PERSONAL SUFFERINGS 
57 
did not much care whether I went down a crevasse or not. 
We had gone through a great deal since then. Bill and 
Birdie kept on assuring me 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 was for him 
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 because he could not 
keep awake. He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his 
hand and let it fall, and once he had the lighted primus. 
Bill's bag was getting hopeless : it was really too small 
for an eiderdown 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 eiderdown was 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.] 
All our bags were by this time so saturated with 
water that they froze too stiff to bend with safety, so 
from now onwards to Cape Evans we never rolled 
them up, but packed them one on the other full length, 
like coffins, on the sledge. Even so, they were breaking 
or broken in several places in the efforts we made to get 
into them in the evenings. We always took the pre- 
caution to stow our personal kit bags and sleeping fur 
