret. But they are probably the most satisfying biscuit 
ever made, and I doubt whether they can be improved 
upon. There were two kinds, called Emergency and Ant- 
arctic, but there was I think little difference between them 
except in the baking. A well-baked biscuit was good to eat 
when sledging if your supply of food was good : but if you 
were very hungry an underbaked one was much preferred. 
By taking individually different quantities of biscuit, 
pemmican and butter we were able roughly to test the 
proportions of proteids, fats and carbo-hydrates wanted by 
the human body under such extreme circumstances. Bill 
was all for fat, starting with 8 oz. butter, 12 oz. pemmi- 
can and only 12 oz. biscuit a day. Bowers told me he 
was going for proteids, 16 oz. pemmican and 16 oz. bis- 
cuit, and suggested I should go the whole hog on carbo- 
hydrates. I did not like this, since I knew I should want 
more fat, but the rations were to be altered as necessary 
during the journey, so there was no harm in trying. So I 
started with 20 oz. of biscuit and 12 oz. of pemmican 
a day. 
Bowers was all right (this was usual with him), but he 
did not eat all his extra pemmican. Bill could not eat all 
his extra butter, but was satisfied. I got hungry, certainly 
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