d beyond doubt that a back-door to the Adelie
penguins' rookery existed by way of the slopes of Mount Terror behind the
Knoll. Early the next year another party reached the record all right,
and while exploring the neighbourhood looked down over the 800-feet
precipice which forms the snout of Cape Crozier. The sea was frozen over,
and in a small bay of ice formed by the cliffs of the Barrier below were
numerous little dots which resolved themselves into Emperor penguins.
Could this be the breeding-place of these wonderful birds? If so, they
must nurse their eggs in mid-winter, in unimagined cold and darkness.

Five days more elapsed before further investigation could be made, for a
violent blizzard kept the party in their tents. On October 18 they set
out to climb the high pressure ridges which lie between the level barrier
and the sea. They found that their conjectures were right: there was the
colony of Emperors. Several were nursing chicks, but all the ice in the
Ross Sea was gone; only the small bay of ice remained. The number of
adult birds was estimated at four hundred, the number of living chicks
was thirty, and there were some eighty dead ones. No eggs were found.[18]

Several more journeys were made to this spot while the Discovery was in
the south, generally in the spring; and the sum total of the information
gained came to something like this. The Emperor is a bird which cannot
fly, lives on fish which it catches in the sea, and never steps on land
even to breed. For a reason which was not then understood it lays its
eggs upon the bare ice some time during the winter and carries out the
whole process of incubation on the sea ice, resting the egg upon its feet
pressed closely to a patch of bare skin in the lower abdomen, and
protected from the intense cold by a loose falling lappet of skin and
feathers. By September 12, the earliest date upon which a party arrived,
all the eggs which were not broken or addled were hatched, and there were
then about a thousand adult Emperors in the rookery. Arriving again on
October 19, a party experienced a ten days' blizzard which confined them
during seven days to their tents, but during their windy visit they saw
one of the most interesting scenes in natural history. The story must be
told by Wilson, who was there:

"The day before the storm broke we were on an old outlying cone of Mount
Terror, about 1300 feet above the sea. Below us lay the Emperor penguin
rookery on the