were no crevasses, only the great drift of
snow, so hard that we used our crampons just as though we had been on
ice, and as polished as the china sides of a giant cup which it
resembled. For three miles we slogged up, until we were only 150 yards
from the moraine shelf where we were going to build our hut of rocks and
snow. This moraine was above us on our left, the twin peaks of the Knoll
were across the cup on our right; and here, 800 feet up the mountain
side, we pitched our last camp.

We had arrived.

What should we call our hut? How soon could we get our clothes and bags
dry? How would the blubber stove work? Would the penguins be there? "It
seems too good to be true, 19 days out. Surely seldom has any one been so
wet; our bags hardly possible to get into, our wind-clothes just frozen
boxes. Birdie's patent balaclava is like iron--it is wonderful how our
cares have vanished."[153]

It was evening, but we were so keen to begin that we went straight up to
the ridge above our camp, where the rock cropped out from the snow. We
found that most of it was _in situ_ but that there were plenty of
boulders, some gravel, and of course any amount of the icy snow which
fell away below us down to our tent, and the great pressure about a mile
beyond. Between us and that pressure, as we were to find out afterwards,
was a great ice-cliff. The pressure ridges, and the Great Ice Barrier
beyond, were at our feet; the Ross Sea edge but some four miles away. The
Emperors must be somewhere round that shoulder of the Knoll which hides
Cape Crozier itself from our view.

Our scheme was to build an igloo with rock walls, banked up with snow,
using a nine-foot sledge as a ridge beam, and a large sheet of green
Willesden canvas as a roof. We had also brought a board to form a lintel
over the door. Here with the stove, which was to be fed with blubber from
the penguins, we were to have a comfortable warm home whence we would
make excursions to the rookery perhaps four miles away. Perhaps we would
manage to get our tent down to the rookery itself and do our scientific
work there on the spot, leaving our nice hut for a night or more. That is
how we planned it.

That same night "we started to dig in under a great boulder on the top of
the hill, hoping to make this a large part of one of the walls of the
hut, but the rock came close underneath and stopped us. We then chose a
moderately level piece of moraine about twelve feet away, and jus