2 3 8 
FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
was tremendously hard work walking on the snow — a 
hundred yards quite pumped us. 
The pack seemed to consist of collected blocks of 
broken snow-ice levelled up with soft snow, so walking on 
it was most fatiguing. For a few paces we succeeded in 
walking on the surface, then the crust broke and we 
plunged through waist-deep, often jamming our feet 
between blocks below the snow. With a sledge and dogs 
we could have travelled over this pack fairly well. The 
greatest obstruction to sledging would have been the little 
pinnacles of ice, of the shape of the stumps in a burned 
forest. These stood up all over the level snow in numbers. 
In the inside of each point there was a core of hard ice. 
Here we found some of the large king or emperor 
penguins. They landed on the snow just as we brought up 
against the floe edge, and waddled towards the interior 
of the pack, and the stillness of the white evening was 
broken by the shouts of men and boys in pursuit. The 
penguins took it all very quietly, and easily outdistanced 
us on the snow. When in a hurry they dropped on their 
breasts and shoved along with their feet, paddling with 
their flippers, looking rather like turtles in this attitude. 
The track their feet left resembled a dog's, and when you 
saw these tracks on the snow, following and between the 
flipper marks, it looked exactly like the track of a dog 
in pursuit of some other animal. 
We never could have caught any had they so chosen. 
But at times they stopped to observe our movements, 
climbed on to some snow mound, and looked at us 
first with one eye then the other whilst we stumbled up. 
