Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/213

could raise a bit of a snow wall. These last three days we have been lying in our wet bags, watching the tent poles bend and quiver as each squall strikes the tent, and speculating as to what can have happened to the ship.

We also feel having only two biscuits a day and an insufficient supply of seal meat. We are hungry both for news of the Southern Party and for more food.

March 5 to 15.—The conditions are gradually but surely becoming more unbearable, and we cannot hope for improvement until we are settled in some permanent home for the winter. The tents we are living in at present are more threadbare than ever, and are pierced with innumerable holes both large and small, so that during the whole time we are inside them we are living in a young gale.

To-day, March 15, is the last that I expect the ship, and from now on I shall conclude something has happened and that she is not coming.

For some days we have been preparing in every way possible for the winter, and our position may be summed up as follows: We landed, besides our sledging rations, six boxes of biscuits with 45 lbs. in each box. The sledging biscuits were finished on March 1, and of the others we have to keep two boxes intact for our journey down the coast.

We have also enough cocoa to give us a mug of very thin cocoa five nights of the week; enough tea for a mug of equally thin tea once a week; and the remaining day we must reboil the tea leaves or drink hot water solus. Our only luxuries are a very small amount of chocolate and sugar, sufficient to give us a stick of chocolate every