without the lining of eider-down which we each carried. For
me it was a very bad night: a succession of shivering fits which I was
quite unable to stop, and which took possession of my body for many
minutes at a time until I thought my back would break, such was the
strain placed upon it. They talk of chattering teeth: but when your body
chatters you may call yourself cold. I can only compare the strain to
that which I have been unfortunate enough to see in a case of lock-jaw.
One of my big toes was frost-bitten, but I do not know for how long.
Wilson was fairly comfortable in his smaller bag, and Bowers was snoring
loudly. The minimum temperature that night as taken under the sledge was
-69 deg.; and as taken on the sledge was -75 deg.. That is a hundred and seven
degrees of frost.

We did the same relay work on July 1, but found the pulling still harder;
and it was all that we could do to move the one sledge forward. From now
onwards Wilson and I, but not to the same extent Bowers, experienced a
curious optical delusion when returning in our tracks for the second
sledge. I have said that we found our way back by the light of a candle,
and we found it necessary to go back in our same footprints. These holes
became to our tired brains not depressions but elevations: hummocks over
which we stepped, raising our feet painfully and draggingly. And then we
remembered, and said what fools we were, and for a while we compelled
ourselves to walk through these phantom hills. But it was no lasting
good, and as the days passed we realized that we must suffer this
absurdity, for we could not do anything else. But of course it took it
out of us.

During these days the blisters on my fingers were very painful. Long
before my hands were frost-bitten, or indeed anything but cold, which was
of course a normal thing, the matter inside these big blisters, which
rose all down my fingers with only a skin between them, was frozen into
ice. To handle the cooking gear or the food bags was agony; to start the
primus was worse; and when, one day, I was able to prick six or seven of
the blisters after supper and let the liquid matter out, the relief was
very great. Every night after that I treated such others as were ready in
the same way until they gradually disappeared. Sometimes it was difficult
not to howl.

I _did_ want to howl many times every hour of these days and nights, but
I invented a formula instead, which I repeated to myself cont