It was a little later on when we were among crevasses, with Terror above us, but invisible, somewhere on our left, and the Barrier pressure on our right.  We were quite lost in the darkness, and only knew that we were running downhill, the sledge almost catching our heels.  There had been no light all day, clouds obscured the moon, we had not seen her since yesterday.  And quite suddenly a little patch of clear sky drifted, as it were, over her face, and she showed us three paces ahead a great crevasse with just a shining icy lid not much thicker than glass.  We should all have walked into it, and the sledge would certainly have followed us down.  After that I felt we had a chance of pulling through:  God could not be so cruel as to have saved us just to prolong our agony.

But at present we need not worry about crevasses; for we had not reached the long stretch where the moving Barrier, with the weight of many hundred miles of ice behind it, comes butting up against the slopes of Mount Terror, itself some eleven thousand feet high.  Now we were still plunging ankle-deep in the mass of soft sandy snow which lies in the windless area.  It seemed to have no bottom at all, and since the snow was much the same temperature as the air, our feet, as well as our bodies, got colder and colder the longer we marched:  in ordinary sledging you begin to warm up after a quarter of an hour’s pulling, here it was just the reverse.  Even now I find myself unconsciously kicking the toes of my right foot against the heel of my left:  a habit I picked up on this journey by doing it every time we halted.  Well no.  Not always.  For there was one halt when we just lay on our backs and gazed up into the sky, where, so the others said, there was blazing the most wonderful aurora they had ever seen.  I did not see it, being so near-sighted and unable to wear spectacles owing to the cold.  The aurora was always before us as we travelled east, more beautiful than any seen by previous expeditions wintering in McMurdo Sound, where Erebus must have hidden the most brilliant displays.  Now most of the sky was covered with swinging, swaying curtains which met in a great whirl overhead:  lemon yellow, green and orange.

The minimum this night was -65 deg., and during July 3 it ranged between -52 deg. and -58 deg..  We got forward only 21/2 miles, and by this time I had silently made up my mind that we had not the ghost of a chance of reaching the penguins.  I am sure that Bill was having a very bad time these nights, though it was an impression rather than anything else, for he never said so.  We knew we did sleep, for we heard one another snore, and also we used to have dreams and nightmares; but we had little consciousness of it, and we were now beginning to drop off when we halted on the march.