, but which must
have been a chaotic quarter of a mile away. They came echoing back from
the cliffs, as we stood helpless and tantalized. We listened and realized
that there was nothing for it but to return, for the little light which
now came in the middle of the day was going fast, and to be caught in
absolute darkness there was a horrible idea. We started back on our
tracks and almost immediately I lost my footing and rolled down a slope
into a crevasse. Birdie and Bill kept their balance and I clambered back
to them. The tracks were very faint and we soon began to lose them.
Birdie was the best man at following tracks that I have ever known, and
he found them time after time. But at last even he lost them altogether
and we settled we must just go ahead. As a matter of fact, we picked them
up again, and by then were out of the worst: but we were glad to see the
tent.

The next morning (Thursday, June 20) we started work on the igloo at 3
A.M. and managed to get the canvas roof on in spite of a wind which
harried us all that day. Little did we think what that roof had in store
for us as we packed it in with snow blocks, stretching it over our second
sledge, which we put athwartships across the middle of the longer walls.
The windward (south) end came right down to the ground and we tied it
securely to rocks before packing it in. On the other three sides we had a
good two feet or more of slack all round, and in every case we tied it to
rocks by lanyards at intervals of two feet. The door was the difficulty,
and for the present we left the cloth arching over the stones, forming a
kind of portico. The whole was well packed in and over with slabs of hard
snow, but there was no soft snow with which to fill up the gaps between
the blocks. However, we felt already that nothing could drag that roof
out of its packing, and subsequent events proved that we were right.

It was a bleak job for three o'clock in the morning before breakfast, and
we were glad to get back to the tent and a meal, for we meant to have
another go at the Emperors that day. With the first glimpse of light we
were off for the rookery again.

But we now knew one or two things about that pressure which we had not
known twenty-four hours ago; for instance, that there was a lot of
alteration since the Discovery days and that probably the pressure was
bigger. As a matter of fact it has been since proved by photographs that
the ridges now ran out three-quarter