o 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.

"We started down the slope in a wind which was rising all the time and
-15 deg.. My job was to balance the sledge behind: I was so utterly done I
don't believe I could have pulled effectively. Birdie was much the
strongest of us. The strain and want of sleep was getting me in the neck,
and Bill looked very bad. At the bottom we turned our faces to the
Barrier, our backs to the penguins, but after doing about a mile it
looked so threatening in the south that we camped in a big wind, our
hands going one after the other. We had nothing but the hardest
wind-swept sastrugi, and it was a long business: there was only the
smallest amount of drift, and we were afraid the icy snow blocks would
chafe the tent. Birdie lashed the full biscuit tin to the door to
prevent its flapping, and also got what he called the tent downhaul round
the cap and then tied it about himself outside his bag: if the tent went
he was going too.

"I was feeling as if I should crack, and accepted Birdie's eider-down. It
was wonderfully self-sacrificing of him: more than I can write. I felt a
brute to take it, but I was getting useless unless I got some sleep which
my big bag would not allow. Bill and Birdie kept on telling me to do
less: that I was doing more than my share of the work: but I think that I
was getting more and more weak. Birdie kept wonderfully strong: he slept
most of the night: the difficulty for him was to get into his bag without
going to sleep. He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but some of
these nights he had to give it up for the time because he could no