THE WINTER JOURNEY 261 
just frozen boxes. Birdie’s patent balaclava 1s like iron— 
it is wonderful how our cares have vanished.’’} 
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 iv 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 press- 
ure 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 comfort- 
able warm home whence we would make excursions to the 
rookery perhaps four miles away. Perhaps we would man- 
age 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 
1 My own diary. 
