During the time through which we had come it was by burning more oil than is usually allowed for cooking that we kept going at all.  After each meal was cooked we allowed the primus to burn on for a while and thus warmed up the tent.  Then we could nurse back our frozen feet and do any necessary little odd jobs.  More often we just sat and nodded for a few minutes, keeping one another from going too deeply to sleep.  But it was running away with the oil.  We started with 6 one-gallon tins (those tins Scott had criticized), and we had now used four of them.  At first we said we must have at least two one-gallon tins with which to go back; but by now our estimate had come down to one full gallon tin, and two full primus lamps.  Our sleeping-bags were awful.  It took me, even as early in the journey as this, an hour of pushing and thumping and cramp every night to thaw out enough of mine to get into it at all.  Even that was not so bad as lying in them when we got there.

Only -35 deg. but “a very bad night” according to my diary.  We got away in good time, but it was a ghastly day and my nerves were quivering at the end, for we could not find that straight and narrow way which led between the crevasses on either hand.  Time after time we found we were out of our course by the sudden fall of the ground beneath our feet—­in we went and then—­“are we too far right?”—­nobody knows—­“well let’s try nearer in to the mountain,” and so forth!  “By hard slogging 23/4 miles this morning—­then on in thick gloom which suddenly lifted and we found ourselves under a huge great mountain of pressure ridge looking black in shadow.  We went on, bending to the left, when Bill fell and put his arm into a crevasse.  We went over this and another, and some time after got somewhere up to the left, and both Bill and I put a foot into a crevasse.  We sounded all about and everywhere was hollow, and so we ran the sledge down over it and all was well."[152] Once we got right into the pressure and took a longish time to get out again.  Bill lengthened his trace out with the Alpine rope now and often afterwards so he found the crevasses well ahead of us and the sledge:  nice for us but not so nice for Bill.  Crevasses in the dark do put your nerves on edge.

When we started next morning (July 15) we could see on our left front and more or less on top of us the Knoll, which is a big hill whose precipitous cliffs to seaward form Cape Crozier.  The sides of it sloped down towards us, and pressing against its ice-cliffs on ahead were miles and miles of great pressure ridges, along which we had travelled, and which hemmed us in.  Mount Terror rose ten thousand feet high on our left, and was connected with the Knoll by a great cup-like drift of wind-polished snow.  The slope of this in one place runs gently out on to the corridor along which we had sledged, and here we turned and started to pull our sledges up.  There were no crevasses, only the great drift of snow, so hard that