278 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
For twenty-four hours we waited for the roof to go: things 
were so bad now that we dare not unlash the door. 
Many hours ago Bill had told us that if the roof went he 
considered that our best chance would be to roll over in our 
sleeping-bags until we were lying on the openings, and get 
frozen and drifted in. 
Gradually the situation got more desperate. The dis- 
tance between the taut-sucked canvas and the sledge on 
which it should have been resting became greater, and 
this must have been due to the stretching of the canvas 
itself and the loss of the snow blocks on the top: it was 
not drawing out of the walls. The crashes as it dropped 
and banged out again were louder. There was more snow 
coming through the walls, though all our loose mitts, socks. 
and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst places: 
our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the 
rocks over the door. The rocks were lifting and shaking 
here till we thought they would fall. 
We talked by shouting, and long before this one of us 
proposed to try and get the Alpine rope lashed down over 
the roof from outside. But Bowers said it was an absolute 
impossibility in that wind. ‘‘ You could never ask men at 
sea to try sucha thing,” he said. He was up and out of his 
bag continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits 
of roof to try and prevent the flapping and so forth. He 
was magnificent. 
And then it went. 
Birdie was over by the door, where the canvas which 
was bent over the lintel board was working worse than 
anywhere else. Bill was practically out of his bag pressing 
against some part with a long stick of some kind. I don’t 
know what I was doing but I was half out of and half in 
my bag. 
The top of the door opened in little slits and that green 
Willesden canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments 
in fewer seconds than it takes to read this. The uproar of 
it all was indescribable. Even above the savage thunder 
of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of the 
canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips. The highest 
