Though uncomfortable this was nothing to worry about overmuch.  Some of the drift which the blizzard was bringing would collect to leeward of our hut and the rocks below which it was built, and they could be used to make our hut more weather-proof.  Then with great difficulty we got the blubber stove to start, and it spouted a blob of boiling oil into Bill’s eye.  For the rest of the night he lay, quite unable to stifle his groans, obviously in very great pain:  he told us afterwards that he thought his eye was gone.  We managed to cook a meal somehow, and Birdie got the stove going afterwards, but it was quite useless to try and warm the place.  I got out and cut the green canvas outside the door, so as to get the roof cloth in under the stones, and then packed it down as well as I could with snow, and so blocked most of the drift coming in.

It is extraordinary how often angels and fools do the same thing in this life, and I have never been able to settle which we were on this journey.  I never heard an angry word:  once only (when this same day I could not pull Bill up the cliff out of the penguin rookery) I heard an impatient one:  and these groans were the nearest approach to complaint.  Most men would have howled.  “I think we reached bed-rock last night,” was strong language for Bill.  “I was incapacitated for a short time,” he says in his report to Scott.[158] Endurance was tested on this journey under unique circumstances, and always these two men with all the burden of responsibility which did not fall upon myself, displayed that quality which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make for success, self-control.

We spent the next day—­it was July 21—­in collecting every scrap of soft snow we could find and packing it into the crevasses between our hard snow blocks.  It was a pitifully small amount but we could see no cracks when we had finished.  To counteract the lifting tendency the wind had on our roof we cut some great flat hard snow blocks and laid them on the canvas top to steady it against the sledge which formed the ridge support.  We also pitched our tent outside the igloo door.  Both tent and igloo were therefore eight or nine hundred feet up Terror:  both were below an outcrop of rocks from which the mountain fell steeply to the Barrier behind us, and from this direction came the blizzards.  In front of us the slope fell for a mile or more down to the ice-cliffs, so wind-swept that we had to wear crampons to walk upon it.  Most of the tent was in the lee of the igloo, but the cap of it came over the igloo roof, while a segment of the tent itself jutted out beyond the igloo wall.

That night we took much of our gear into the tent and lighted the blubber stove.  I always mistrusted that stove, and every moment I expected it to flare up and burn the tent.  But the heat it gave, as it burned furiously, with the double lining of the tent to contain it, was considerable.