with both mine [even as I shouted a warning[165] ], the
bridge gave way and down I went. Fortunately our sledge harness is made
with a view to resisting this sort of thing, and there I hung with the
bottomless pit below and the ice-crusted sides alongside, so narrow that
to step over it would have been quite easy had I been able to see it.
Bill said, 'What do you want?' I asked for an Alpine rope with a bowline
for my foot: and taking up first the bowline and then my harness they got
me out."[166] Meanwhile on the surface I lay over the crevasse and gave
Birdie the bowline: he put it on his foot: then he raised his foot,
giving me some slack: I held the rope while he raised himself on his
foot, thus giving Bill some slack on the harness: Bill then held the
harness, allowing Birdie to raise his foot and give me some slack again.
We got him up inch by inch, our fingers getting bitten, for the
temperature was -46 deg.. Afterwards we often used this way of getting people
out of crevasses, and it was a wonderful piece of presence of mind that
it was invented, so far as I know, on the spur of the moment by a frozen
man hanging in one himself.

"In front of us we could see another ridge, and we did not know how many
lay beyond that. Things looked pretty bad. Bill took a long lead on the
Alpine rope and we got down our present difficulty all right. This method
of the leader being on a long trace in front we all agreed to be very
useful. From this moment our luck changed and everything went for us to
the end. When we went out on the sea-ice the whole experience was over in
a few days, Hut Point was always in sight, and there was daylight. I
always had the feeling that the whole series of events had been brought
about by an extraordinary run of accidents, and that after a certain
stage it was quite beyond our power to guide the course of them. When on
the way to Cape Crozier the moon suddenly came out of the cloud to show
us a great crevasse which would have taken us all with our sledge without
any difficulty, I felt that we were not to go under this trip after such
a deliverance. When we had lost our tent, and there was a very great
balance of probability that we should never find it again, and we were
lying out the blizzard in our bags, I saw that we were face to face with
a long fight against cold which we could not have survived. I cannot
write how helpless I believed we were to help ourselves, and how we were
brought out of a