Birdie dived for his sleeping-bag and eventually got in, together with a terrible lot of drift.  Bill also—­but he was better off:  I was already half into mine and all right, so I turned to help Bill.  “Get into your own,” he shouted, and when I continued to try and help him, he leaned over until his mouth was against my ear. “Please, Cherry,” he said, and his voice was terribly anxious.  I know he felt responsible:  feared it was he who had brought us to this ghastly end.

The next I knew was Bowers’ head across Bill’s body.  “We’re all right,” he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative.  Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful.  Then we turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath us.  And we lay and thought, and sometimes we sang.

I suppose, wrote Wilson, we were all revolving plans to get back without a tent:  and the one thing we had left was the floor-cloth upon which we were actually lying.  Of course we could not speak at present, but later after the blizzard had stopped we discussed the possibility of digging a hole in the snow each night and covering it over with the floor-cloth.  I do not think we had any idea that we could really get back in those temperatures in our present state of ice by such means, but no one ever hinted at such a thing.  Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and hymns, snatches of which reached me every now and then, and I chimed in, somewhat feebly I suspect.  Of course we were getting pretty badly drifted up.  “I was resolved to keep warm,” wrote Bowers, “and beneath my debris covering I paddled my feet and sang all the songs and hymns I knew to pass the time.  I could occasionally thump Bill, and as he still moved I knew he was alive all right—­what a birthday for him!” Birdie was more drifted up than we, but at times we all had to hummock ourselves up to heave the snow off our bags.  By opening the flaps of our bags we could get small pinches of soft drift which we pressed together and put into our mouths to melt.  When our hands warmed up again we got some more; so we did not get very thirsty.  A few ribbons of canvas still remained in the wall over our heads, and these produced volleys of cracks like pistol shots hour after hour The canvas never drew out from the walls, not an inch The wind made just the same noise as an express train running fast through a tunnel if you have both the windows down.

I can well believe that neither of my companions gave up hope for an instant.  They must have been frightened but they were never disturbed.  As for me I never had any hope at all; and when the roof went I felt that this was the end.  What else could I think?  We had spent days in reaching this place through the darkness in cold such as had never been experienced by human beings.  We had been out for four weeks under conditions in which no man had existed previously