not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice
below the circles of fire. Still we slept sometimes, and always we lay
for seven hours. Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and
always we said no. Yet there was nothing I should have liked better: I
was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy. That
day we had advanced 11/2 miles by the utmost labour, and the usual relay
work. This was quite a good march--and Cape Crozier is 67 miles from Cape
Evans!

More than once in my short life I have been struck by the value of the
man who is blind to what appears to be a common-sense certainty: he
achieves the impossible. We never spoke our thoughts: we discussed the
Age of Stone which was to come, when we built our cosy warm rock hut on
the slopes of Mount Terror, and ran our stove with penguin blubber, and
pickled little Emperors in warmth and dryness. We were quite intelligent
people, and we must all have known that we were not going to see the
penguins and that it was folly to go forward. And yet with quiet
perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with gentleness those two men
led on. I just did what I was told.

It is desirable that the body should work, feed and sleep at regular
hours, and this is too often forgotten when sledging. But just now we
found we were unable to fit 8 hours marching and 7 hours in our
sleeping-bags into a 24-hour day: the routine camp work took more than 9
hours, such were the conditions. We therefore ceased to observe the quite
imaginary difference between night and day, and it was noon on Friday
(July 7) before we got away. The temperature was -68 deg. and there was a
thick white fog: generally we had but the vaguest idea where we were, and
we camped at 10 P.M. after managing 13/4 miles for the day. But what a
relief. Instead of labouring away, our hearts were beating more
naturally: it was easier to camp, we had some feeling in our hands, and
our feet had not gone to sleep. Birdie swung the thermometer and found
it only -55 deg.. "Now if we tell people that to get only 87 degrees of frost
can be an enormous relief they simply won't believe us," I remember
saying. Perhaps you won't but it was, all the same: and I wrote that
night: "There is something after all rather good in doing something never
done before." Things were looking up, you see.

Our hearts were doing very gallant work. Towards the end of the march
they were getting b