PRIESTLEY'S EXPERIENCE 



on my Burberry trousers and jacket outside the bag. A 

 few hours later I woke up to find that the wind had in- 

 creased to the dimensions of a bhzzard, and that the drift 

 was sweeping in a steady cloud over my head. I reahsed 

 that those in the tent would have trouble in reaching me 

 in the morning, so I got out of the bag and dressed, get- 

 ting both the bag and my clothes full of snow in the 

 process. Then, after some trouble, I got the bag down 

 the steep slope of the nunatak to the sledge, where 

 I wrapped myself up in the tent-cloth and lay 

 athwart the wind. In about two hours I got drifted up 

 so close that I was forced to get my shoulders out of 

 the bag and lever myself out of the drift, and I then 

 tried the experiment of lying head to wind on the opening 

 of the sleeping-bag. This answered very well, and it was 

 in this position that I spent the next seventy-two hours, 

 getting shifted down a yard or two at a time at every 

 change in the direction of the wind, and being gradually 

 pushed along the wind-swept surface of the glacier until 

 I was some twenty or thirty yards from the tent, and in 

 some danger of getting swept, as the wind increased in 

 violence, either on to some rocks a quarter of a mile below 

 or else straight down the glacier and over a hundred-foot 

 drop into Horseshoe Bay. 



" Three times the people in the tent managed to 

 pass me over some biscuits and raw pemmican, and 

 Marston got my chocolate from the riicksack and 

 brought it to me. My chief difficulty, however, was 

 want of water. I had had a little tea before I turned 

 in, but from that time for nearly eighty hours I had 

 nothing to drink but some fragments of ice that I could 

 prise up with the point of a small safety-pin. The 

 second time Joyce came down, I believe about the 

 beginning of the third day, he reported that the lashings 

 at the top of the tent-poles had given way and that a 



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