below the circles of fire. Still we slept sometimes, and always we lay
for seven hours. Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and
always we said no. Yet there was nothing I should have liked better: I
was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy. That
day we had advanced 11/2 miles by the utmost labour, and the usual relay
work. This was quite a good march--and Cape Crozier is 67 miles from Cape
Evans!

More than once in my short life I have been struck by the value of the
man who is blind to what appears to be a common-sense certainty: he
achieves the impossible. We never spoke our thoughts: we discussed the
Age of Stone which was to come, when we built our cosy warm rock hut on
the slopes of Mount Terror, and ran our stove with penguin blubber, and
pickled little Emperors in warmth and dryness. We were quite intelligent
people, and we must all have known that we were not going to see the
penguins and that it was folly to go forward. And yet with quiet
perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with gentleness those two men
led on. I just did what I was told.

It is desirable that the body should work, feed and sleep at regular
hours, and this is too often forgotten when sledging. But just now we
found we were unable to fit 8 hours marching and 7 hours in our
sleeping-bags into a 24-hour day: the routine camp work took more than 9
hours, such were the conditions. We therefore ceased to observe the quite
imaginary difference between night and day, and it was noon on Friday
(July 7) before we got away. The temperature was -68 deg. and there was a
thick white fog: generally we had but the vaguest idea where we were, and
we camped at 10 P.M. after managing 13/4 miles for the day. But what a
relief. Instead of labouring away, our hearts were beating more
naturally: it was easier to camp, we had some feeling in our hands, and
our feet had not gone to sleep. Birdie swung the thermometer and found
it only -55 deg.. "Now if we tell people that to get only 87 degrees of frost
can be an enormous relief they simply won't believe us," I remember
saying. Perhaps you won't but it was, all the same: and I wrote that
night: "There is something after all rather good in doing something never
done before." Things were looking up, you see.

Our hearts were doing very gallant work. Towards the end of the march
they were getting beaten and were finding it difficult to pump the blood
out to our extremities There were few days that Wilson and I did not get
some part of our feet frost-bitten. As we camped, I suspect our hearts
were beating comparatively slowly and weakly. Nothing could be done until
a hot drink was ready--tea for lunch, hot water for supper. Directly we
started to drink then the effect was wonderful: it was, said Wilson, like
putting a hot-water bottle against your heart. The beats became very
rapid and strong and you felt the warmth travelling outwards and
downwards. Then you got your foot-gear off--puttees (cut in half and
wound round the bottom of the trousers), finnesko, saennegrass, hair
socks, and two pairs of woollen socks. Then you nursed back your feet and
tried to believe you were glad--a frost-bite does not hurt until it
begins to thaw. Later came the blisters, and then the chunks of dead
skin.

Bill was anxious. It seems that Scott had twice gone for a walk with him
during the Winter, and tried to persuade him not to go, and only finally
consented on condition that Bill brought us all back unharmed: we were
Southern Journey men. Bill had a tremendous respect for Scott, and later
when we were about to make an effort to get back home over the Barrier,
and our case was very desperate, he was most anxious to leave no gear
behind at Cape Crozier, even the scientific gear which could be of no use
to us and of which we had plenty more at the hut. "Scott will never
forgive me if I leave gear behind," he said. It is a good sledging
principle, and the party which does not follow it, or which leaves some
of its load to be fetched in later is seldom a good one: but it is a
principle which can be carried to excess.

And now Bill was feeling terribly responsible for both of us. He kept on
saying that he was sorry, but he had never dreamed it was going to be as
bad as this. He felt that having asked us to come he was in some way
chargeable with our troubles. When leaders have this kind of feeling
about their men they get much better results, if the men are good: if men
are bad or even moderate they will try and take advantage of what they
consider to be softness.

The temperature on the night of July 7 was -59 deg..

On July 8 we found the first sign that we might be coming to an end of
this soft, powdered, arrowrooty snow. It was frightfully hard pulling;
but every now and then our finnesko pierced a thin crust before they sank
right in. This meant a little wind, and every now and then our feet came
down on a hard slippery patch under the soft snow. We were surrounded by
fog which walked along with us, and far above us the moon was shining on
its roof. Steering was as difficult as the pulling, and four hours of the
hardest work only produced 11/4 miles in the morning, and three more hours
1 mile in the afternoon--and the temperature was -57 deg. with a
breeze--horrible!

In the early morning of the next day snow began to fall and the fog was
dense: when we got up we could see nothing at all anywhere. After the
usual four hours to get going in the morning we settled that it was
impossible to relay, for we should never be able to track ourselves back
to the second sledge. It was with very great relief that we found we
could move both sledges together, and I think this was mainly due to the
temperature which had risen to -36 deg..

This was our fourth day of fog in addition to the normal darkness, and we
knew we must be approaching the land. It would be Terror Point, and the
fog is probably caused by the moist warm air coming up from the sea
through the pressure cracks and crevasses; for it is supposed that the
Barrier here is afloat.

I wish I could take you on to the great Ice Barrier some calm evening
when the sun is just dipping in the middle of the night and show you the
autumn tints on Ross Island. A last look round before turning in, a good
day's march behind, enough fine fat pemmican inside you to make you
happy, the homely smell of tobacco from the tent, a pleasant sense of
soft fur and the deep sleep to come. And all the softest colours God has
made are in the snow; on Erebus to the west, where the wind can scarcely
move his cloud of smoke; and on Terror to the east, not so high, and more
regular in form. How peaceful and dignified it all is.

That was what you might have seen four months ago had you been out on the
Barrier plain. Low down on the extreme right or east of the land there
was a black smudge of rock peeping out from great snow-drifts: that was
the Knoll, and close under it were the cliffs of Cape Crozier, the Knoll
looking quite low and the cliffs invisible, although they are eight
hundred feet high, a sheer precipice falling to the sea.

It is at Cape Crozier that the Barrier edge, which runs for four hundred
miles as an ice-cliff up to 200 feet high, meets the land. The Barrier is
moving against this land at a rate which is sometimes not much less than
a mile in a year. Perhaps you can imagine the chaos which it piles up:
there are pressure ridges compared to which the waves of the sea are like
a ploughed field. These are worst at Cape Crozier itself, but they extend
all along the southern slopes of Mount Terror, running parallel with the
land, and the disturbance which Cape Crozier makes is apparent at Corner
Camp some forty miles back on the Barrier in the crevasses we used to
find and the occasional ridges we had to cross.

In the Discovery days the pressure just where it hit Cape Crozier formed
a small bay, and on the sea-ice frozen in this bay the men of the
Discovery found the only Emperor penguin rookery which had ever been
seen. The ice here was not blown out by the blizzards which cleared the
Ross Sea, and open water or open leads were never far away. This gave the
Emperors a place to lay their eggs and an opportunity to find their food.
We had therefore to find our way along the pressure to the Knoll, and
thence penetrate _through_ the pressure to the Emperors' Bay. And we had
to do it in the dark.

Terror Point, which we were approaching in the fog, is a short twenty
miles from the Knoll, and ends in a long snow-tongue running out into the
Barrier. The way had been travelled a good many times in Discovery days
and in daylight, and Wilson knew there was a narrow path, free from
crevasses, which skirted along between the mountain and the pressure
ridges running parallel to it. But it is one thing to walk along a
corridor by day, and quite another to try to do so at night, especially
when there are no walls by which you can correct your course--only
crevasses. Anyway, Terror Point must be somewhere close to us now, and
vaguely in front of us was that strip of snow, neither Barrier nor
mountain, which was our only way forward.

We began to realize, now that our eyes were more or less out of action,
how much we could do with our feet and ears. The effect of walking in
finnesko is much the same as walking in gloves, and you get a sense of
touch which nothing else except bare feet could give you. Thus we could
feel every small variation in surface, every crust through which our feet
broke, every hardened patch below the soft snow. And soon we began to
rely more and more upon the sound of our footsteps to tell us whether we
were on crevasses or solid ground. From now onwards we were working among
crevasses fairly constantly. I loathe them in full daylight when much can
be done to avoid them, and when if you fall into them you can at any rate
see where the sides are, which way they run and how best to scramble out;
when your companions can see how to stop the sledge to which you are all
attached by your harness; how most safely to hold the sledge when
stopped; how, if you are dangling fifteen feet down in a chasm, to work
above you to get you up to the surface again. And then our clothes were
generally something like clothes. Even under the ideal conditions of good
light, warmth and no wind, crevasses are beastly, whether you are pulling
over a level and uniform snow surface, never knowing what moment will
find you dropping into some bottomless pit, or whether you are rushing
for the Alpine rope and the sledge, to help some companion who has
disappeared. I dream sometimes now of bad days we had on the Beardmore
and elsewhere, when men were dropping through to be caught up and hang at
the full length of the harnesses and toggles many times in an hour. On
the same sledge as myself on the Beardmore one man went down once head
first, and another eight times to the length of his harness in 25
minutes. And always you wondered whether your harness was going to hold
when the jerk came. But those days were a Sunday School treat compared to
our days of blind-man's buff with the Emperor penguins among the
crevasses of Cape Crozier.

Our troubles were greatly increased by the state of our clothes. If we
had been dressed in lead we should have been able to move our arms and
necks and heads more easily than we could now. If the same amount of
icing had extended to our legs I believe we should still be there,
standing unable to move: but happily the forks of our trousers still
remained movable. To get into our canvas harnesses was the most absurd
business. Quite in the early days of our journey we met with this
difficulty, and somewhat foolishly decided not to take off our harness
for lunch. The harnesses thawed in the tent, and froze back as hard as
boards. Likewise our clothing was hard as boards and stuck out from our
bodies in every imaginable fold and angle. To fit one board over the
other required the united efforts of the would-be wearer and his two
companions, and the process had to be repeated for each one of us twice a
day. Goodness knows how long it took; but it cannot have been less than
five minutes' thumping at each man.

As we approached Terror Point in the fog we sensed that we had risen and
fallen over several rises. Every now and then we felt hard slippery snow
under our feet. Every now and then our feet went through crusts in the
surface. And then quite suddenly, vague, indefinable, monstrous, there
loomed a something ahead. I remember having a feeling as of ghosts about
as we untoggled our harnesses from the sledge, tied them together, and
thus roped walked upwards on that ice. The moon was showing a ghastly
ragged mountainous edge above us in the fog, and as we rose we found that
we were on a pressure ridge. We stopped, looked at one another, and then
_bang_--right under our feet. More bangs, and creaks and groans; for that
ice was moving and splitting like glass. The cracks went off all round
us, and some of them ran along for hundreds of yards. Afterwards we got
used to it, but at first the effect was very jumpy. From first to last
during this journey we had plenty of variety and none of that monotony
which is inevitable in sledging over long distances of Barrier in summer.
Only the long shivering fits following close one after the other all the
time we lay in our dreadful sleeping-bags, hour after hour and night
after night in those temperatures--they were as monotonous as could be.
Later we got frost-bitten even as we lay in our sleeping-bags. Things are
getting pretty bad when you get frost-bitten in your bag.

There was only a glow where the moon was; we stood in a moonlit fog, and
this was sufficient to show the edge of another ridge ahead, and yet
another on our left. We were utterly bewildered. The deep booming of the
ice continued, and it may be that the tide has something to do with this,
though we were many miles from the ordinary coastal ice. We went back,
toggled up to our sledges again and pulled in what we thought was the
right direction, always with that feeling that the earth may open
underneath your feet which you have in crevassed areas. But all we found
were more mounds and banks of snow and ice, into which we almost ran
before we saw them. We were clearly lost. It was near midnight, and I
wrote, "it may be the pressure ridges or it may be Terror, it is
impossible to say,--and I should think it is impossible to move till it
clears. We were steering N.E. when we got here and returned S.W. till we
seemed to be in a hollow and camped."

The temperature had been rising from -36 deg. at 11 A.M. and it was now -27 deg.;
snow was falling and nothing whatever could be seen. From under the tent
came noises as though some giant was banging a big empty tank. All the
signs were for a blizzard, and indeed we had not long finished our supper
and were thawing our way little by little into our bags when the wind
came away from the south. Before it started we got a glimpse of black
rock and knew we must be in the pressure ridges where they nearly join
Mount Terror.

It is with great surprise that in looking up the records I find that
blizzard lasted three days, the temperature and wind both rising till it
was +9 deg. and blowing force 9 on the morning of the second day (July 11).
On the morning of the third day (July 12) it was blowing storm force
(10). The temperature had thus risen over eighty degrees.

It was not an uncomfortable time. Wet and warm, the risen temperature
allowed all our ice to turn to water, and we lay steaming and beautifully
liquid, and wondered sometimes what we should be like when our gear froze
up once more. But we did not do much wondering, I suspect: we slept. From
that point of view these blizzards were a perfect Godsend.

We also revised our food rations. From the moment we started to prepare
for this journey we were asked by Scott to try certain experiments in
view of the Plateau stage of the Polar Journey the following summer. It
was supposed that the Plateau stage would be the really tough part of the
Polar Journey, and no one then dreamed that harder conditions could be
found in the middle of the Barrier in March than on the Plateau, ten
thousand feet higher, in February. In view of the extreme conditions we
knew we must meet on this winter journey, far harder of course in point
of weather than anything experienced on the Polar Journey, we had
determined to simplify our food to the last degree. We only brought
pemmican, biscuit, butter and tea: and tea is not a food, only a pleasant
stimulant, and hot: the pemmican was excellent and came from Beauvais,
Copenhagen.

[Illustration: CAMP WORK IN A BLIZZARD, PASSING IN THE COOKER--E. A.
Wilson, del.]

The immediate advantage of this was that we had few food bags to handle
for each meal. If the air temperature is 100 degrees of frost, then
everything in the air is about 100 degrees of frost too. You have only to
untie the lashings of one bag in a -70 deg. temperature, with your feet
frozen and your fingers just nursed back after getting a match to strike
for the candle (you will have tried several boxes--metal), to realize
this as an advantage.

The immediate and increasingly pressing disadvantage is that you have no
sugar. Have you ever had a craving for sugar which never leaves you, even
when asleep? It is unpleasant. As a matter of fact the craving for sweet
things never seriously worried us on this journey, and there must have
been some sugar in our biscuits which gave a pleasant sweetness to our
mid-day tea or nightly hot water when broken up and soaked in it. These
biscuits were specially made for us by Huntley and Palmer: their
composition was worked out by Wilson and that firm's chemist, and is a
secret. But they are probably the most satisfying biscuit ever made, and
I doubt whether they can be improved upon. There were two kinds, called
Emergency and Antarctic, but there was I think little difference between
them except in the baking. A well-baked biscuit was good to eat when
sledging if your supply of food was good: but if you were very hungry an
underbaked one was much preferred. By taking individually different
quantities of biscuit, pemmican and butter we were able roughly to test
the proportions of proteids, fats and carbo-hydrates wanted by the human
body under such extreme circumstances. Bill was all for fat, starting
with 8 oz. butter, 12 oz. pemmican and only 12 oz. biscuit a day. Bowers
told me he was going for proteids, 16 oz. pemmican and 16 oz. biscuit,
and suggested I should go the whole hog on carbo-hydrates. I did not like
this, since I knew I should want more fat, but the rations were to be
altered as necessary during the journey, so there was no harm in trying.
So I started with 20 oz. of biscuit and 12 oz. of pemmican a day.

Bowers was all right (this was usual with him), but he did not eat all
his extra pemmican. Bill could not eat all his extra butter, but was
satisfied. I got hungry, certainly got more frost-bitten than the
others, and wanted more fat. I also got heartburn. However, before taking
more fat I increased my biscuits to 24 oz., but this did not satisfy me;
I wanted fat. Bill and I now took the same diet, he giving me 4 oz. of
butter which he could not eat, and I giving him 4 oz. of biscuit which
did not satisfy my wants. We both therefore had 12 oz. pemmican, 16 oz
biscuit and 4 oz. butter a day, but we did not always finish our butter.
This is an extremely good ration, and we had enough to eat during most of
this journey. We certainly could not have faced the conditions without.

I will not say that I was entirely easy in my mind as we lay out that
blizzard somewhere off Terror Point; I don't know how the others were
feeling. The unearthly banging going on underneath us may have had
something to do with it. But we were quite lost in the pressure and it
might be the deuce and all to get out in the dark. The wind eddied and
swirled quite out of its usual straightforward way, and the tent got
badly snowed up: our sledge had disappeared long ago. The position was
not altogether a comfortable one.

Tuesday night and Wednesday it blew up to force 10, temperature from -7 deg.
to +2 deg.. And then it began to modify and get squally. By 3 A.M. on
Thursday (July 13) the wind had nearly ceased, the temperature was
falling and the stars were shining through detached clouds. We were soon
getting our breakfast, which always consisted of tea, followed by
pemmican. We soaked our biscuits in both. Then we set to work to dig out
the sledges and tent, a big job taking several hours. At last we got
started. In that jerky way in which I was still managing to jot a few
sentences down each night as a record, I wrote:

"Did 71/2 miles during day--seems a marvellous run--rose and fell over
several ridges of Terror--in afternoon suddenly came on huge crevasse on
one of these--we were quite high on Terror--moon saved us walking in--it
might have taken sledge and all."

To do seven miles in a day, a distance which had taken us nearly a week
in the past, was very heartening. The temperature was between -20 deg. and
-30 deg. all day, and that was good too. When crossing the undulations which
ran down out of the mountain into the true pressure ridges on our right
we found that the wind which came down off the mountain struck along the
top of the undulation, and flowing each way, caused a N.E. breeze on one
side and a N.W. breeze on the other. There seemed to be wind in the sky,
and the blizzard had not cleared as far away as we should have wished.

During the time through which we had come it was by burning more oil than
is usually allowed for cooking that we kept going at all. After each meal
was cooked we allowed the primus to burn on for a while and thus warmed
up the tent. Then we could nurse back our frozen feet and do any
necessary little odd jobs. More often we just sat and nodded for a few
minutes, keeping one another from going too deeply to sleep. But it was
running away with the oil. We started with 6 one-gallon tins (those tins
Scott had criticized), and we had now used four of them. At first we said
we must have at least two one-gallon tins with which to go back; but by
now our estimate had come down to one full gallon tin, and two full
primus lamps. Our sleeping-bags were awful. It took me, even as early in
the journey as this, an hour of pushing and thumping and cramp every
night to thaw out enough of mine to get into it at all. Even that was not
so bad as lying in them when we got there.

Only -35 deg. but "a very bad night" according to my diary. We got away in
good time, but it was a ghastly day and my nerves were quivering at the
end, for we could not find that straight and narrow way which led between
the crevasses on either hand. Time after time we found we were out of our
course by the sudden fall of the ground beneath our feet--in we went and
then--"are we too far right?"--nobody knows--"well let's try nearer in to
the mountain," and so forth! "By hard slogging 23/4 miles this
morning--then on in thick gloom which suddenly lifted and we found
ourselves under a huge great mountain of pressure ridge looking black in
shadow. We went on, bending to the left, when Bill fell and put his arm
into a crevasse. We went over this and another, and some time after got
somewhere up to the left, and both Bill and I put a foot into a crevasse.
We sounded all about and everywhere was hollow, and so we ran the sledge
down over it and all was well."[152] Once we got right into the pressure
and took a longish time to get out again. Bill lengthened his trace out
with the Alpine rope now and often afterwards so he found the crevasses
well ahead of us and the sledge: nice for us but not so nice for Bill.
Crevasses in the dark _do_ put your nerves on edge.

When we started next morning (July 15) we could see on our left front and
more or less on top of us the Knoll, which is a big hill whose
precipitous cliffs to seaward form Cape Crozier. The sides of it sloped
down towards us, and pressing against its ice-cliffs on ahead were miles
and miles of great pressure ridges, along which we had travelled, and
which hemmed us in. Mount Terror rose ten thousand feet high on our left,
and was connected with the Knoll by a great cup-like drift of
wind-polished snow. The slope of this in one place runs gently out on to
the corridor along which we had sledged, and here we turned and started
to pull our sledges up. There were no crevasses, only the great drift of
snow, so hard that we used our crampons just as though we had been on
ice, and as polished as the china sides of a giant cup which it
resembled. For three miles we slogged up, until we were only 150 yards
from the moraine shelf where we were going to build our hut of rocks and
snow. This moraine was above us on our left, the twin peaks of the Knoll
were across the cup on our right; and here, 800 feet up the mountain
side, we pitched our last camp.

We had arrived.

What should we call our hut? How soon could we get our clothes and bags
dry? How would the blubber stove work? Would the penguins be there? "It
seems too good to be true, 19 days out. Surely seldom has any one been so
wet; our bags hardly possible to get into, our wind-clothes just frozen
boxes. Birdie's patent balaclava is like iron--it is wonderful how our
cares have vanished."[153]

It was evening, but we were so keen to begin that we went straight up to
the ridge above our camp, where the rock cropped out from the snow. We
found that most of it was _in situ_ but that there were plenty of
boulders, some gravel, and of course any amount of the icy snow which
fell away below us down to our tent, and the great pressure about a mile
beyond. Between us and that pressure, as we were to find out afterwards,
was a great ice-cliff. The pressure ridges, and the Great Ice Barrier
beyond, were at our feet; the Ross Sea edge but some four miles away. The
Emperors must be somewhere round that shoulder of the Knoll which hides
Cape Crozier itself from our view.

Our scheme was to build an igloo with rock walls, banked up with snow,
using a nine-foot sledge as a ridge beam, and a large sheet of green
Willesden canvas as a roof. We had also brought a board to form a lintel
over the door. Here with the stove, which was to be fed with blubber from
the penguins, we were to have a comfortable warm home whence we would
make excursions to the rookery perhaps four miles away. Perhaps we would
manage to get our tent down to the rookery itself and do our scientific
work there on the spot, leaving our nice hut for a night or more. That is
how we planned it.

That same night "we started to dig in under a great boulder on the top of
the hill, hoping to make this a large part of one of the walls of the
hut, but the rock came close underneath and stopped us. We then chose a
moderately level piece of moraine about twelve feet away, and just under
the level of the top of the hill, hoping that here in the lee of the
ridge we might escape a good deal of the tremendous winds which we knew
were common. Birdie gathered rocks from over the hill, nothing was too
big for him; Bill did the banking up outside while I built the wall with
the boulders. The rocks were good, the snow, however, was blown so hard
as to be practically ice; a pick made little impression upon it, and the
only way was to chip out big blocks gradually with the small shovel. The
gravel was scanty, but good when there was any. Altogether things looked
very hopeful when we turned in to the tent some 150 yards down the slope,
having done about half one of the long walls."[154]

The view from eight hundred feet up the mountain was magnificent and I
got my spectacles out and cleared the ice away time after time to look.
To the east a great field of pressure ridges below, looking in the
moonlight as if giants had been ploughing with ploughs which made furrows
fifty or sixty feet deep: these ran right up to the Barrier edge, and
beyond was the frozen Ross Sea, lying flat, white and peaceful as though
such things as blizzards were unknown. To the north and north-east the
Knoll. Behind us Mount Terror on which we stood, and over all the grey
limitless Barrier seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague,
ponderous, a breeding-place of wind and drift and darkness. God! What a
place!

"There was now little moonlight or daylight, but for the next forty-eight
hours we used both to their utmost, being up at all times by day and
night, and often working on when there was great difficulty in seeing
anything; digging by the light of the hurricane lamp. By the end of two
days we had the walls built, and banked up to one or two feet from the
top; we were to fit the roof cloth close before banking up the rest. The
great difficulty in banking was the hardness of the snow, it being
impossible to fill in the cracks between the blocks which were more like
paving-stones than anything else. The door was in, being a triangular
tent doorway, with flaps which we built close in to the walls, cementing
it with snow and rocks. The top folded over a plank and the bottom was
dug into the ground."[155]

Birdie was very disappointed that we could not finish the whole thing
that day: he was nearly angry about it, but there was a lot to do yet and
we were tired out. We turned out early the next morning (Tuesday 18th) to
try and finish the igloo, but it was blowing too hard. When we got to
the top we did some digging but it was quite impossible to get the roof
on, and we had to leave it. We realized that day that it blew much harder
at the top of the slope than where our tent was. It was bitterly cold up
there that morning with a wind force 4-5 and a minus thirty temperature.

The oil question was worrying us quite a lot. We were now well in to the
fifth of our six tins, and economizing as much as possible, often having
only two hot meals a day. We had to get down to the Emperor penguins
somehow and get some blubber to run the stove which had been made for us
in the hut. The 19th being a calm fine day we started at 9.30, with an
empty sledge, two ice-axes, Alpine rope, harnesses and skinning tools.

Wilson had made this journey through the Cape Crozier pressure ridges
several times in the Discovery days. But then they had daylight, and they
had found a practicable way close under the cliffs which at the present
moment were between us and the ridges.

As we neared the bottom of the mountain slope, farther to the north than
we had previously gone, we had to be careful about crevasses, but we soon
hit off the edge of the cliff and skirted along it until it petered out
on the same level as the Barrier. Turning left handed we headed towards
the sea-ice, knowing that there were some two miles of pressure between
us and Cape Crozier itself. For about half a mile it was fair going,
rounding big knobs of pressure but always managing to keep more or less
on the flat and near the ice-cliff which soon rose to a very great height
on our left. Bill's idea was to try and keep close under this cliff,
along that same Discovery way which I have mentioned above. They never
arrived there early enough for the eggs in those days; the chicks were
hatched. Whether we should now find any Emperors, and if so whether they
would have any eggs, was by no means certain.

However, we soon began to get into trouble, meeting several crevasses
every few yards, and I have no doubt crossing scores of others of which
we had no knowledge. Though we hugged the cliffs as close as possible we
found ourselves on the top of the first pressure ridge, separated by a
deep gulf from the ice-slope which we wished to reach. Then we were in a
great valley between the first and second ridges: we got into huge heaps
of ice pressed up in every shape on every side, crevassed in every
direction: we slithered over snow-slopes and crawled along drift ridges,
trying to get in towards the cliffs. And always we came up against
impossible places and had to crawl back. Bill led on a length of Alpine
rope fastened to the toggle of the sledge; Birdie was in his harness also
fastened to the toggle, and I was in my harness fastened to the rear of
the sledge, which was of great use to us both as a bridge and a ladder.

Two or three times we tried to get down the ice-slopes to the
comparatively level road under the cliff, but it was always too great a
drop. In that dim light every proportion was distorted; some of the
places we actually did manage to negotiate with ice-axes and Alpine rope
looked absolute precipices, and there were always crevasses at the bottom
if you slipped. On the way back I did slip into one of these and was
hauled out by the other two standing on the wall above me.

We then worked our way down into the hollow between the first and second
large pressure ridges, and I believe on to the top of the second. The
crests here rose fifty or sixty feet. After this I don't know where we
went. Our best landmarks were patches of crevasses, sometimes three or
four in a few footsteps. The temperatures were lowish (-37 deg.), it was
impossible for me to wear spectacles, and this was a tremendous
difficulty to me and handicap to the party: Bill would find a crevasse
and point it out; Birdie would cross; and then time after time, in trying
to step over or climb over on the sledge, I put my feet right into the
middle of the cracks. This day I went well in at least six times; once,
when we were close to the sea, rolling into and out of one and then down
a steep slope until brought up by Birdie and Bill on the rope.

[Illustration: A PROCESSION OF EMPERORS]

[Illustration: THE KNOLL BEHIND THE CLIFFS OF CAPE CROZIER]

We blundered along until we got into a great cul-de-sac which probably
formed the end of the two ridges, where they butted on to the sea-ice. On
all sides rose great walls of battered ice with steep snow-slopes in
the middle, where we slithered about and blundered into crevasses. To the
left rose the huge cliff of Cape Crozier, but we could not tell whether
there were not two or three pressure ridges between us and it, and though
we tried at least four ways, there was no possibility of getting forward.

And then we heard the Emperors calling.

Their cries came to us from the sea-ice we could not see, but which must
have been a chaotic quarter of a mile away. They came echoing back from
the cliffs, as we stood helpless and tantalized. We listened and realized
that there was nothing for it but to return, for the little light which
now came in the middle of the day was going fast, and to be caught in
absolute darkness there was a horrible idea. We started back on our
tracks and almost immediately I lost my footing and rolled down a slope
into a crevasse. Birdie and Bill kept their balance and I clambered back
to them. The tracks were very faint and we soon began to lose them.
Birdie was the best man at following tracks that I have ever known, and
he found them time after time. But at last even he lost them altogether
and we settled we must just go ahead. As a matter of fact, we picked them
up again, and by then were out of the worst: but we were glad to see the
tent.

The next morning (Thursday, June 20) we started work on the igloo at 3
A.M. and managed to get the canvas roof on in spite of a wind which
harried us all that day. Little did we think what that roof had in store
for us as we packed it in with snow blocks, stretching it over our second
sledge, which we put athwartships across the middle of the longer walls.
The windward (south) end came right down to the ground and we tied it
securely to rocks before packing it in. On the other three sides we had a
good two feet or more of slack all round, and in every case we tied it to
rocks by lanyards at intervals of two feet. The door was the difficulty,
and for the present we left the cloth arching over the stones, forming a
kind of portico. The whole was well packed in and over with slabs of hard
snow, but there was no soft snow with which to fill up the gaps between
the blocks. However, we felt already that nothing could drag that roof
out of its packing, and subsequent events proved that we were right.

It was a bleak job for three o'clock in the morning before breakfast, and
we were glad to get back to the tent and a meal, for we meant to have
another go at the Emperors that day. With the first glimpse of light we
were off for the rookery again.

But we now knew one or two things about that pressure which we had not
known twenty-four hours ago; for instance, that there was a lot of
alteration since the Discovery days and that probably the pressure was
bigger. As a matter of fact it has been since proved by photographs that
the ridges now ran out three-quarters of a mile farther into the sea than
they did ten years before. We knew also that if we entered the pressure
at the only place where the ice-cliffs came down to the level of the
Barrier, as we did yesterday, we could neither penetrate to the rookery
nor get in under the cliffs where formerly a possible way had been found.
There was only one other thing to do--to go over the cliff. And this was
what we proposed to try and do.

Now these ice-cliffs are some two hundred feet high, and I felt
uncomfortable, especially in the dark. But as we came back the day before
we had noticed at one place a break in the cliffs from which there hung a
snow-drift. It _might_ be possible to get down that drift.

And so, all harnessed to the sledge, with Bill on a long lead out in
front and Birdie and myself checking the sledge behind, we started down
the slope which ended in the cliff, which of course we could not see. We
crossed a number of small crevasses, and soon we knew we must be nearly
there. Twice we crept up to the edge of the cliff with no success, and
then we found the slope: more, we got down it without great difficulty
and it brought us out just where we wanted to be, between the land cliffs
and the pressure.

[Illustration: THE BARRIER PRESSURE AT CAPE CROZIER]

Then began the most exciting climb among the pressure that you can
imagine. At first very much as it was the day before--pulling
ourselves and one another up ridges, slithering down slopes, tumbling
into and out of crevasses and holes of all sorts, we made our way along
under the cliffs which rose higher and higher above us as we neared the
black lava precipices which form Cape Crozier itself. We straddled along
the top of a snow ridge with a razor-backed edge, balancing the sledge
between us as we wriggled: on our right was a drop of great depth with
crevasses at the bottom, on our left was a smaller drop also crevassed.
We crawled along, and I can tell you it was exciting work in the more
than half darkness. At the end was a series of slopes full of crevasses,
and finally we got right in under the rock on to moraine, and here we had
to leave the sledge.

We roped up, and started to worry along under the cliffs, which had now
changed from ice to rock, and rose 800 feet above us. The tumult of
pressure which climbed against them showed no order here. Four hundred
miles of moving ice behind it had just tossed and twisted those giant
ridges until Job himself would have lacked words to reproach their Maker.
We scrambled over and under, hanging on with our axes, and cutting steps
where we could not find a foothold with our crampons. And always we got
towards the Emperor penguins, and it really began to look as if we were
going to do it this time, when we came up against a wall of ice which a
single glance told us we could never cross. One of the largest pressure
ridges had been thrown, end on, against the cliff. We seemed to be
stopped, when Bill found a black hole, something like a fox's earth,
disappearing into the bowels of the ice. We looked at it: "Well, here
goes!" he said, and put his head in, and disappeared. Bowers likewise. It
was a longish way, but quite possible to wriggle along, and presently I
found myself looking out of the other side with a deep gully below me,
the rock face on one hand and the ice on the other. "Put your back
against the ice and your feet against the rock and lever yourself along,"
said Bill, who was already standing on firm ice at the far end in a snow
pit. We cut some fifteen steps to get out of that hole. Excited by now,
and thoroughly enjoying ourselves, we found the way ahead easier, until
the penguins' call reached us again and we stood, three crystallized
ragamuffins, above the Emperors' home. They were there all right, and we
were going to reach them, but where were all the thousands of which we
had heard?

We stood on an ice-foot which was really a dwarf cliff some twelve feet
high, and the sea-ice, with a good many ice-blocks strewn upon it, lay
below. The cliff dropped straight, with a bit of an overhang and no
snow-drift. This may have been because the sea had only frozen recently;
whatever the reason may have been it meant that we should have a lot of
difficulty in getting up again without help. It was decided that some one
must stop on the top with the Alpine rope, and clearly that one should be
I, for with short sight and fogged spectacles which I could not wear I
was much the least useful of the party for the job immediately ahead. Had
we had the sledge we could have used it as a ladder, but of course we had
left this at the beginning of the moraine miles back.

We saw the Emperors standing all together huddled under the Barrier cliff
some hundreds of yards away. The little light was going fast: we were
much more excited about the approach of complete darkness and the look of
wind in the south than we were about our triumph. After indescribable
effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and
we were the first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our
grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we
were turning theories into facts with every observation we made,--and we
had but a moment to give.

[Illustration: EMPERORS BARRIER AND SEA ICE--E. A. Wilson, del.]

The disturbed Emperors made a tremendous row, trumpeting with their
curious metallic voices. There was no doubt they had eggs, for they tried
to shuffle along the ground without losing them off their feet. But when
they were hustled a good many eggs were dropped and left lying on the
ice, and some of these were quickly picked up by eggless Emperors who had
probably been waiting a long time for the opportunity. In these poor
birds the maternal side seems to have necessarily swamped the other
functions of life. Such is the struggle for existence that they can only
live by a glut of maternity, and it would be interesting to know whether
such a life leads to happiness or satisfaction.

I have told[156] how the men of the Discovery found this rookery where we
now stood. How they made journeys in the early spring but never arrived
early enough to get eggs and only found parents and chicks. They
concluded that the Emperor was an impossible kind of bird who, for some
reason or other, nests in the middle of the Antarctic winter with the
temperature anywhere below seventy degrees of frost, and the blizzards
blowing, always blowing, against his devoted back. And they found him
holding his precious chick balanced upon his big feet, and pressing it
maternally, or paternally (for both sexes squabble for the privilege)
against a bald patch in his breast. And when at last he simply must go
and eat something in the open leads near by, he just puts the child down
on the ice, and twenty chickless Emperors rush to pick it up. And they
fight over it, and so tear it that sometimes it will die. And, if it can,
it will crawl into any ice-crack to escape from so much kindness, and
there it will freeze. Likewise many broken and addled eggs were found,
and it is clear that the mortality is very great. But some survive, and
summer comes; and when a big blizzard is going to blow (they know all
about the weather), the parents take the children out for miles across
the sea-ice, until they reach the threshold of the open sea. And there
they sit until the wind comes, and the swell rises, and breaks that
ice-floe off; and away they go in the blinding drift to join the main
pack-ice, with a private yacht all to themselves.

You must agree that a bird like this is an interesting beast, and when,
seven months ago, we rowed a boat under those great black cliffs,[157]
and found a disconsolate Emperor chick still in the down, we knew
definitely why the Emperor has to nest in mid-winter. For if a June egg
was still without feathers in the beginning of January, the same egg
laid in the summer would leave its produce without practical covering for
the following winter. Thus the Emperor penguin is compelled to undertake
all kinds of hardships because his children insist on developing so
slowly, very much as we are tied in our human relationships for the same
reason. It is of interest that such a primitive bird should have so long
a childhood.

But interesting as the life history of these birds must be, we had not
travelled for three weeks to see them sitting on their eggs. We wanted
the embryos, and we wanted them as young as possible, and fresh and
unfrozen that specialists at home might cut them into microscopic
sections and learn from them the previous history of birds throughout the
evolutionary ages. And so Bill and Birdie rapidly collected five eggs,