It gives me joy now to think that, anxious and spent as we were, trusting indeed to God to pull us through, but too weary and weak to be very hopeful or to care very much, we still hung on to the geological specimens we had collected.
By the 6th we were all better, but we were terribly hungry, and six biscuits per day and one pannikin of horse-meat each meal did nothing to enable us to regain our strength. Indeed, my fear was that this incessant hunger would weaken us so much that our return would never be accomplished.
The Camp under the Granite Pillar, half a mile from the Lower Glacier Depot, where the Party camped on January 27 (See page 151)
On the 7th Adams and Marshall were again attacked by dysentery; and, though Wild and I were free of it, all of us were pitiably weak. Still we struggled on, starving for food, and talking about it all the time as we advanced slowly towards the north.
The mounds which we had laid on our way out continued to guide us on our return, and were a great comfort, but all our thoughts and our conversation were about food. Wind and weather helped us through that desperate time, or again in our weakened and starving condition we could never have hoped to reach our next depot.
Assisted, however, as we were, we reached the depot on February 13 without a single particle of food left. There we found poor old Chinaman's liver, and thought it a dish that kings might envy. We looked round for any spare bits of meat, and while I was digging in the snow I came across some hard red stuff, which turned out to be Chinaman's blood frozen into a solid core. We dug it up, and in such straits were we that we found it a most welcome addition to our food. When boiled up, it seemed to us like beef-tea.
Truly I was in luck in those days, for the fifteenth of February was my birthday, and I was given a present of a cigarette made out of pipe tobacco and some paper we had with us. It tasted absolutely delicious.
Those, however, were glad moments in a most distressing time, for on the day following my smoke all of us were again so appallingly hungry, and consequently so weak, that even to lift our almost empty provision-bag was an effort.
When we broke camp in the morning we pulled the tent off the poles and took it down before we moved the things inside, for the effort of lifting anything through the doorway was too much for us. At night we sometimes had to lift our legs one at a time with both hands in getting them into the tent, and after we had stiffened from the day's march it seemed almost impossible to lift our feet without assistance.