t keep
awake. He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his hand and let it
fall: and sometimes he had the primus.

"Bill's bag was getting hopeless: it was really too small for an
eider-down and was splitting all over the place: great long holes. He
never consciously slept for nights: he did sleep a bit, for we heard him.
Except for this night, and the next when Birdie's eider-down was still
fairly dry, I never consciously slept; except that I used to wake for
five or six nights running with the same nightmare--that we were drifted
up, and that Bill and Birdie were passing the gear into my bag, cutting
it open to do so, or some other variation,--I did not know that I had
been asleep at all."[161]

"We had hardly reached the pit," wrote Bowers, "when a furious wind came
on again and we had to camp. All that night the tent flapped like the
noise of musketry, owing to two poles having been broken at the ends and
the fit spoilt. I thought it would end matters by going altogether and
lashed it down as much as I could, attaching the apex to a line round my
own bag. The wind abated after 11/2 days and we set out, doing five or six
miles before we found ourselves among crevasses."[162]

We had plugged ahead all that day (July 26) in a terrible light,
blundering in among pressure and up on to the slopes of Terror. The
temperature dropped from -21 deg. to -45 deg.. "Several times [we] stepped into
rotten-lidded crevasses in smooth wind-swept ice. We continued, however,
feeling our way along by keeping always off hard ice-slopes and on the
crustier deeper snow which characterizes the hollows of the pressure
ridges, which I believed we had once more fouled in the dark. We had no
light, and no landmarks to guide us, except vague and indistinct
silhouetted slopes ahead, which were always altering and whose distance
and character it was impossible to judge. We never knew whether we were
approaching a steep slope at close quarters or a long slope of Terror,
miles away, and eventually we travelled on by the ear, and by the feel of
the snow under our feet, for both the sound and the touch told one much
of the chances of crevasses or of safe going. We continued thus in the
dark in the hope that we were at any rate in the right direction."[163]
And then we camped after getting into a bunch of crevasses, completely
lost. Bill said, "At any rate I think we are well clear of the pressure."
But there were pressure pops all night, as thoug