Pulling out from Hut Point that evening we brought along our heavy loads on the two nine-foot sledges with comparative ease; it was the first, and though we did not know it then, the only bit of good pulling we were to have.  Good pulling to the sledge traveller means easy pulling.  Away we went round Cape Armitage and eastwards.  We knew that the Barrier edge was in front of us and also that the break-up of the sea-ice had left the face of it as a low perpendicular cliff.  We had therefore to find a place where the snow had formed a drift.  This we came right up against and met quite suddenly a very keen wind flowing, as it always does, from the cold Barrier down to the comparatively warm sea-ice.  The temperature was -47 deg.  F., and I was a fool to take my hands out of my mitts to haul on the ropes to bring the sledges up.  I started away from the Barrier edge with all ten fingers frost-bitten.  They did not really come back until we were in the tent for our night meal, and within a few hours there were two or three large blisters, up to an inch long, on all of them.  For many days those blisters hurt frightfully.

We were camped that night about half a mile in from the Barrier edge.  The temperature was -56 deg..  We had a baddish time, being very glad to get out of our shivering bags next morning (June 29).  We began to suspect, as we knew only too well later, that the only good time of the twenty-four hours was breakfast, for then with reasonable luck we need not get into our sleeping-bags again for another seventeen hours.

[Illustration:  A PANORAMIC VIEW OF ROSS ISLAND FROM CRATER HILL]

The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again:  it is not possible to describe it.  The weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better—­they were far worse—­because we were callous.  I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain.  They talk of the heroism of the dying—­they little know—­it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep.  The trouble is to go on....

It was the darkness that did it.  I don’t believe minus seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight, not comparatively bad, when you could see where you were going, where you were stepping, where the sledge straps were, the cooker, the primus, the food; could see your footsteps lately trodden deep into the soft snow that you might find your way back to the rest of your load; could see the lashings of the food bags; could read a compass without striking three or four different boxes to find one dry match; could read your watch to see if the blissful moment of getting out of your bag was come without groping in the snow all about; when it would not take you five minutes to lash up the door of the tent, and five hours to get started in the morning....