And then quite naturally and no doubt disappointingly to those who would like to read of my last agonies (for who would not give pleasure by his death?) I fell asleep.  I expect the temperature was pretty high during this great blizzard, and anything near zero was very high to us.  That and the snow which drifted over us made a pleasant wet kind of snipe marsh inside our sleeping-bags, and I am sure we all dozed a good bit.  There was so much to worry about that there was not the least use in worrying; and we were so very tired.  We were hungry, for the last meal we had had was in the morning of the day before, but hunger was not very pressing.

And so we lay, wet and quite fairly warm, hour after hour while the wind roared round us, blowing storm force continually and rising in the gusts to something indescribable.  Storm force is force 11, and force 12 is the biggest wind which can be logged:  Bowers logged it force 11, but he was always so afraid of overestimating that he was inclined to underrate.  I think it was blowing a full hurricane.  Sometimes awake, sometimes dozing, we had not a very uncomfortable time so far as I can remember.  I knew that parties which had come to Cape Crozier in the spring had experienced blizzards which lasted eight or ten days.  But this did not worry us as much as I think it did Bill:  I was numb.  I vaguely called to mind that Peary had survived a blizzard in the open:  but wasn’t that in the summer?

It was in the early morning of Saturday (July 22) that we discovered the loss of the tent.  Some time during that morning we had had our last meal.  The roof went about noon on Sunday and we had had no meal in the interval because our supply of oil was so low; nor could we move out of our bags except as a last necessity.  By Sunday night we had been without a meal for some thirty-six hours.

The rocks which fell upon us when the roof went did no damage, and though we could not get out of our bags to move them, we could fit ourselves into them without difficulty.  More serious was the drift which began to pile up all round and over us.  It helped to keep us warm of course, but at the same time in these comparatively high temperatures it saturated our bags even worse than they were before.  If we did not find the tent (and its recovery would be a miracle) these bags and the floor-cloth of the tent on which we were lying were all we had in that fight back across the Barrier which could, I suppose, have only had one end.

Meanwhile we had to wait.  It was nearly 70 miles home and it had taken us the best part of three weeks to come.  In our less miserable moments we tried to think out ways of getting back, but I do not remember very much about that time.  Sunday morning faded into Sunday afternoon,—­into Sunday night,—­into Monday morning.  Till then the blizzard had raged with monstrous fury; the winds of the world were there, and they had all gone mad.  We had bad winds at Cape Evans this year, and we had far worse the next winter when the open water was at our doors.  But I have never heard or felt or seen a wind like this.  I wondered why it did not carry away the earth.