We have heard of Cape Crozier as being the eastern extremity of Ross Island, discovered by Ross and named after the captain of the Terror.  It is here that with immense pressures and rendings the moving sheet of the Barrier piles itself up against the mountain.  It is here also that the great ice-cliff which runs for hundreds of miles to the east, with the Barrier behind it and the Ross Sea beating into its crevasses and caves, joins the basalt precipice which bounds the Knoll, as the two-knobbed saddle which forms Cape Crozier is called.  Altogether it is the kind of place where giants have had a good time in their childhood, playing with ice instead of mud—­so much cleaner too!

But the slopes of Mount Terror do not all end in precipices.  Farther to the west they slope quietly into the sea, and the Adelie penguins have taken advantage of this to found here one of their largest and most smelly rookeries.  When the Discovery arrived off this rookery she sent a boat ashore and set up a post with a record upon it to guide the relief ship in the following year.  The post still stands.  Later it became desirable to bring the record left here more up to date, and so one of the first sledging parties went to try and find a way by the Barrier to this spot.

They were prevented from reaching the record by a series of most violent blizzards, and indeed Cape Crozier is one of the windiest places on earth, but they proved beyond doubt that a back-door to the Adelie penguins’ rookery existed by way of the slopes of Mount Terror behind the Knoll.  Early the next year another party reached the record all right, and while exploring the neighbourhood looked down over the 800-feet precipice which forms the snout of Cape Crozier.  The sea was frozen over, and in a small bay of ice formed by the cliffs of the Barrier below were numerous little dots which resolved themselves into Emperor penguins.  Could this be the breeding-place of these wonderful birds?  If so, they must nurse their eggs in mid-winter, in unimagined cold and darkness.

Five days more elapsed before further investigation could be made, for a violent blizzard kept the party in their tents.  On October 18 they set out to climb the high pressure ridges which lie between the level barrier and the sea.  They found that their conjectures were right:  there was the colony of Emperors.  Several were nursing chicks, but all the ice in the Ross Sea was gone; only the small bay of ice remained.  The number of adult birds was estimated at four hundred, the number of living chicks was thirty, and there were some eighty dead ones.  No eggs were found.[18]