276 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
was blowing as though the world was having a fit of hys- 
terics. ‘The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable 
fury and roar of it all cannot be imagined. 
“Bill, Bill, the tent has gone,” was the next I remem- 
ber—from Bowers shouting at us again and again through 
the door. It is always these early morning shocks which 
hit one hardest: our slow minds suggested that this might 
mean a peculiarly lingering form of death. Journey after 
journey Birdie and I fought our way across the few yards 
which had separated the tent from the igloo door. I have 
never understood why so much of our gear which was in 
the tent remained, even in the lee of the igloo. The place 
where the tent had been was littered with gear, and when 
we came to reckon up afterwards we had everything except 
the bottom piece of the cooker, and the top of the outer 
cooker. We never saw these again. The most wonderful 
thing of all was that our finnesko were lying where they 
were left, which happened to be on the ground in the part 
of the tent which was under the lee of the igloo. Also 
Birdie’s bag of personal gear was there, and a tin of sweets. 
Birdie brought two tins of sweets away with him. One 
we had to celebrate our arrival at the Knoll: this was the 
second, of which we knew nothing, and which was for 
Bill’s birthday, the next day. We started eating them on 
Saturday, however, and the tin came in useful to Bull after- 
wards. 
To get that gear in we fought against solid walls of 
black snow which flowed past us and tried to hurl us down 
the slope. Once started nothing could have stopped us. 
I saw Birdie knocked over once, but he clawed his way back 
just in time. Having passed everything we could find in 
to Bill, we got back into the igloo, and started to collect 
things together, including our very dishevelled minds. 
There was no doubt that we were in the devil of a mess, 
and it was not altogether our fault. We had had to put 
our igloo more or less where we could get rocks with 
which to build it. Very naturally we had given both our 
tent and igloo all the shelter we could from the full force 
of the wind, and now it seemed we were in danger not 
