But interesting as the life history of these birds must be, we had not travelled for three weeks to see them sitting on their eggs.  We wanted the embryos, and we wanted them as young as possible, and fresh and unfrozen that specialists at home might cut them into microscopic sections and learn from them the previous history of birds throughout the evolutionary ages.  And so Bill and Birdie rapidly collected five eggs, which we hoped to carry safely in our fur mitts to our igloo upon Mount Terror, where we could pickle them in the alcohol we had brought for the purpose.  We also wanted oil for our blubber stove, and they killed and skinned three birds—­an Emperor weighs up to 61/2 stones.

The Ross Sea was frozen over, and there were no seal in sight.  There were only 100 Emperors as compared with 2000 in 1902 and 1903.  Bill reckoned that every fourth or fifth bird had an egg, but this was only a rough estimate, for we did not want to disturb them unnecessarily.  It is a mystery why there should have been so few birds, but it certainly looked as though the ice had not formed very long.  Were these the first arrivals?  Had a previous rookery been blown out to sea and was this the beginning of a second attempt?  Is this bay of sea-ice becoming unsafe?

Those who previously discovered the Emperors with their chicks saw the penguins nursing dead and frozen chicks if they were unable to obtain a live one.  They also found decomposed eggs which they must have incubated after they had been frozen.  Now we found that these birds were so anxious to sit on something that some of those which had no eggs were sitting on ice!  Several times Bill and Birdie picked up eggs to find them lumps of ice, rounded and about the right size, dirty and hard.  Once a bird dropped an ice nest egg as they watched, and again a bird returned and tucked another into itself, immediately forsaking it for a real one, however, when one was offered.

Meanwhile a whole procession of Emperors came round under the cliff on which I stood.  The light was already very bad and it was well that my companions were quick in returning:  we had to do everything in a great hurry.  I hauled up the eggs in their mitts (which we fastened together round our necks with lampwick lanyards) and then the skins, but failed to help Bill at all.  “Pull,” he cried, from the bottom:  “I am pulling,” I said.  “But the line’s quite slack down here,” he shouted.  And when he had reached the top by climbing up on Bowers’ shoulders, and we were both pulling all we knew Birdie’s end of the rope was still slack in his hands.  Directly we put on a strain the rope cut into the ice edge and jammed—­a very common difficulty when working among crevasses.  We tried to run the rope over an ice-axe without success, and things began to look serious when Birdie, who had been running about prospecting and had meanwhile put one leg through a crack into the sea, found a place where the cliff did not overhang.  He cut steps for himself, we hauled, and at last we were all together on the top—­his foot being by now surrounded by a solid mass of ice.