The cold was intense and long-continued. Even the tobacco pipes froze, the stem becoming solidly clogged with ice as the smoking went on unless it was made so short as to bring the bowl unpleasantly close to the mouth. On the 1st of April the temperature was down to minus 64°, and three days afterwards it was a hundred and five below freezing, the cold weather preventing the departure of the dog-sledge for Discovery Bay. During the autumn, sledging parties had laid out reserves of stores for the spring journeys, and a certain amount of practice had been given to the men in what was intended to be the chief work of the expedition. The field, however, was not promising. On one occasion Nares went out to look at it. He obtained a fine view of the pack for a distance of six miles from the land. The southern side of each purely white snow-covered hummock was brilliantly lighted by the orange-tinted twilight. The stranded floebergs lining the shore extended from half to three-quarters of a mile off the land. Outside were old floes with undulating upper surfaces separated from each other by Sherard Osborn's "hedgerows of Arctic landscape," otherwise ridges of pressed-up ice of every size. "It will be as difficult," was his verdict, "to drag a sledge over such ice as to transport a carriage directly across country in England." He gave a lecture on sledging at one of the winter entertainments. It was interesting but not encouraging. He told his hearers that if they could imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as child's play in comparison with the work they would have to perform whilst sledging. "These prophetic words," says Markham, "were fully realised, and were often recalled and commented on by the men."