1911] NIGHT IN THE IGLOO 29 
with the blubber ready in it. The first thing it did was to spurt 
a blob of boiling blubber into his eye: for the rest of the night 
he lay, quite unable to stifle his groans, in obviously very great 
pain—and he told us afterwards that he thought his eye was 
gone. We managed to cook a meal somehow, and Birdie got the 
stove going afterwards; but it was quite useless to try and warm 
the place. The wind was working in through the cracks in the 
snow blocks which we had used for baulking outside, and there 
was no possibility of stopping these cracks. I got out and cut 
up a triangular piece outside the door so as to get the roof cloth 
in under the stones, and then packed it down as best I could with 
snow and so blocked most of the drift coming in. Bill said the 
next evening, ‘At any rate things look better to-night—I think 
we reached bedrock last night ’—as a matter of fact we hadn’t 
by some long way. ‘The igloo was naturally very cold, and it 
blizzed all that night, blowing 6. 
The greater part of the next day the wind had fallen, and we 
got all the drift we could find from the last night—it wasn’t much 
—and packed in the sides of the igloo. ] 
The temperature to-day had not been below — 28-3°. There 
had been a southerly wind all day which we had felt at all the 
more exposed parts of the way down to the sea ice and in the 
hollows under the cliffs. It gradually freshened in the afternoon 
and stratus came up from the south. At 8 P.M. it was blowing 
force 6 from the S.S.W., but the sky was clear to the N.E. 
Friday, July 21, 1911.—Our first night in the hut was com- 
fortable enough, though the breeze freshened during the night 
and increased to force 8, but fell to 5 in the morning. The only 
thing we did not quite like was the tendency the wind had to lift 
the canvas roof off its supporting sledge—so we piled large slabs 
of icy snow on the canvas top to steady it down and prevent this. 
The temp. ranged from — 20-4° to — 23-7°, and though the 
wind dropped to light airs the weather looked thick and unsettled, 
with stratus moving up rapidly from the south. 
We spent the whole of our daylight in packing our hut with 
soft snow, until not a crack or a crevice remained visible any- 
where on the outside. 
Then we brought up our tent from the hollow below, and 
pitched it, for the sake of convenience, under the lee end of our 
hut, quite close to the door. My idea in doing this was to get 
