ing. For twenty-four hours we
waited for the roof to go: things were so bad now that we dare not unlash
the door.

Many hours ago Bill had told us that if the roof went he considered that
our best chance would be to roll over in our sleeping-bags until we were
lying on the openings, and get frozen and drifted in.

Gradually the situation got more desperate. The distance between the
taut-sucked canvas and the sledge on which it should have been resting
became greater, and this must have been due to the stretching of the
canvas itself and the loss of the snow blocks on the top: it was not
drawing out of the walls. The crashes as it dropped and banged out again
were louder. There was more snow coming through the walls, though all our
loose mitts, socks and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst
places: our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks
over the door. The rocks were lifting and shaking here till we thought
they would fall.

We talked by shouting, and long before this one of us proposed to try and
get the Alpine rope lashed down over the roof from outside. But Bowers
said it was an absolute impossibility in that wind. "You could never ask
men at sea to try such a thing," he said. He was up and out of his bag
continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof to try and
prevent the flapping and so forth. He was magnificent.

And then it went.

Birdie was over by the door, where the canvas which was bent over the
lintel board was working worse than anywhere else. Bill was practically
out of his bag pressing against some part with a long stick of some kind.
I don't know what I was doing but I was half out of and half in my bag.

The top of the door opened in little slits and that green Willesden
canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments in fewer seconds than it
takes to read this. The uproar of it all was indescribable. Even above
the savage thunder of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of
the canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips. The highest rocks
which we had built into our walls fell upon us, and a sheet of drift came
in.

Birdie dived for his sleeping-bag and eventually got in, together with a
terrible lot of drift. Bill also--but he was better off: I was already
half into mine and all right, so I turned to help Bill. "Get into your
own," he shouted, and when I continued to try and help him, he leaned
over until his mouth was against my ear. "