with our crampons.  And always we got towards the Emperor penguins, and it really began to look as if we were going to do it this time, when we came up against a wall of ice which a single glance told us we could never cross.  One of the largest pressure ridges had been thrown, end on, against the cliff.  We seemed to be stopped, when Bill found a black hole, something like a fox’s earth, disappearing into the bowels of the ice.  We looked at it:  “Well, here goes!” he said, and put his head in, and disappeared.  Bowers likewise.  It was a longish way, but quite possible to wriggle along, and presently I found myself looking out of the other side with a deep gully below me, the rock face on one hand and the ice on the other.  “Put your back against the ice and your feet against the rock and lever yourself along,” said Bill, who was already standing on firm ice at the far end in a snow pit.  We cut some fifteen steps to get out of that hole.  Excited by now, and thoroughly enjoying ourselves, we found the way ahead easier, until the penguins’ call reached us again and we stood, three crystallized ragamuffins, above the Emperors’ home.  They were there all right, and we were going to reach them, but where were all the thousands of which we had heard?

We stood on an ice-foot which was really a dwarf cliff some twelve feet high, and the sea-ice, with a good many ice-blocks strewn upon it, lay below.  The cliff dropped straight, with a bit of an overhang and no snow-drift.  This may have been because the sea had only frozen recently; whatever the reason may have been it meant that we should have a lot of difficulty in getting up again without help.  It was decided that some one must stop on the top with the Alpine rope, and clearly that one should be I, for with short sight and fogged spectacles which I could not wear I was much the least useful of the party for the job immediately ahead.  Had we had the sledge we could have used it as a ladder, but of course we had left this at the beginning of the moraine miles back.

We saw the Emperors standing all together huddled under the Barrier cliff some hundreds of yards away.  The little light was going fast:  we were much more excited about the approach of complete darkness and the look of wind in the south than we were about our triumph.  After indescribable effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and we were the first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we were turning theories into facts with every observation we made,—­and we had but a moment to give.

[Illustration:  EMPERORS BARRIER AND SEA ICE—­E.  A. Wilson, del.]