THE WINTER JOURNEY 269 
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? 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 eges and only found parents and chicks. They con- 
cluded 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 some- 
thing 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 some- 
times 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 bliz- 
zard 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 blind- 
ing 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,” 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 
1 See Introduction, pp. xxxix-xlv. 2 See p. 82. 
