as to the value of the tent; Wilson’s party swore by it and Scott was always loud in its praise.  The sailors hated it and despised it; they always argued, when consulted on the subject of the double tent, that it collected snow and rime and added much to the weights we had to drag along.  Perhaps they were right, and I remember one occasion when two members of the Expedition dumped the inner lining after carrying it many hundred miles with the remark, “Good-bye, you blighter, you’ve had a damn good ride!”

The scene inside the little green tent baffles description:  the three men’s breath and the steam from the cooker settles in no time on the sides of the tent in a thick, white rime; the least movement shakes this down in a shower which brings clammy discomfort to all; the dimmest of light is given by the sledging lantern with its edible candle (for Messrs. Price and Co. had made our candles eatable and not poisonous), everything is frozen stiff, fur boots, bags and fur mitts break if roughly handled, for they are as hard as boards.  The cold has carved deep ruts in the faces of the little company who, despite their sufferings and discomforts, smile and keep cheerful without apparent effort.  This cheerfulness and the fragrant smell of the cooking pemmican are the two redeeming features of a dreadful existence, but the discomforts are only a foretaste of what is to come—­one night the temperature fell to 77 degrees below zero, that is 109 degrees of frost.  There is practically no record of such low temperature, although Captain Scott found that Roald Amundsen in one of his northern journeys encountered something nearly as bad.  One cannot wonder that Wilson’s party scarcely slept at all, but their outward experiences were nothing to what they put up with at Cape Crozier, which was reached on July 15.  To get on to the slopes of Mount Terror near Crozier the party climbed over great pressure ridges and up a steep slope to a position between the end of a moraine terrace and the conspicuous hillock known as The Knoll.  In the gap here the last camp was made in a windswept snow hollow, a stone hut was constructed behind a land ridge above this hollow, the party using a quantity of loose rocks and hard snow to build with.  Cherry-Garrard did most of the building, while the others provided the material, for, in his methodical way, Cherry had built a model hut before leaving Cape Evans.  The hut was 800 ft. above sea-level, roofed with canvas, with one of the sledges as a rafter to support the canvas roof.

On the 19th July the party descended by the snow slopes to the Emperor penguin rookery.  They had great trouble in making this descent, on account of crevasses in the ice slopes which overhung the level way under the rock cliffs.  As a matter of fact, the attempt on the 19th proved abortive, although the little band got close to the rookery.  They reached it successfully on the 20th when the light was almost failing, and were mortified to find only about one hundred Emperor