286 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
stances would not give for a good warm sleep. He would 
give everything he possessed: he would give—how many 
—years of his life. One or two at any rate—perhaps 
five? Yes—I would give five. I remember the sastrugi, 
the view of the Knoll, the dim hazy black smudge of the 
sea far away below: the tiny bits of green canvas that 
twittered in the wind on the surface of the snow: the 
cold misery of it all, and the weakness which was biting 
into my heart. 
For days Birdie had been urging me to use his eider- 
down lining—his beautiful dry bag of the finest down— 
which he had never slipped into his own fur bag. I had 
refused: I felt that I should be a beast to take it. 
We packed the tank ready for a start back in the 
morning and turned in, utterly worn out. It was only 
— 12° that night, but my left big toe was frost-bitten in my 
bag which I was trying to use withoutan eider-down lining, 
and my bag was always too big for me. It must have taken 
several hours to get it back, by beating one foot against the 
other. When we got up, as soon as we could, as we did 
every night, for our bags were nearly impossible, it was 
blowing fairly hard and looked like blizzing. We had a 
lot to do, two or three hours’ work, packing sledges and 
making a depot of what we did not want, in a corner of the 
igloo. We left the second sledge, and a note tied to the 
handle of the pickaxe. 
‘““We started down the slope in a wind which was 
rising all the time and - 15°. My job was to balance 
the sledge behind: I was so utterly done I don’t believe 
I could have pulled effectively. Birdie was much the 
strongest of us. The strain and want of sleep was getting 
me in the neck, and Bill looked very bad. At the bottom 
we turned our faces to the Barrier, our backs to the pen- 
guins, but after doing about a mile it looked so threatening 
in the south that we camped in a big wind, our hands 
going one after the other. We had nothing but the 
hardest wind-swept sastrugi, and it was a long business : 
there was only the smallest amount of drift, and we were 
afraid the icy snow blocks would chafe the tent. Birdie 
