Only one rookery of Emperor penguins had been found at this date, and this was on the sea-ice inside a little bay of the Barrier edge at Cape Crozier, which was guarded by miles of some of the biggest pressure in the Antarctic.  Chicks had been found in September, and Wilson reckoned that the eggs must be laid in the beginning of July.  And so we started just after midwinter on the weirdest bird’s-nesting expedition that has ever been or ever will be.

[Illustration:  EMPERORS]

But the sweat was freezing in our clothing and we moved on.  All we could see was a black patch away to our left which was Turk’s Head:  when this disappeared we knew that we had passed Glacier Tongue which, unseen by us, eclipsed the rocks behind.  And then we camped for lunch.

That first camp only lives in my memory because it began our education of camp work in the dark.  Had we now struck the blighting temperature which we were to meet....

There was just enough wind to make us want to hurry:  down harness, each man to a strap on the sledge—­quick with the floor-cloth—­the bags to hold it down—­now a good spread with the bamboos and the tent inner lining—­hold them, Cherry, and over with the outer covering—­snow on to the skirting and inside with the cook with his candle and a box of matches....

That is how we tied it:  that is the way we were accustomed to do it, day after day and night after night when the sun was still high or at any rate only setting, sledging on the Barrier in spring and summer and autumn; pulling our hands from our mitts when necessary—­plenty of time to warm up afterwards; in the days when we took pride in getting our tea boiling within twenty minutes of throwing off our harness:  when the man who wanted to work in his fur mitts was thought a bit too slow.

But now it didn’t work.  “We shall have to go a bit slower,” said Bill, and “we shall get more used to working in the dark.”  At this time, I remember, I was still trying to wear spectacles.

We spent that night on the sea-ice, finding that we were too far in towards Castle Rock; and it was not until the following afternoon that we reached and lunched at Hut Point.  I speak of day and night, though they were much the same, and later on when we found that we could not get the work into a twenty-four-hour day, we decided to carry on as though such a convention did not exist; as in actual fact it did not.  We had already realized that cooking under these conditions would be a bad job, and that the usual arrangement by which one man was cook for the week would be intolerable.  We settled to be cook alternately day by day.  For food we brought only pemmican and biscuit and butter; for drink we had tea, and we drank hot water to turn in on.