We packed the tank ready for a start back in the morning and turned in, utterly worn out.  It was only -12 deg. that night, but my left big toe was frost-bitten in my bag which I was trying to use without an eider-down lining, and my bag was always too big for me.  It must have taken several hours to get it back, by beating one foot against the other.  When we got up, as soon as we could, as we did every night, for our bags were nearly impossible, it was blowing fairly hard and looked like blizzing.  We had a lot to do, two or three hours’ work, packing sledges and making a depot of what we did not want, in a corner of the igloo.  We left the second sledge, and a note tied to the handle of the pickaxe.

“We started down the slope in a wind which was rising all the time and -15 deg..  My job was to balance the sledge behind:  I was so utterly done I don’t believe I could have pulled effectively.  Birdie was much the strongest of us.  The strain and want of sleep was getting me in the neck, and Bill looked very bad.  At the bottom we turned our faces to the Barrier, our backs to the penguins, but after doing about a mile it looked so threatening in the south that we camped in a big wind, our hands going one after the other.  We had nothing but the hardest wind-swept sastrugi, and it was a long business:  there was only the smallest amount of drift, and we were afraid the icy snow blocks would chafe the tent.  Birdie lashed the full biscuit tin to the door to prevent its flapping, and also got what he called the tent downhaul round the cap and then tied it about himself outside his bag:  if the tent went he was going too.

“I was feeling as if I should crack, and accepted Birdie’s eider-down.  It was wonderfully self-sacrificing of him:  more than I can write.  I felt a brute to take it, but I was getting useless unless I got some sleep which my big bag would not allow.  Bill and Birdie kept on telling me to do less:  that I was doing more than my share of the work:  but I think that I was getting more and more weak.  Birdie kept wonderfully strong:  he slept most of the night:  the difficulty for him was to get into his bag without going to sleep.  He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but some of these nights he had to give it up for the time because he could not keep awake.  He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his hand and let it fall:  and sometimes he had the primus.

“Bill’s bag was getting hopeless:  it was really too small for an eider-down and was splitting all over the place:  great long holes.  He never consciously slept for nights:  he did sleep a bit, for we heard him.  Except for this night, and the next when Birdie’s eider-down was still fairly dry, I never consciously slept; except that I used to wake for five or six nights running with the same nightmare—­that we were drifted up, and that Bill and Birdie were passing the gear into my bag, cutting it open to do so, or some other variation,—­I did not know that I had been asleep at all."[161]