My party had not yet become sufficiently inured to exposure at such low temperatures to enable them to bear it without risk. They were all more or less touched with the frost, and the faces of two of them had been so often frozen that they had become very painful and much swollen, and their feet being constantly cold, I was fearful of some serious accident if we did not speedily seek safety at a lower level. The temperature fell to 34° below zero during the night, and it is a circumstance worthy of mention that the lowest record of the thermometer at Port Foulke, during our absence, was 22° higher. The men complained bitterly, and could not sleep. One of them seemed likely to give up altogether, and I was compelled to send him into the open air to save himself from perishing by a vigorous walk. The storm steadily increased in force, and, the temperature falling lower and lower, we were all at length forced to quit the tent, and in active exercise strive to prevent ourselves from freezing. To face the wind was not possible, and shelter was nowhere to be found upon the unbroken plain. There was but one direction in which we could move, and that was with our backs to the gale. Much as I should have liked to continue the journey one day more, it was clear to me that longer delay would not alone endanger the lives of one or two members of my party, but would wholly defeat the purposes of the expedition by the destruction of all of us. It was not without much difficulty that the tent was taken down and bundled upon the sledge. The wind blew so fiercely that we could scarcely roll it up with our stiffened hands. The men were suffering with pain, and could only for a few moments hold on to the hardened canvas. Their fingers, freezing continually, required active pounding to keep them upon the flickering verge of life. We did not wait for neat stowage or an orderly start. Danger suggests prompt expedients. [Sidenote: A DANGEROUS SITUATION.] Our situation at this camp was as sublime as it was dangerous. We had attained an altitude of five thousand feet above the level of the sea, and we were seventy miles from the coast, in the midst of a vast frozen sahara, immeasurable to the human eye. There was neither hill, mountain, nor gorge anywhere in view. We had completely sunk the strip of land which lies between the _mer de glace_ and the sea; and no object met the eye but our feeble tent, which bent to the storm. Fitful clouds swept over the face of the full-orbed moon, which, descending toward the horizon, glimmered through the drifting snow that whirled out of the illimitable distance, and scudded over the icy plain;--to the eye, in undulating lines of downy softness; to the flesh, in showers of piercing darts. Our only safety was in flight; and like a ship driven before a tempest which she cannot withstand, and which has threatened her ruin, we turned our backs to the gale; and, hastening down the slope, we ran to save our lives.