Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/95

did not much care whether I went down a crevasse or not. We had gone through a great deal since then. Bill and Birdie kept on assuring me that I was doing more than my share of the work, but I think that I was getting more and more weak. Birdie kept wonderfully strong: he slept most of the night; the difficulty was for him to get into his bag without going to sleep. He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but some of these nights he had to give it up for the time because he could not keep awake. He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his hand and let it fall, and once he had the lighted primus.

Bill's bag was getting hopeless: it was really too small for an eiderdown 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 eiderdown was 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.]

All our bags were by this time so saturated with water that they froze too stiff to bend with safety, so from now onwards to Cape Evans we never rolled them up, but packed them one on the other full length, like coffins, on the sledge. Even so, they were breaking or broken in several places in the efforts we made to get into them in the evenings. We always took the precaution to stow our personal kit bags and sleeping fur