“Another very happy day doing nothing.  After falling asleep two or three times I went to bed, read Kim, and slept.  About two hours after each meal we all want another, and after a tremendous supper last night we had another meal before turning in.  I have my taste back but all our fingers are impossible, they might be so many pieces of lead except for the pins and needles feeling in them which we have also got in our feet.  My toes are very bulbous and some toe-nails are coming off.  My left heel is one big burst blister.  Going straight out of a warm bed into a strong wind outside nearly bowled me over.  I felt quite faint, and pulled myself together thinking it was all nerves:  but it began to come on again and I had to make for the hut as quickly as possible.  Birdie is now full of schemes for doing the trip again next year.  Bill says it is too great a risk in the darkness, and he will not consider it, though he thinks that to go in August might be possible."[169]

And again a day or two later: 

“I came in covered with a red rash which is rather ticklish.  My ankles and knees are a bit puffy, but my feet are not so painful as Bill’s and Birdie’s.  Hands itch a bit.  We must be very weak and worn out, though I think Birdie is the strongest of us.  He seems to be picking up very quickly.  Bill is still very worn and rather haggard.  The kindness of everybody would spoil an angel."[170]

I have put these personal experiences down from my diary because they are the only contemporary record I possess.  Scott’s own diary at this time contains the statement:  “The Crozier party returned last night after enduring for five weeks the hardest conditions on record.  They looked more weather-worn than any one I have yet seen.  Their faces were scarred and wrinkled, their eyes dull, their hands whitened and creased with the constant exposure to damp and cold, yet the scars of frost-bite were very few ... to-day after a night’s rest our travellers are very different in appearance and mental capacity."[171]

“Atch has been lost in a blizzard,” was the news which we got as soon as we could grasp anything.  Since then he has spent a year of war in the North Sea, seen the Dardanelles campaign, and much fighting in France, and has been blown up in a monitor.  I doubt whether he does not reckon that night the worst of the lot.  He ought to have been blown into hundreds of little bits, but always like some hardy indiarubber ball he turns up again, a little dented, but with the same tough elasticity which refuses to be hurt.  And with the same quiet voice he volunteers for the next, and tells you how splendid everybody was except himself.

It was the blizzard of July 4, when we were lying in the windless bight on our way to Cape Crozier, and we knew it must be blowing all round us.  At any rate it was blowing at Cape Evans, though it eased up in the afternoon, and Atkinson and Taylor went up the Ramp to read the thermometers there.  They returned without great difficulty, and some discussion seems to have arisen as to whether it was possible to read the two screens on the sea-ice.  Atkinson said he would go and read that in North Bay:  Gran said he was going to South Bay.  They started independently at 5.30 P.M.  Gran returned an hour and a quarter afterwards.  He had gone about two hundred yards.