THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC 



are doing all humanly possible. It is with Providence 

 to help us. 



December 31.— The last day of the old year, and 

 the hardest day we have had almost, pushing through 

 soft snow uphill with a strong head wind and drift all 

 day. The temperature is minus 7° Fahr., and our 

 altitude is 10,477 ft. above sea-level. The altitude is 

 trying. My head has been very bad all day, and we 

 are all feeling the short food, but still we are getting 

 south. We are in latitude 86° 54/ South to-night, but 

 we have only three weeks' food and two weeks' biscuit 

 to do nearly 500 geographical miles. We can only do 

 our best. Too tired to write more to-night. We all 

 get iced-up about our faces, and are on the verge of 

 frost-bite all the time. Please God the weather will be 

 fine during the next fourteen days. Then all will be 

 well. The distance to-day was 11 miles. 



Note. — If we had only known that we were going to get such cold 

 weather as we were at this time experiencing, we would have kept a 

 pair of scissors to trim our beards. The moisture from the con- 

 densation of one's breath accumulated on the beard and trickled 

 down on to the Burberry blouse. Then it froze into a sheet of ice 

 inside, and it became very painful to pull the Burberry off in camp. 

 Little troubles of this sort would have seemed less serious to us if 

 we had been able to get a decent feed at the end of the day's work, 

 but we were very hungry. We thought of food most of the time. 

 The chocolate certainly seemed better than the cheese, because the 

 two spoonfuls of cheese per man allowed under our scale of diet would 

 not last as long as the two sticks of chocolate. We did not have 

 both at the same meal. We had the bad luck at this time to strike a 

 tin in which the biscuits were thin and overbaked. Under ordinary 

 circumstances they would probably have tasted rather better than 

 the other biscuits, but we wanted bulk. We soaked them in our 

 tea so that they would swell up and appear larger, but if one soaked 

 a biscuit too much, the sensation of biting something was lost, and 

 the food seemed to disappear much too easily. 



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