m. we were on the march again. We wished one another a
merry Christmas, and our thoughts went back to those at home. We
wondered, too, that day, as we sat down to our "lunch" of stale, thin
bannock and a mug of thin cocoa, what they were having at home.
All hands were very cheerful. The prospect of a relief from the
monotony of life on the floe raised all our spirits. One man wrote in
his diary: "It's a hard, rough, jolly life, this marching and camping;
no washing of self or dishes, no undressing, no changing of clothes.
We have our food anyhow, and always impregnated with blubber-smoke;
sleeping almost on the bare snow and working as hard as the human
physique is capable of doing on a minimum of food."
We marched on, with one halt at 6 a.m., till half-past eleven. After a
supper of seal steaks and tea we turned in. The surface now was pretty
bad. High temperatures during the day made the upper layers of snow
very soft, and the thin crust which formed at night was not sufficient
to support a man. Consequently, at each step we went in over our knees
in the soft wet snow. Sometimes a man would step into a hole in the
ice which was hidden by the covering of snow, and be pulled up with a
jerk by his harness. The sun was very hot and many were suffering from
cracked lips.
Two seals were killed to-day.
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