Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/89

wind had dropped to force 2. At 10 a.m. it was about force 3, and we awaited the moment when there would be light enough for us to look for our tent. Meanwhile Bowers suggested an al fresco meal under the floorcloth as we sat in our bags. We lit the primus and got the cooker going and had a good hot meal, the first for 48 hours, the tent floorcloth resting on our heads.

As it was still dark when we had finished we lay in our bags again for a bit. Daylight appeared, and we at once turned out, and it was by no means reassuring to find that the weather in the south still looked as bad and thick as it possibly could. We therefore lost no time at all in getting away down wind to look for the tent. Everywhere we found shreds of green canvas roof the size of a pocket-handkerchief, but not a sign of the tent, until a loud shout from Bowers, who had gone more east to the top of a ridge than Cherry and I, told us he had seen it. He hurried down, and slid about a hundred yards down a hard snow slope, sitting in his haste, and there we joined him where he had found the whole tent hardly damaged at all, a quarter of a mile from where we had pitched it. One of the poles had been twisted right out of the cap, and the lower stops of the tent lining had all carried away more or less, but the tent itself was intact and untorn.

We brought it back, pitched it in the old spot in the snow hollow below our hut, and then brought down our bags and cooker and all essential gear, momentarily expecting the weather to break on us again. It looked as thick as could be and close at hand in the south.