He would give everything he
possessed: he would give--how many--years of his life. One or two at any
rate--perhaps five? Yes--I would give five. I remember the sastrugi, the
view of the Knoll, the dim hazy black smudge of the sea far away below:
the tiny bits of green canvas that twittered in the wind on the surface
of the snow: the cold misery of it all, and the weakness which was biting
into my heart.
For days Birdie had been urging me to use his eider-down lining--his
beautiful dry bag of the finest down--which he had never slipped into his
own fur bag. I had refused: I felt that I should be a beast to take it.
We packed the tank ready for a start back in the morning and turned in,
utterly worn out. It was only -12 deg. that night, but my left big toe was
frost-bitten in my bag which I was trying to use without an eider-down
lining, and my bag was always too big for me. It must have taken several
hours to get it back, by beating one foot against the other. When we got
up, as soon as we could, as we did every night, for our bags were nearly
impossible, it was blowing fairly hard and looked like blizzing. We had a
lot to do, two or three hours' work, packing sledges and making a depot
of what we did not want, in a corner of the igloo. We left the second
sledge, and a note tied to the handle of the pickaxe.
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