THE WINTER JOURNEY 287 
lashed the full biscuit tin to the door to prevent its flapping, 
and also got what he called the tent downhaul round the 
cap and then tied it about himself outside his bag: if the 
tent went he was going too. 
*‘T was feeling as if I should crack,and accepted Birdie’s 
eider-down. It was wonderfully self-sacrificing of him: 
more than I can write. I felt a brute to take it, but I was 
getting useless unless I got some sleep which my big bag 
would not allow. Bill and Birdie kept on telling me to do 
less: that I was doing more than my share of the work: 
but I think that I was getting more and more weak. Birdie 
kept wonderfully strong: he slept most of the night: the 
difficulty for him was to get into his bag without going 
to sleep. He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but 
some of these nights he had to give it up for the time be- 
cause he could not keep awake. He used to fall asleep with 
his pannikin in his hand and let it fall: and sometimes he 
had the primus. 
“< Bill’s bag was getting hopeless: it was really too small 
for an eider-down and was splitting all over the place: 
great long holes. He never consciously slept for nights : 
he did sleep a bit, for we heard him. Except for this night, 
and the next when Birdie’s eider-down was still fairly dry, 
I never consciously slept; except that I used to wake for 
five or six nights running with the same nightmare—that 
we were drifted up, and that Bill and Birdie were passing 
the gear into my bag, cutting it open to do so, or some other 
variation,—I did not know that I had been asleep at all.’’} 
““We had hardly reached the pit,’’ wrote Bowers, 
when a furious wind came on again and we had to camp. 
All that night the tent flapped like the noise of musketry, 
owing to two poles having been broken at the ends and the 
fit spoilt. I thought it would end matters by going alto- 
gether and lashed it down as muchas I could, attaching the 
apex toa line round my own bag. The wind abated after 
14 days and we set out, doing five OF six miles before we 
found ourselves among crevasses.’ 
We had plugged ahead all that HA (July 26) in a ter- 
1 My own diary. 2 Bowers. 
6é 
