Page:South - the story of Shackleton's last expedition, 1914-1917.djvu/186

 down here, but the terrific winds penetrate the flimsy fabric of our fragile tents and create so much draught that it is impossible to keep warm within. At supper last night our drinking-water froze over in the tin in the tent before we could drink it. It is curious how thirsty we all are."

Two days of brilliant warm sunshine succeeded these cold times, and on March 29 we experienced, to us, the most amazing weather. It began to rain hard, and it was the first rain that we had seen since we left South Georgia sixteen months ago. We regarded, it as our first touch with civilization, and many of the men longed for the rain and fogs of London.

Strong south winds with dull, overcast skies and occasional high temperatures were now our lot till April 7, when the mist lifted and we could make out what appeared to be land to the north.

Although the general drift of our ice-floe had indicated to us that we must eventually drift north, our progress in that direction was not by any means uninterrupted. We were at the mercy of the wind, and could no more control our drift than we could control the weather.

A long spell of calm, still weather at the beginning of January caused us some anxiety by keeping us at about the latitude that we were in at the beginning of December. Towards the end of January, however, a long drift of eighty-four miles in a blizzard cheered us all up. This soon stopped and we began a slight drift to the east. Our general drift now slowed up considerably, and by February 22 we were still eighty miles from Paulet Island, which now was our objective. There was a hut there and some stores which had been taken down by the ship which went to the rescue of Nordenskjold's Expedition in 1904, and whose fitting out and equipment I had charge of. We remarked amongst ourselves what a strange turn of fate it would be if the very cases of provisions which I had ordered and sent out so many years before were now to support us during the coming winter. But this was not to be. March 5 found us about forty miles south of the longitude of Paulet Island, but well to the east of it; and as the ice was still too much broken up to sledge over, it appeared as if