282 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
That and the snow which drifted over us made a pleasant 
wet kind of snipe marsh inside our sleeping-bags, and I 
am sure we all dozed a good bit. There was so much to 
worry about that there was not the least use in worrying : 
and we were so very tired. We were hungry, for the last 
meal we had had was in the morning of the day before, but 
hunger was not very pressing. 
And so we lay, wet and quite fairly warm, hour after 
hour while the wind roared round us, blowing storm force 
continually and rising in the gusts to something inde- 
scribable. Storm force is force 11, and force 12 is the 
biggest wind which can be logged: Bowers logged it force 
11, but he was always so afraid of overestimating that he 
was inclined to underrate. I think it was blowing a full 
hurricane. Sometimes awake, sometimes dozing, we had 
not a very uncomfortable time so far as I can remember. 
I knew that parties which had come to Cape Crozier in the 
spring had experienced blizzards which lasted eight or ten 
days. But this did not worry us as much as I think it did 
Bill: I was numb. I vaguely called to mind that Peary had 
survived a blizzard in the open: but wasn’t that in the 
summer? 
It was in the early morning of Saturday (July 22) that 
we discovered the loss of the tent. Some time during that 
morning we had had our last meal. The roof went about 
noon on Sunday and we had had no meal in the interval 
because our supply of oil was so low; nor could we move 
out of our bags except asa last necessity. By Sunday night 
we had been without a meal for some thirty-six hours. 
The rocks which fell upon us when the roof went did 
no damage, and though we could not get out of our bags to 
move them, we could fit ourselves into them without diff_i- 
culty. More serious was the drift which began to pile up 
allround and over us. It helped to keep us warm of course, 
but at the same time in these comparatively high tempera- 
tures it saturated our bags even worse than they were be- 
fore. If we did not find the tent (and its recovery would 
be a miracle) these bags and the floor-cloth of the tent on 
which we were lying were all we had in that fight back 
