We cooked a meal and then prepared to scout for Corner Camp.  I got a glimpse of Observation Hill, a well-known landmark, and took a bearing of that and another hill.

This gave me our whereabouts, and then we struck southward for a short distance until we saw just the top of the flagstaff of Corner Camp, which had been entirely buried up by the winter’s snow-drifts.  When we reached the Camp we pitched our tent and dug out all the forenoon, until eventually we had got all the stores repacked in an accessible fashion at the top of a great snow cairn constructed by the three of us.  It was about the coldest day’s work I ever remember doing.

The job finished, we made ourselves some tea and then started to march back to Hut Point, nearly thirty-five miles away.  We proposed to do this distance without camping, except for a little food, for we had no wish to remain another minute at Corner Camp, where it was blowing a strong breeze with a temperature of 32 degrees below zero all the time we were digging, in fact about as much as we could stick.  When four miles on our homeward journey the wind dropped to a calm, and at 10.30 we had some pemmican and tea, having covered nine and a half miles according to our sledge meter.  We started again at midnight, and, steering by stars, kept our course correct.  The hot tea seemed to run through my veins; its effect was magical, and the ice-bitten feeling of tired men gave way once more to vigour and alertness.

As we started out again we witnessed a magnificent Auroral display, and as we dragged the now light sledge onward we watched the gold white streamers waving and playing in the heavens.  The atmosphere, was extraordinarily clear, and we seemed to be marching in fairyland, but for the cold which made our breath come in gasps.  We were cased lightly in ice about the shoulders, loins, and feet, and we were also covered with the unpleasant rime which our backs had brushed off the tent walls when we had camped.  On we went, however, confident but silent.  No other sound now but the swish, swish of our ski as we sped through the soft new snow.  In the light of the Aurora objects stood out with the razor-edge sharpness of an after-blizzard atmosphere, and the temperature seemed to fall even lower than at midnight.  Our fingers seemed to be cut with the frost burn, and frost bites played all round our faces, making us wince with pain.

We were marching, as, it were, under the shadow of Erebus, the great Antarctic volcano, and on this never-to-be-forgotten night the Southern Lights played for hours.  If for nothing else, it was worth making such a sledge journey to witness the display.  First, vertical shafts ascended in a fan of electric flame, and then the shafts all merged into a filmy, pale chrome sheet.  This faded and intensified alternately, and then in an instant disappeared, but more flaming lights burst into view in other parts of the heavens, and a phantom curtain of glittering electric violet trembled between the lights and the stars.