CAPTAIN SCOTT'S OWN STORY . 
wind howled on. The snow entered every 
chink and crevice of the sleeping-bags, and 
the occupants shivered and wondered how it 
would all end. 
“ Horrible Discomforts. 5 ' 
“ The wind fell at noon the following day; 
the forlorn travellers crept from their icy 
nests, made shift to spread their floor-cloth 
overhead, and lit their Primus. They tasted 
their first food for forty-eight hours, and 
began to plan a means to build a shelter on the 
homeward route. They decided that they 
must dig a large pit nightly and cover it as 
best they could with their floor-cloth. Put 
now fortune befriended them ; a search to 
the north revealed the tent lying [in a sheltered 
dip of the great snow-slope below their camp- 
ing ground] a quarter of a mile away, and, 
strange to relate, practically uninjured, a fine 
testimonial for the material used in its con- 
struction. On the following day they started 
homeward, and immediately another blizzard 
fell on them, holding them prisoners for two 
days. By this time the miserable condition 
of their effects was beyond description. The 
sleeping-bags were far too stiff to be rolled up 
— in fact, they were so hard -frozen that 
attempts to bend them actually split the 
skins ; the eiderdown bags inside Wilson’s 
and C.-G.’s reindeer covers served but to 
fitfully stop the gaps made by such rents. 
All socks, ffnneslco, and mits had long been 
coated with ice ; placed in breast pockets or 
inside vests at night, they did not even show 
signs of thawing, much less of drying. It 
sometimes took C.-G. three-quarters of an 
hour to get into his sleeping-bag, so flat did it 
freeze and so difficult was it to open. It is 
scarcely possible to realize the horrible dis- 
comforts of the forlorn travellers as they 
plodded back across the Barrier with the 
temperature again constantly below - 6o°. 
In this fashion they reached Hut Point, and 
on the following night our home quarters. 
“ One of the Most Gallant Stories in 
Polar History.” 
“ Wilson is disappointed at seeing so little 
of the penguins, but to me and to everyone 
who has remained here the result of this effort 
is the appeal it makes to our imagination 
as one of the most gallant stories in Polar 
history. That men should wander forth in 
the depth of a Polar night to face the most 
dismal cold and the fiercest gales in darkness 
THE BEAUTIES OF THE ANTARCTIC. 
A STRIKING MIDNIGHT SUN EFFECT, WITH PENGUINS AT THE ICE-EDGE. 
