Now we had reached the Barrier face some five miles east of the point at which it joins the basalt cliffs of Cape Crozier.  We could see the great pressure waves which had proved such an obstacle to travellers from the Discovery to the Emperor penguin rookery.  The Knoll was clear, but the summit of Mount Terror was in the clouds.  As for the Barrier we seemed to have known it all our lives, it was so exactly like what we had imagined it to be, and seen in the pictures and photographs.

Scott had a whaler launched, and we pulled in under the cliffs.  There was a considerable swell.

“We were to examine the possibilities of landing, but the swell was so heavy in its break among the floating blocks of ice along the actual beach and ice foot that a landing was out of the question.  We should have broken up the boat and have all been in the water together.  But I assure you it was tantalizing to me, for there about six feet above us on a small dirty piece of the old bay ice about ten feet square one living Emperor penguin chick was standing disconsolately stranded, and close by stood one faithful old Emperor parent asleep.  This young Emperor was still in the down, a most interesting fact in the bird’s life history at which we had rightly guessed, but which no one had actually observed before.  It was in a stage never yet seen or collected, for the wings were already quite clean of down and feathered as in the adult, also a line down the breast was shed of down and part of the head.  This bird would have been a treasure to me, but we could not risk life for it, so it had to remain where it was.  It was a curious fact that with as much clean ice to live on as they could have wished for, these destitute derelicts of a flourishing colony, now gone north to sea on floating bay ice, should have preferred to remain standing on the only piece of bay ice left, a piece about ten feet square and now pressed up six feet above water level, evidently wondering why it was so long in starting north with the general exodus which must have taken place just a month ago.  The whole incident was most interesting and full of suggestion as to the slow working of the brain of these queer people.  Another point was most weird to see, that on the under side of this very dirty piece of sea-ice, which was about two feet thick and which hung over the water as a sort of cave, we could see the legs and lower halves of dead Emperor chicks hanging through, and even in one place a dead adult.  I hope to make a picture of the whole quaint incident, for it was a corner crammed full of Imperial history in the light of what we already knew, and it would otherwise have been about as unintelligible as any group of animate or inanimate nature could possibly have been.  As it is, it throws more light on the life history of this strangely primitive bird....