Five days later and three men, one of whom at any rate is feeling a little frightened, stand panting and sweating out in McMurdo Sound.  They have two sledges, one tied behind the other, and these sledges are piled high with sleeping-bags and camping equipment, six weeks’ provisions, and a venesta case full of scientific gear for pickling and preserving.  In addition there is a pickaxe, ice-axes, an Alpine rope, a large piece of green Willesden canvas and a bit of board.  Scott’s amazed remark when he saw our sledges two hours ago, “Bill, why are you taking all this oil?” pointing to the six cans lashed to the tray on the second sledge, had a bite in it.  Our weights for such travelling are enormous—­253 lbs. a man.

It is mid-day but it is pitchy dark, and it is not warm.

As we rested my mind went back to a dusty, dingy office in Victoria Street some fifteen months ago.  “I want you to come,” said Wilson to me, and then, “I want to go to Cape Crozier in the winter and work out the embryology of the Emperor penguins, but I’m not saying much about it—­it might never come off.”  Well! this was better than Victoria Street, where the doctors had nearly refused to let me go because I could only see the people across the road as vague blobs walking.  Then Bill went and had a talk with Scott about it, and they said I might come if I was prepared to take the additional risk.  At that time I would have taken anything.

After the Depot Journey, at Hut Point, walking over that beastly, slippery, sloping ice-foot which I always imagined would leave me some day in the sea, Bill asked me whether I would go with him—­and who else for a third?  There can have been little doubt whom we both wanted, and that evening Bowers had been asked.  Of course he was mad to come.  And here we were.  “This winter travel is a new and bold venture,” wrote Scott in the hut that night, “but the right men have gone to attempt it.”

I don’t know.  There never could have been any doubt about Bill and Birdie.  Probably Lashly would have made the best third, but Bill had a prejudice against seamen for a journey like this—­“They don’t take enough care of themselves, and they will not look after their clothes.”  But Lashly was wonderful—­if Scott had only taken a four-man party and Lashly to the Pole!

What is this venture?  Why is the embryo of the Emperor penguin so important to Science?  And why should three sane and common-sense explorers be sledging away on a winter’s night to a Cape which has only been visited before in daylight, and then with very great difficulty?

I have explained more fully in the Introduction to this book[150] the knowledge the world possessed at this time of the Emperor penguin, mainly due to Wilson.  But it is because the Emperor is probably the most primitive bird in existence that the working out of his embryology is so important.  The embryo shows remains of the development of an animal in former ages and former states; it recapitulates its former lives.  The embryo of an Emperor may prove the missing link between birds and the reptiles from which birds have sprung.