[Illustration:  CAMPING AFTER DARK—­E.  A. Wilson, del.]

There are those who write of Polar Expeditions as though the whole thing was as easy as possible.  They are trusting, I suspect, in a public who will say, “What a fine fellow this is! we know what horrors he has endured, yet see, how little he makes of all his difficulties and hardships.”  Others have gone to the opposite extreme.  I do not know that there is any use in trying to make a -18 deg. temperature appear formidable to an uninitiated reader by calling it fifty degrees of frost.  I want to do neither of these things.  I am not going to pretend that this was anything but a ghastly journey, made bearable and even pleasant to look back upon by the qualities of my two companions who have gone.  At the same time I have no wish to make it appear more horrible than it actually was:  the reader need not fear that I am trying to exaggerate.

During the night of July 3 the temperature dropped to -65 deg., but in the morning we wakened (we really did wake that morning) to great relief.  The temperature was only -27 deg. with the wind blowing some 15 miles an hour with steadily falling snow.  It only lasted a few hours, and we knew it must be blowing a howling blizzard outside the windless area in which we lay, but it gave us time to sleep and rest, and get thoroughly thawed, and wet, and warm, inside our sleeping-bags.  To me at any rate this modified blizzard was a great relief, though we all knew that our gear would be worse than ever when the cold came back.  It was quite impossible to march.  During the course of the day the temperature dropped to -44 deg.:  during the following night to -54 deg..

The soft new snow which had fallen made the surface the next day (July 5) almost impossible.  We relayed as usual, and managed to do eight hours’ pulling, but we got forward only 11/2 miles.  The temperature ranged between -55 deg. and -61 deg., and there was at one time a considerable breeze, the effect of which was paralysing.  There was the great circle of a halo round the moon with a vertical shaft, and mock moons.  We hoped that we were rising on to the long snow cape which marks the beginning of Mount Terror.  That night the temperature was -75 deg.; at breakfast -70 deg.; at noon nearly -77 deg..  The day lives in my memory as that on which I found out that records are not worth making.  The thermometer as swung by Bowers after lunch at 5.51 P.M. registered -77.5 deg., which is 1091/2 degrees of frost, and is I suppose as cold as any one will want to endure in darkness and iced-up gear and clothes.  The lowest temperature recorded by a Discovery Spring Journey party was -67.7 deg.,[151] and in those days fourteen days was a long time for a Spring Party to be away sledging and they were in daylight.  This was our tenth day out and we hoped to be away for six weeks.