We got a meal that Saturday morning, our last for a very long time as it happened.  Oil being of such importance to us we tried to use the blubber stove, but after several preliminary spasms it came to pieces in our hands, some solder having melted; and a very good thing too, I thought, for it was more dangerous than useful.  We finished cooking our meal on the primus.  Two bits of the cooker having been blown away we had to balance it on the primus as best we could.  We then settled that in view of the shortage of oil we would not have another meal for as long as possible.  As a matter of fact God settled that for us.

We did all we could to stop up the places where the drift was coming in, plugging the holes with our socks, mitts and other clothing.  But it was no real good.  Our igloo was a vacuum which was filling itself up as soon as possible:  and when snow was not coming in a fine black moraine dust took its place, covering us and everything.  For twenty-four hours we waited for the roof to go:  things were so bad now that we dare not unlash the door.

Many hours ago Bill had told us that if the roof went he considered that our best chance would be to roll over in our sleeping-bags until we were lying on the openings, and get frozen and drifted in.

Gradually the situation got more desperate.  The distance between the taut-sucked canvas and the sledge on which it should have been resting became greater, and this must have been due to the stretching of the canvas itself and the loss of the snow blocks on the top:  it was not drawing out of the walls.  The crashes as it dropped and banged out again were louder.  There was more snow coming through the walls, though all our loose mitts, socks and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst places:  our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks over the door.  The rocks were lifting and shaking here till we thought they would fall.

We talked by shouting, and long before this one of us proposed to try and get the Alpine rope lashed down over the roof from outside.  But Bowers said it was an absolute impossibility in that wind.  “You could never ask men at sea to try such a thing,” he said.  He was up and out of his bag continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof to try and prevent the flapping and so forth.  He was magnificent.

And then it went.

Birdie was over by the door, where the canvas which was bent over the lintel board was working worse than anywhere else.  Bill was practically out of his bag pressing against some part with a long stick of some kind.  I don’t know what I was doing but I was half out of and half in my bag.

The top of the door opened in little slits and that green Willesden canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments in fewer seconds than it takes to read this.  The uproar of it all was indescribable.  Even above the savage thunder of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of the canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips.  The highest rocks which we had built into our walls fell upon us, and a sheet of drift came in.