i 9 ii] 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 



