I9IIJ 
' GRANITE HOUSE ' 
Next day was spent in getting meat from another seal 
and in finishing the hut walls. From our rate of consump- 
tion I reckoned that one seal would give us 2^ meals of 
liver and ten meals of meat, while his blubber would 
cook about 30 meals. 
Debenham and I flensed the seal-skin on a block of 
ice. This consisted in removing the white tallowy two- 
inch layer of blubber from the outer leather with sharp 
knives. It was rather a troublesome task in which we 
were not assisted by the numerous skua gulls \^ hich 
surrounded us. This skin was one of three we required 
for the roof of the stone hut. 
Gran and Forde worked very energetically on the 
latter. Gran was so keen at lifting huge blocks of granite 
that I had to caution him against straining his back. 
We used a sledge for the roof tree, and sewed the skins 
together and then pulled them taut by heavy stones hung 
round the edges. Finally the hut looked quite snug with 
the smoke pouring out of the chimney (and also it must be 
confessed out of the front), and the tout ensemble was 
very like an Irish shebeen in Forde's opinion. Gran was 
reading Jules Verne's ' Mysterious Island ' this trip, so we 
named our sample of Polar architecture ' Granite House ' 
from that exciting melodrama. 
On the 3rd Gran and I set about placing a letter 
on the Rendezvous Bluff as Captain Scott instructed me. 
We climbed up one of the big couloirs about 500 feet and 
then got on to a projecting spur, where we fixed a stout 
bamboo pole in a crack 3 feet deep in the granite — which 
just admitted the staff. I left a letter for Pennell as to 
