If that tent went again we were going with it.  We made our way back up the slope with it, carrying it solemnly and reverently, precious as though it were something not quite of the earth.  And we dug it in as tent was never dug in before; not by the igloo, but in the old place farther down where we had first arrived.  And while Bill was doing this Birdie and I went back to the igloo and dug and scratched and shook away the drift inside until we had found nearly all our gear.  It is wonderful how little we lost when the roof went.  Most of our gear was hung on the sledge, which was part of the roof, or was packed into the holes of the hut to try and make it drift-proof, and the things must have been blown inwards into the bottom of the hut by the wind from the south and the back draught from the north.  Then they were all drifted up.  Of course a certain number of mitts and socks were blown away and lost, but the only important things were Bill’s fur mitts, which were stuffed into a hole in the rocks of the hut.  We loaded up the sledge and pushed it down the slope.  I don’t know how Birdie was feeling, but I felt so weak that it was the greatest labour.  The blizzard looked right on top of us.

We had another meal, and we wanted it:  and as the good hoosh ran down into our feet and hands, and up into our cheeks and ears and brains, we discussed what we would do next.  Birdie was all for another go at the Emperor penguins.  Dear Birdie, he never would admit that he was beaten—­I don’t know that he ever really was!  “I think he (Wilson) thought he had landed us in a bad corner and was determined to go straight home, though I was for one other tap at the Rookery.  However, I had placed myself under his orders for this trip voluntarily, and so we started the next day for home."[160] There could really be no common-sense doubt:  we had to go back, and we were already very doubtful whether we should ever manage to get into our sleeping-bags in very low temperature, so ghastly had they become.

I don’t know when it was, but I remember walking down that slope—­I don’t know why, perhaps to try and find the bottom of the cooker—­and thinking that there was nothing on earth that a man under such circumstances would not give for a good warm sleep.  He would give everything he possessed:  he would give—­how many—­years of his life.  One or two at any rate—­perhaps five?  Yes—­I would give five.  I remember the sastrugi, the view of the Knoll, the dim hazy black smudge of the sea far away below:  the tiny bits of green canvas that twittered in the wind on the surface of the snow:  the cold misery of it all, and the weakness which was biting into my heart.

For days Birdie had been urging me to use his eider-down lining—­his beautiful dry bag of the finest down—­which he had never slipped into his own fur bag.  I had refused:  I felt that I should be a beast to take it.