The view from eight hundred feet up the mountain was magnificent and I got my spectacles out and cleared the ice away time after time to look.  To the east a great field of pressure ridges below, looking in the moonlight as if giants had been ploughing with ploughs which made furrows fifty or sixty feet deep:  these ran right up to the Barrier edge, and beyond was the frozen Ross Sea, lying flat, white and peaceful as though such things as blizzards were unknown.  To the north and north-east the Knoll.  Behind us Mount Terror on which we stood, and over all the grey limitless Barrier seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague, ponderous, a breeding-place of wind and drift and darkness.  God!  What a place!

“There was now little moonlight or daylight, but for the next forty-eight hours we used both to their utmost, being up at all times by day and night, and often working on when there was great difficulty in seeing anything; digging by the light of the hurricane lamp.  By the end of two days we had the walls built, and banked up to one or two feet from the top; we were to fit the roof cloth close before banking up the rest.  The great difficulty in banking was the hardness of the snow, it being impossible to fill in the cracks between the blocks which were more like paving-stones than anything else.  The door was in, being a triangular tent doorway, with flaps which we built close in to the walls, cementing it with snow and rocks.  The top folded over a plank and the bottom was dug into the ground."[155]

Birdie was very disappointed that we could not finish the whole thing that day:  he was nearly angry about it, but there was a lot to do yet and we were tired out.  We turned out early the next morning (Tuesday 18th) to try and finish the igloo, but it was blowing too hard.  When we got to the top we did some digging but it was quite impossible to get the roof on, and we had to leave it.  We realized that day that it blew much harder at the top of the slope than where our tent was.  It was bitterly cold up there that morning with a wind force 4-5 and a minus thirty temperature.

The oil question was worrying us quite a lot.  We were now well in to the fifth of our six tins, and economizing as much as possible, often having only two hot meals a day.  We had to get down to the Emperor penguins somehow and get some blubber to run the stove which had been made for us in the hut.  The 19th being a calm fine day we started at 9.30, with an empty sledge, two ice-axes, Alpine rope, harnesses and skinning tools.

Wilson had made this journey through the Cape Crozier pressure ridges several times in the Discovery days.  But then they had daylight, and they had found a practicable way close under the cliffs which at the present moment were between us and the ridges.