improved and we did not find it necessary after all to get back into our
bags, for it was still warm and quite pleasant sitting in the tent.

What a sight the camp had presented before we started digging out. The
ponies like drowned rats, their manes and tails dank and dripping, a
saturated blotting-paper look about their green horse cloths, eyes half
closed, mouths flabby and wet, each animal half buried in this Antarctic
morass, the old snow walls like sand dunes after a storm.

The green tents just peeping through the snow, mottled and beaten in, as
it were, all sledges well under, except for here and there a red paraffin
oil tin and the corner of an instrument box peeping out. Our ski-sticks
and ski alone stood up above it all, and those sleeping-bags,
ugh--rightly the place was christened "Shambles Camp."

On December 9 the blizzard was really over; we completed the digging out
of sledges and stores and wallowed sometimes thigh-deep whilst getting
the ponies out of their snow-drifted shelters. Then we faced probably the
hardest physical test we had had since the bailing out in the great gale
a year ago. We had breakfast and got away somewhere about 8 a.m. My party
helped the pony sledges to get away for a mile or two; the poor brutes
had a fearful struggle, and so did we in the man-hauling team. We panted
and sweated alongside the sledges, and when at last Captain Scott sent us
back to bring up our own sledge and tent we were quite done. Arrived at
the Shambles Camp we cooked a little tea, and then wearily hauled our
sledge for hour after hour until we came up with the Boss, dead
cooked--we had struggled and wallowed for nearly 15 hours. The others had
certainly an easier time but a far sadder time, for, they had to coax the
exhausted ponies along and watch their sufferings, knowing that they must
kill the little creatures on halting.