290 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
giving me some slack: I held the rope while he raised 
himself on his foot, thus giving Bill some slack on the 
harness: Bill then held the harness, allowing Birdie to 
raise his foot and give me some slack again. We got him 
up inch by inch, our fingers getting bitten, for the tem- 
perature was — 46°. Afterwards we often used this way of 
getting people out of crevasses, and it was a wonderful 
piece of presence of mind that it was invented, so far as I 
know, on the spur of the moment by a frozen man hanging 
in one himself. 
“Tn front of us we could see another ridge, and we did 
not know how many lay beyond that. ‘Things looked 
pretty bad. Bill took a long lead on the Alpine rope and we 
got down our present difficulty all right. This method of 
the leader being on a long trace in front we all agreed to 
be very useful. From this moment our luck changed and 
everything went for us to the end. When we went out on 
the sea-ice the whole experience was over in a few days, 
Hut Point was always in sight, and there was daylight. I 
always had the feeling that the whole series of events had 
been brought about by an extraordinary run of accidents, 
and that after a certain stage it was quite beyond our power 
to guide the course of them. When on the way to Cape 
Crozier the moon suddenly came out of the cloud to show 
us a great crevasse which would have taken us all with our 
sledge without any difficulty, I felt that we were not to go 
under this trip after such a deliverance. When we had lost 
our tent, and there was a very great balance of probability 
that we should never find it again, and we were lying out 
the blizzard in our bags, Isaw that we were face to face with 
a long fight against cold which we could not have survived. 
I cannot write how helpless I believed we were to help our- 
selves, and how we were brought out of a very terrible 
series of experiences. When we started back I had a feeling 
that things were going to change for the better, and this 
day I had a distinct idea that we were to have one more bad 
experience and that after that we could hope for better 
things. 
“‘By running along the hollow we cleared the pressure 
