The foregoing pages illustrate sufficiently the grouping of the afterguard, and if one adds an anthracite stove, a 12 ft. by 4 ft. table, a pianola, gramophone, and a score of chairs, with a small shelf-like table squeezed in between the dark-room and Simpson’s corner, one completes the picture of the officers’ quarters in the Cape Evans Hut.  A bulkhead of biscuit cases and so on divided us from the men’s accommodation.  They were very well off, each seaman having a trestle bed similar to Captain Scott’s, unless he preferred to build a bunk for himself, as one or two did.  They had a table 6 ft. by 4 ft., and the cook had a kitchen table 4 ft. square, and certainly no crew space was ever provided on a Polar Expedition that gave such comfortable and cosy housing room.

CHAPTER VIII

THE WINTER CLOSES IN

The closing down of the Polar night was very swift now and the few hours of gray daylight were employed collecting what data was required by certain members for working on during the forthcoming days of darkness.  Young Gran was handed over to me to help with the survey work and astronomical observations which had to be taken from time to time.  He was a most entertaining assistant.  Without complaint, he stood patiently shivering in that cutting winter wind whilst I swung around the theodolite telescope and took angles for him to write down in my notebook.  I don’t think anybody has made a triangulated survey under conditions worse than we endured that epoch:  the weather was beastly and we spent much time dancing when nearly sick with cold, our fingers tucked under our arms to recover their feelings.  When one’s extremities did get frost-bitten it was no joke—­frost-bitten finger tips gave us little peace at night with their sharp burning pain.

The most interesting part of the survey work was what is known to the surveyor as coast-lining.  This meant walking along the edge of the sea ice, fixing one’s position by sextant angle every five hundred yards or so, and sketching in a notebook the character and features of the ever changing coast between the various “fixes.”  One could keep warm doing this and one saw more of the land and ice formation than the others, for it meant following carefully round-cape and glacier edge, penetrating inlets and delineating every islet, promontory, cliff, and talus.

In spite of the cold, the gloom, and the sad whistling wind that heralded the now fast approaching darkness, I felt glad to work with my sextant and sketch-book under the shadow of those fantastic ice-foots hung round with fringes of icicle.  I loved to go with Gran into the deep bays and walk for miles under the overhanging of the vast ice cliffs all purple in the reflection of the early winter noon, and to come out sometimes as we did on to the sea ice clear of a jutting glacier, to face suddenly northward over the frozen sea where nothing but a great waste of ice stretched away to meet the horizon and the rosy, copper glow of the departed sun’s rays.  Some of the cloud effects at the end of April were too wonderful for mere pen or brush to describe.  To appreciate them one must go there and see them, those wonderful half-light tints.