Luckily we were spared wind.  Our naked candle burnt steadily as we trudged back in our tracks to fetch our other sledge, but if we touched metal for a fraction of a second with naked fingers we were frost-bitten.  To fasten the strap buckles over the loaded sledge was difficult:  to handle the cooker, or mugs, or spoons, the primus or oil can was worse.  How Bowers managed with the meteorological instruments I do not know, but the meteorological log is perfectly kept.  Yet as soon as you breathed near the paper it was covered with a film of ice through which the pencil would not bite.  To handle rope was always cold and in these very low temperatures dreadfully cold work.  The toggling up of our harnesses to the sledge we were about to pull, the untoggling at the end of the stage, the lashing up of our sleeping-bags in the morning, the fastening of the cooker to the top of the instrument box, were bad, but not nearly so bad as the smaller lashings which were now strings of ice.  One of the worst was round the weekly food bag, and those round the pemmican, tea and butter bags inside were thinner still.  But the real devil was the lashing of the tent door:  it was like wire, and yet had to be tied tight.  If you had to get out of the tent during the seven hours spent in our sleeping-bags you must tie a string as stiff as a poker, and re-thaw your way into a bag already as hard as a board.  Our paraffin was supplied at a flash point suitable to low temperatures and was only a little milky:  it was very difficult to splinter bits off the butter.

The temperature that night was -75.8 deg., and I will not pretend that it did not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire.  Still we slept sometimes, and always we lay for seven hours.  Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and always we said no.  Yet there was nothing I should have liked better:  I was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy.  That day we had advanced 11/2 miles by the utmost labour, and the usual relay work.  This was quite a good march—­and Cape Crozier is 67 miles from Cape Evans!

More than once in my short life I have been struck by the value of the man who is blind to what appears to be a common-sense certainty:  he achieves the impossible.  We never spoke our thoughts:  we discussed the Age of Stone which was to come, when we built our cosy warm rock hut on the slopes of Mount Terror, and ran our stove with penguin blubber, and pickled little Emperors in warmth and dryness.  We were quite intelligent people, and we must all have known that we were not going to see the penguins and that it was folly to go forward.  And yet with quiet perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with gentleness those two men led on.  I just did what I was told.