We did the same relay work on July 1, but found the pulling still harder; and it was all that we could do to move the one sledge forward.  From now onwards Wilson and I, but not to the same extent Bowers, experienced a curious optical delusion when returning in our tracks for the second sledge.  I have said that we found our way back by the light of a candle, and we found it necessary to go back in our same footprints.  These holes became to our tired brains not depressions but elevations:  hummocks over which we stepped, raising our feet painfully and draggingly.  And then we remembered, and said what fools we were, and for a while we compelled ourselves to walk through these phantom hills.  But it was no lasting good, and as the days passed we realized that we must suffer this absurdity, for we could not do anything else.  But of course it took it out of us.

During these days the blisters on my fingers were very painful.  Long before my hands were frost-bitten, or indeed anything but cold, which was of course a normal thing, the matter inside these big blisters, which rose all down my fingers with only a skin between them, was frozen into ice.  To handle the cooking gear or the food bags was agony; to start the primus was worse; and when, one day, I was able to prick six or seven of the blisters after supper and let the liquid matter out, the relief was very great.  Every night after that I treated such others as were ready in the same way until they gradually disappeared.  Sometimes it was difficult not to howl.

I did want to howl many times every hour of these days and nights, but I invented a formula instead, which I repeated to myself continually.  Especially, I remember, it came in useful when at the end of the march with my feet frost-bitten, my heart beating slowly, my vitality at its lowest ebb, my body solid with cold, I used to seize the shovel and go on digging snow on to the tent skirting while the cook inside was trying to light the primus.  “You’ve got it in the neck—­stick it—­stick it—­you’ve got it in the neck,” was the refrain, and I wanted every little bit of encouragement it would give me:  then I would find myself repeating “Stick it—­stick it—­stick it—­stick it,” and then “You’ve got it in the neck.”  One of the joys of summer sledging is that you can let your mind wander thousands of miles away for weeks and weeks.  Oates used to provision his little yacht (there was a pickled herring he was going to have):  I invented the compactest little revolving bookcase which was going to hold not books, but pemmican and chocolate and biscuit and cocoa and sugar, and have a cooker on the top, and was going to stand always ready to quench my hunger when I got home:  and we visited restaurants and theatres and grouse moors, and we thought of a pretty girl, or girls, and....  But now that was all impossible.  Our conditions forced themselves upon us without pause:  it was not possible to think of anything else.  We got no respite.  I found it best to refuse to let myself think of the past or the future—­to live only for the job of the moment, and to compel myself to think only how to do it most efficiently.  Once you let yourself imagine....