We legged it back as hard as we could go:  five eggs in our fur mitts, Birdie with two skins tied to him and trailing behind, and myself with one.  We were roped up, and climbing the ridges and getting through the holes was very difficult.  In one place where there was a steep rubble and snow slope down I left the ice-axe half way up; in another it was too dark to see our former ice-axe footsteps, and I could see nothing, and so just let myself go and trusted to luck.  With infinite patience Bill said:  “Cherry, you must learn how to use an ice-axe.”  For the rest of the trip my wind-clothes were in rags.

We found the sledge, and none too soon, and now had three eggs left, more or less whole.  Both mine had burst in my mitts:  the first I emptied out, the second I left in my mitt to put into the cooker; it never got there, but on the return journey I had my mitts far more easily thawed out than Birdie’s (Bill had none) and I believe the grease in the egg did them good.  When we got into the hollows under the ridge where we had to cross, it was too dark to do anything but feel our way.  We did so over many crevasses, found the ridge and crept over it.  Higher up we could see more, but to follow our tracks soon became impossible, and we plugged straight ahead and luckily found the slope down which we had come.  All day it had been blowing a nasty cold wind with a temperature between -20 deg. and 30 deg., which we felt a good deal.  Now it began to get worse.  The weather was getting thick and things did not look very nice when we started up to find our tent.  Soon it was blowing force 4, and soon we missed our way entirely.  We got right up above the patch of rocks which marked our igloo and only found it after a good deal of search.

I have heard tell of an English officer at the Dardanelles who was left, blinded, in No Man’s Land between the English and Turkish trenches.  Moving only at night, and having no sense to tell him which were his own trenches, he was fired at by Turk and English alike as he groped his ghastly way to and from them.  Thus he spent days and nights until, one night, he crawled towards the English trenches, to be fired at as usual.  “Oh God! what can I do!” some one heard him say, and he was brought in.

Such extremity of suffering cannot be measured:  madness or death may give relief.  But this I know:  we on this journey were already beginning to think of death as a friend.  As we groped our way back that night, sleepless, icy, and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, a crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift.

“Things must improve,” said Bill next day, “I think we reached bed-rock last night.”  We hadn’t, by a long way.

It was like this.

We moved into the igloo for the first time, for we had to save oil by using our blubber stove if we were to have any left to travel home with, and we did not wish to cover our tent with the oily black filth which the use of blubber necessitates.  The blizzard blew all night, and we were covered with drift which came in through hundreds of leaks:  in this wind-swept place we had found no soft snow with which we could pack our hard snow blocks.  As we flensed some blubber from one of our penguin skins the powdery drift covered everything we had.