le of a halo
round the moon with a vertical shaft, and mock moons. We hoped that we
were rising on to the long snow cape which marks the beginning of Mount
Terror. That night the temperature was -75 deg.; at breakfast -70 deg.; at noon
nearly -77 deg.. The day lives in my memory as that on which I found out
that records are not worth making. The thermometer as swung by Bowers
after lunch at 5.51 P.M. registered -77.5 deg., which is 1091/2 degrees of
frost, and is I suppose as cold as any one will want to endure in
darkness and iced-up gear and clothes. The lowest temperature recorded by
a Discovery Spring Journey party was -67.7 deg.,[151] and in those days
fourteen days was a long time for a Spring Party to be away sledging and
they were in daylight. This was our tenth day out and we hoped to be away
for six weeks.

Luckily we were spared wind. Our naked candle burnt steadily as we
trudged back in our tracks to fetch our other sledge, but if we touched
metal for a fraction of a second with naked fingers we were frost-bitten.
To fasten the strap buckles over the loaded sledge was difficult: to
handle the cooker, or mugs, or spoons, the primus or oil can was worse.
How Bowers managed with the meteorological instruments I do not know, but
the meteorological log is perfectly kept. Yet as soon as you breathed
near the paper it was covered with a film of ice through which the pencil
would not bite. To handle rope was always cold and in these very low
temperatures dreadfully cold work. The toggling up of our harnesses to
the sledge we were about to pull, the untoggling at the end of the stage,
the lashing up of our sleeping-bags in the morning, the fastening of the
cooker to the top of the instrument box, were bad, but not nearly so bad
as the smaller lashings which were now strings of ice. One of the worst
was round the weekly food bag, and those round the pemmican, tea and
butter bags inside were thinner still. But the real devil was the lashing
of the tent door: it was like wire, and yet had to be tied tight. If you
had to get out of the tent during the seven hours spent in our
sleeping-bags you must tie a string as stiff as a poker, and re-thaw your
way into a bag already as hard as a board. Our paraffin was supplied at a
flash point suitable to low temperatures and was only a little milky: it
was very difficult to splinter bits off the butter.

The temperature that night was -75.8 deg., and I will not pretend that it did