rd of our
hut and the rocks below which it was built, and they could be used to
make our hut more weather-proof. Then with great difficulty we got the
blubber stove to start, and it spouted a blob of boiling oil into Bill's
eye. For the rest of the night he lay, quite unable to stifle his groans,
obviously in very great pain: he told us afterwards that he thought his
eye was gone. We managed to cook a meal somehow, and Birdie got the stove
going afterwards, but it was quite useless to try and warm the place. I
got out and cut the green canvas outside the door, so as to get the roof
cloth in under the stones, and then packed it down as well as I could
with snow, and so blocked most of the drift coming in.

It is extraordinary how often angels and fools do the same thing in this
life, and I have never been able to settle which we were on this journey.
I never heard an angry word: once only (when this same day I could not
pull Bill up the cliff out of the penguin rookery) I heard an impatient
one: and these groans were the nearest approach to complaint. Most men
would have howled. "I think we reached bed-rock last night," was strong
language for Bill. "I was incapacitated for a short time," he says in his
report to Scott.[158] Endurance was tested on this journey under unique
circumstances, and always these two men with all the burden of
responsibility which did not fall upon myself, displayed that quality
which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make
for success, self-control.

We spent the next day--it was July 21--in collecting every scrap of soft
snow we could find and packing it into the crevasses between our hard
snow blocks. It was a pitifully small amount but we could see no cracks
when we had finished. To counteract the lifting tendency the wind had on
our roof we cut some great flat hard snow blocks and laid them on the
canvas top to steady it against the sledge which formed the ridge
support. We also pitched our tent outside the igloo door. Both tent and
igloo were therefore eight or nine hundred feet up Terror: both were
below an outcrop of rocks from which the mountain fell steeply to the
Barrier behind us, and from this direction came the blizzards. In front
of us the slope fell for a mile or more down to the ice-cliffs, so
wind-swept that we had to wear crampons to walk upon it. Most of the tent
was in the lee of the igloo, but the cap of it came over the igloo roof,
while a segment