But at present we need not worry about crevasses; for we had not reached
the long stretch where the moving Barrier, with the weight of many
hundred miles of ice behind it, comes butting up against the slopes of
Mount Terror, itself some eleven thousand feet high. Now we were still
plunging ankle-deep in the mass of soft sandy snow which lies in the
windless area. It seemed to have no bottom at all, and since the snow was
much the same temperature as the air, our feet, as well as our bodies,
got colder and colder the longer we marched: in ordinary sledging you
begin to warm up after a quarter of an hour's pulling, here it was just
the reverse. Even now I find myself unconsciously kicking the toes of my
right foot against the heel of my left: a habit I picked up on this
journey by doing it every time we halted. Well no. Not always. For there
was one halt when we just lay on our backs and gazed up into the sky,
where, so the others said, there was blazing the most wonderful aurora
they had ever seen. I did not see it, being so near-sighted and unable to
wear spectacles owing to the cold. The aurora was always before us as we
travelled east, more beautiful than any seen by previous expeditions
wintering in McMurdo Sound, where Erebus must have hidden the most
brilliant displays. Now most of the sky was covered with swinging,
swaying curtains which met in a great whirl overhead: lemon yellow, green
and orange.

The minimum this night was -65 deg., and during July 3 it ranged between -52 deg.
and -58 deg.. We got forward only 21/2 miles, and by this time I had silently
made up my mind that we had not the ghost of a chance of reaching the
penguins. I am sure that Bill was having a very bad time these nights,
though it was an impression rather than anything else, for he never said
so. We knew we did sleep, for we heard one another snore, and also we
used to have dreams and nightmares; but we had little consciousness of
it, and we were now beginning to drop off when we halted on the march.

Our sleeping-bags were getting really bad by now, and already it took a
long time to thaw a way down into them at night. Bill spread his in the
middle, Bowers was on his right, and I was on his left. Always he
insisted that I should start getting my legs into mine before _he_
started: we were rapidly cooling down after our hot supper, and this was
very unselfish of him. Then came seven shivering hours and first thing on
getting out of our