THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



and they had firmly refused to go back with it, appar- 

 ently because Joyce had been in the habit of feeding 

 them, and they were not willing to leave him. They 

 followed us right to Hut Point, the first long march of 

 their short lives, and after devouring all the meat and 

 biscuits we would give them, they settled down in a 

 corner of the hut for the night. We could not take 

 the poor little animals out on to the Barrier with us, 

 though they would have followed us readily enough, 

 and we decided that the only thing to do was to shut 

 them up in the hut until we came back. There was 

 plenty of snow there, so that they would not want for 

 water, and we opened a box of biscuits and some tinned 

 meat, and left the food where they could reach it. Their 

 anxious barks and whines followed us as we moved off 

 southwards. 



The journey was a severe one, for the temperature got 

 down to fifty-nine degrees below zero Fahr., with blizzard 

 winds, but as we travelled over ground that had become 

 fairly familiar in the course of the previous expedition, I 

 will not deal with our experiences in any great detail. The 

 first blizzard struck us when we were south of White 

 Island. We started off in the morning, though there 

 was a stiff breeze blowing and the weather looked 

 threatening, and marched until about 10.30 a.m. Then 

 the gusts became more fierce, and the drift got so thick 

 that we had to camp. We only put up one tent at first, 

 in the hope that we would be able to start again in a 

 few hours, but the wind continued, so we erected the 

 other tent and abandoned hope of marching farther 

 that day. We were able to make an early start on the 

 following morning, the 26th. The petroleum for our 

 stoves was practically frozen at times, refusing to run 

 at all. We got into pressure ridges when some distance 



238 



