I do not think it took us less than an hour to get a hot meal to our lips:  pemmican followed by hot water in which we soaked our biscuits.  For lunch we had tea and biscuits:  for breakfast, pemmican, biscuits and tea.  We could not have managed more food bags—­three were bad enough, and the lashings of everything were like wire.  The lashing of the tent door, however, was the worst, and it had to be tied tightly, especially if it was blowing.  In the early days we took great pains to brush rime from the tent before packing it up, but we were long past that now.

The hoosh got down into our feet:  we nursed back frost-bites:  and we were all the warmer for having got our dry foot-gear on before supper.  Then we started to get into our bags.

[Illustration:  PANORAMA AND MAP OF THE WINTER JOURNEY—­Copied at Hut Point by Apsley Cherry-Garrard from a drawing by E. A. Wilson]

Birdie’s bag fitted him beautifully, though perhaps it would have been a little small with an eider-down inside.  He must have had a greater heat supply than other men; for he never had serious trouble with his feet, while ours were constantly frost-bitten:  he slept, I should be afraid to say how much, longer than we did, even in these last days:  it was a pleasure, lying awake practically all night, to hear his snores.  He turned his bag inside out from fur to skin, and skin to fur, many times during the journey, and thus got rid of a lot of moisture which came out as snow or actual knobs of ice.  When we did turn our bags the only way was to do so directly we turned out, and even then you had to be quick before the bag froze.  Getting out of the tent at night it was quite a race to get back to your bag before it hardened.  Of course this was in the lowest temperatures.

We could not burn our bags and we tried putting the lighted primus into them to thaw them out, but this was not very successful.  Before this time, when it was very cold, we lighted the primus in the morning while we were still in our bags:  and in the evening we kept it going until we were just getting or had got the mouths of our bags levered open.  But returning we had no oil for such luxuries, until the last day or two.

I do not believe that any man, however sick he is, has a much worse time than we had in those bags, shaking with cold until our backs would almost break.  One of the added troubles which came to us on our return was the sodden condition of our hands in our bags at night.  We had to wear our mitts and half-mitts, and they were as wet as they could be:  when we got up in the morning we had washer-women’s hands—­white, crinkled, sodden.  That was an unhealthy way to start the day’s work.  We really wanted some bags of saennegrass for hands as well as feet; one of the blessings of that kind of bag being that you can shake the moisture from it:  but we only had enough for our wretched feet.