We had been out for four weeks under
conditions in which no man had existed previously for more than a few
days, if that. During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer
physical exhaustion, as men sleep on the rack; and every minute of it we
had been fighting for the bed-rock necessaries of bare existence, and
always in the dark. We had kept ourselves going by enormous care of our
feet and hands and bodies, by burning oil, and by having plenty of hot
fatty food. Now we had no tent, one tin of oil left out of six, and only
part of our cooker. When we were lucky and not too cold we could almost
wring water from our clothes, and directly we got out of our
sleeping-bags we were frozen into solid sheets of armoured ice. In cold
temperatures with all the advantages of a tent over our heads we were
already taking more than an hour of fierce struggling and cramp to get
into our sleeping-bags--so frozen were they and so long did it take us to
thaw our way in. No! Without the tent we were dead men.
[Illustration: MT. EREBUS]
[Illustration: ICE PRESSURE AT A]
And there seemed not one chance in a million that we should ever see our
tent again. We were 900 feet up on the mountain side, and the wind blew
about as hard as a wind can blow straight out to sea. First there was a
steep slope, so hard that a pick made little impression upon it, so
slippery that if you started down in finnesko you never could stop: this
ended in a great ice-cliff some hundreds of feet high, and then came
miles of pressure ridges, crevassed and tumbled, in which you might as
well look for a daisy as a tent: and after that the open sea.
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