AURORA AUSTRALIS.
cuit, or some emergency rations, or both, added. We had all developed a sledging appetite, and found the ‘hoosh’ delicious. By mistake, as he subsequently asserted, a knowing one put three times the maximum allowance of pemmican into the ‘hoosh’ of the three dwellers in one of the tents. He declared that this amount contained the irreducible minimum of food fuel needed to keep the lamp of life alight within us, so we ate earnestly that we might live; one of us, however, utterly failed to consume his treble ration, but the knowing one, after finishing the whole of his own allowance, came to the assistance of his distressed tents. fellow, and finished all his ‘hoosh’ for him, down to the fatty end. A man after such a meal, in any but a polar climate, would have seen in his sleep ‘more devils than vast hell can hold,’ but it speaks volumes for the climate, as well as for the strength of the quintuple-whacker’s digestion, that on this occasion he slept soundly till dawn, and that too, with a volume of Paradise Lost in his pocket, without once seeing a vision of the swart hero of Milton’s epic.
The following morning the temperature was –10° Fahr., and when we untoggled our sleeping bags, miniature showers of ice-crystals, formed from the freezing of the moisture of our breath on the rein-
