Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/46

putting them on in the morning. It has seemed to us an almost necessary precaution at these temperatures unless one is prepared to take the damp socks into the sleeping-bag every night, and this with so many weeks ahead of us we are loath to do, as we are trying our best to keep the bags dry in many ways—for instance, we kept our pyjama trousers and pyjama jackets only for night wear to begin with, until they became so wet and stiff that in order to wear them at all they had to be kept on permanently. From the day of the blizzard incident at Cape Crozier back to Cape Evans, neither Bowers nor I made use of our jackets, however, at all—they were stowed away, stiff, in the tank, and so returned home.

Wednesday, July 5, 1911.—At 3 a.m. the whole sky was clearing and at 7 a.m. we turned out. The surface was now worse than we had as yet experienced, and we moved dreadfully slowly with one sledge load at a time. In 7½ hours hauling we only made 1½ miles good.

The min. temp. last night was −54·6°, and by the evening the temp. had dropped to −61·1°. We were then surrounded by a white fog, but could see Erebus and Terror. The cirro-stratus gave a white-looking sky in the moonlight and a fair halo with mock moons and vertical beams and a particularly well-defined mock moon beneath on the horizon.

All day we had been hauling up hill, and we hoped it was Terror Point we were crossing. Settlements of the crust occurred regularly again at short intervals. The surface still shows no sign of windcut sastrugi, and though much of it is wind-hardened and smooth, it appears to