THE WINTER JOURNEY 265 
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 help- 
less 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 
