Apart from the surface we enjoyed the weather, a wonderful calm and beautiful blue sky.  On November 15, after building a guiding snow cairn, we continued southward to Lat. 80 degrees 31 minutes 40 seconds S. Long. 169 degrees 23 minutes E., where we camped to await Scott, his party, and the ponies.  I proposed to build an enormous cairn here to mark the 80 1/2 degree depot, so after lunch we inspected ourselves and found nothing worse than sunburnt faces and a slight thinning down all round.

We commenced the cairn after a short rest.

November 16 passed quietly with no signs of the ponies, and on November 17 we remained in camp all day wondering rather why the ponies had not come up with us.  We thought they must be doing very poor marching.  To employ our time we worked hours at the cairn, which soon assumed gigantic proportions.  We called it Mount Hooper after our youngest member.  Day amused us very distinctly at Mount Hooper Camp.

Day, gaunt and gay, but what a lovable nature if one can apply such an adjective to him.  He entertained the rest of us for a week out of “Pickwick Papers.”  The proper number of hours in the forenoon were spent in building the giant depot cairn, then lunch, and then the cosy sleeping-bags and Day’s reading.  It was unforgettable, and I think we all watched his face, which took somehow the expression of the character he was reading about.

We put in a good deal of sleep in those days and went walks, such as they were, in a direct line away from the tent and directly back to the tent.  We must surely have been the first in the world to spend a week holiday-making on that frozen Sahara, the Great Ice Barrier.

There is little enough to record during this wait at Mount Hooper.  We could have eaten more than our ration, and to save fuel we occasionally had dry hoosh for supper, which means that we broke all our biscuits up and melted the pemmican over the primus, half fried the biscuit in the fat pemmican, and made a filling dish.  The temperature varied between twenty below zero and a couple of degrees above.

November 20 found us growing impatient, for I find in my diary that day: 

“Once again we find no signs of the ponies:  we all say D——­ and look forward to the next meal:  Day reads more Pickwick to us and keeps us out of mischief.  I got sights for error and rate of chronometer watches, but these are not satisfactory with so short an epoch as our stay at Mount Hooper, when change in altitude is so slow.  Beyond working out the sights I did really nothing.  Temperature at 8 p.m. +7 degrees, Wind South-West 3-4.  Cirrus clouds radiating from S.W.  Minimum temperature -14 degrees.”

But at last relief from our inactivity came to us.  On 21st November, just before 5 a.m., Lashly woke me and said the ponies had arrived.  Out we all popped to find Atkinson with poor, old “Jehu,” Wright with “Chinaman,” and Keohane with my old friend “James Pigg.”