SOUTH 
hut of fibro-concrete sheets for the use of this party. The ship 
was of? the Cape on the afternoon of January 9, and a boat 
put off with Steiihouse, Cope, Joyce, Ninnis, Mauger, and Aitken 
to search for a landing-place. " We steered in towards the 
Barrier/' wrote Stenhouse, " and found an opening leading into 
a large bight which jutted back to eastward into the Barrier. 
We endeavoured without success to scale the steep ice-foot 
under the clifis, and then proceeded up the bay. Pulling along 
the edge of perpendicular ice, we turned into a bay in the ice- 
clifi and came to a cul-de-sac, at the head of which was a grotto. 
At the head of the grotto and on a ledge of snow were perched 
some adelie penguins. The beautiful green and blue tints in 
the ice-colouring made a picture as unreal as a stage settmg. 
Coming back along the edge of the bight towards the land, 
we caught and killed one penguin, much to the sinprise of 
another, which ducked into a niche in the ice and, after much 
squawking, was extracted with a boat-hook and captured. We 
returned to our original landing, and were fortunate in our 
time, for no sooner had we cleared the ledge where Ninnis had 
been hanging in his endeavour to catch the penguin than the 
barrier calved and a piece weighing hundreds of tons toppled 
over into the sea. 
Since we left the ship a mist had blown up from the 
south, and when we arrived back at the entrance to the bay 
the ship could be but dimly seen. We found a slope on the 
ice-foot, and Joyce and I managed, by cutting steps, to 
climb up to a ledge of debris between the cliffs and the ice, 
which we thought might lead to the vicinity of the emperor 
penguin rookery. I sent the boat back to the ship to tell the 
captain of our failure to find a spot where we could depot the 
hut and stores, and then, with Joyce, set out to walk along 
the narrow land between the cUfis and the ice to the southward 
in hopes of finding the rookery. We walked for about a mile 
along the foot of the chffs, over undulating paths, sometimes 
crawHng carefully down a gully and then over rocks and 
debris which had fallen from the steep clifis which towered 
above us, but we saw no signs of a rookery or any place where 
a rookerv could be. Close to the cUffs and separated from them 
244 
