Truly we realised that we had taken a most serious risk, and that we were in a most critical situation, but we were partly sustained by the fact that, at any rate, we had played the game to the last and utmost. With 72° of frost the wind cut searchingly into our thin tent, and even the drift found its way on to our bags, which were wet enough already. Cramp kept on attacking us, and every now and then a frozen foot had to be nursed into life again by placing it inside the shirt and next to the skin of the sufferer's almost as suffering neighbour. To add to our dreariness we had nothing to read, as we had depoted our little books so that we might save weight. [Illustration: The Farthest South Camp after sixty hours' Blizzard. (_See page 144_)] We had honestly and truly shot our bolt at last, and when the wind dropped about midnight we were soon up and ready to struggle forward a little further and hoist the flag as near to the South Pole as we could possibly bear it. At 9 A.M. on January 9 we were in latitude 88° 23' south, longitude 162° east, half running and half walking over a surface much hardened by the recent blizzard, and it was indeed strange to us to go along without the nightmare of that heavy sledge dragging behind us. Soon the time came when we had to hoist Her Majesty's flag and afterwards the other Union Jack, and then we took possession of the plateau in the name of His Majesty. And while the Union Jack blew out stiff in the icy gale which was still cutting us to the bone, we looked south with our powerful glasses, but could see nothing but the dead white snow plain. No break in the plateau was to be seen as it extended toward the Pole, and we felt absolutely sure that the goal which we had struggled for--and failed to reach--lay on this plain. We stayed only for a few minutes, and then, taking the Queen's flag with us, we turned our backs upon the Pole and began to retrace our steps. Regretfully it is true, but conscious that, though failure was ours, we had done our best to avoid it. CHAPTER XXVIII THE RETURN MARCH Our homeward marches are a tale of sufferings from hunger and dysentery, of struggles against blizzards and crevasses and bad surfaces. One desire drove us on from depot to depot, and that was our supreme craving for food. All of us had tragic dreams of getting food to eat, but rarely did we have the satisfaction of dreaming that we were actually eating. I did, however, once have a dream that I was eating bread and butter. Conscience is said to make men cowardly, and I am sure that it is as true to say that hunger makes them very peevish and irritable. We looked at each other as we ate our scanty meals, and felt a distinct grievance if one man managed to make his ration last longer than the rest of us. Sometimes we did our best to save a bit of biscuit for the next meal, but the problem whether it was better to eat the food at once or to keep a fragment to nibble afterwards was never solved.