for more than a few days, if that.  During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer physical exhaustion, as men sleep on the rack; and every minute of it we had been fighting for the bed-rock necessaries of bare existence, and always in the dark.  We had kept ourselves going by enormous care of our feet and hands and bodies, by burning oil, and by having plenty of hot fatty food.  Now we had no tent, one tin of oil left out of six, and only part of our cooker.  When we were lucky and not too cold we could almost wring water from our clothes, and directly we got out of our sleeping-bags we were frozen into solid sheets of armoured ice.  In cold temperatures with all the advantages of a tent over our heads we were already taking more than an hour of fierce struggling and cramp to get into our sleeping-bags—­so frozen were they and so long did it take us to thaw our way in.  No!  Without the tent we were dead men.

[Illustration:  MT.  EREBUS]

[Illustration:  ICE PRESSURE AT A]

And there seemed not one chance in a million that we should ever see our tent again.  We were 900 feet up on the mountain side, and the wind blew about as hard as a wind can blow straight out to sea.  First there was a steep slope, so hard that a pick made little impression upon it, so slippery that if you started down in finnesko you never could stop:  this ended in a great ice-cliff some hundreds of feet high, and then came miles of pressure ridges, crevassed and tumbled, in which you might as well look for a daisy as a tent:  and after that the open sea.  The chances, however, were that the tent had just been taken up into the air and dropped somewhere in this sea well on the way to New Zealand.  Obviously the tent was gone.

Face to face with real death one does not think of the things that torment the bad people in the tracts, and fill the good people with bliss.  I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but candidly I did not care.  I could not have wept if I had tried.  I had no wish to review the evils of my past.  But the past did seem to have been a bit wasted.  The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions:  the road to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.

I wanted those years over again.  What fun I would have with them:  what glorious fun!  It was a pity.  Well has the Persian said that when we come to die we, remembering that God is merciful, will gnaw our elbows with remorse for thinking of the things we have not done for fear of the Day of Judgment.

And I wanted peaches and syrup—­badly.  We had them at the hut, sweeter and more luscious than you can imagine.  And we had been without sugar for a month.  Yes—­especially the syrup.

Thus impiously I set out to die, making up my mind that I was not going to try and keep warm, that it might not take too long, and thinking I would try and get some morphia from the medical case if it got very bad.  Not a bit heroic, and entirely true!  Yes! comfortable, warm reader.  Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.