280 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
the flaps of our bags we could get small pinches of soft 
drift which we pressed together and put into our mouths 
to melt. When our hands warmed up again we got some 
more; so we did not get very thirsty. A few ribbons of 
canvas still remained in the wall over our heads, and these 
produced volleys of cracks like pistol shots hour after hour. 
The canvas never drew out from the walls, not an inch. 
The wind made just the same noise as an express train run- 
ning fast through a tunnel if you have both the windows 
down. 
I can well believe that neither of my companions gave 
up hope for an instant. They must have been frightened, 
but they were never disturbed. As for me I never had any 
hope at all; and when the roof went I felt that this was 
the end. What else could I think? We had spent days in 
reaching this place through the darkness in cold such as 
had never been experienced by human beings. We had 
been out for four weeks under conditions in which no man 
had existed previously for more than a few days, if that. 
During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer 
physical exhaustion, as men sleep on the rack; and every 
minute of it we had been fighting for the bed-rock neces- 
saries of bare existence, and always in the dark. We had 
kept ourselves going by enormous care of our feet and 
hands and bodies, by burning oil, and by having plenty of 
hot fatty food. Now we had no tent, one tin of oil left out 
of six, and only part of our cooker. When we were lucky 
and not too cold we could almost wring water from our 
clothes, and directly we got out of our sleeping-bags we 
were frozen into solid sheets of armoured ice. In cold 
temperatures with all the advantages of a tent over our 
heads we were already taking more than an hour of fierce 
struggling and cramp to get into our sleeping-bags—so 
frozen were they and so long did it take us to thaw our way 
in. No! Without the tent we were dead men. 
And there seemed not one chance in a million that we 
should ever see our tent again. We were 900 feet up on 
the mountain side, and the wind blew about as hard as a 
wind can blow straight out to sea. First there was a steep 
