hing it
closely, after covering two miles, we could see that it was still more
than a mile to the rocks.

Penguins soon began to splash around; Wilson petrels came glancing
overhead and we could descry great flocks of Antarctic petrels wheeling
over cliff and sea. Reefs buried in frothing surge showed their
glistening mantles, and the boat swerved to avoid floating streamers of
brash-ice.

The rocky cliffs, about eighty feet in height at the highest point,
were formed of vertically lying slate rocks--a very uniform series of
phyllite and sericite-schist. At their base lay great clinging blocks
of ice deeply excavated by the restless swell. One island was separated
from the parent mass by a channel cut sheer to the deep blue water.
Behind the main rocks and indenting the ice-cliff was a curving bay into
which we steered, finding at its head a beautiful cove fringed with a
heavy undermined ice-foot and swarming with Adelie penguins. Overhanging
the water was a cavern hollowed out of a bridge of ice thrown from the
glacier to the western limit of the rock outcrop.

Hurley had before him a picture in perfect proportion. The steel-blue
water, paled by an icy reflection, a margin of brown rocks on which the
penguins leapt through the splashing surf, a curving canopy of ice-foot
and, filling the background, the cavern with pendent icicles along its
cornice.

The swell was so great that an anchor had to be thrown from the stern to
keep the launch off shore, and two men remained on board to see that no
damage was done.

At last we were free to roam and explore. Over the first ridge of rocks
we walked suddenly into the home of the Antarctic petrels! There had
always been much speculation as to where these birds nested. Jones'
party at our western base had the previous summer at Haswell Island
happened upon the first rookery of Antarctic petrels ever discovered.
Here was another spot in the great wilderness peopled by their
thousands. Every available nook and crevice was occupied along a wide
slope which shelved away until it met the vertical cliffs falling to the
ocean. One could sit down among the soft, mild birds who were fearless
at the approach of man. They rested in pairs close to their eggs laid on
the bare rock or among fragments of slate loosely arranged to resemble a
rest. Many eggs were collected, and the birds, losing confidence in us,
rose into the air in flocks, gaining in feathered volume as they circled
in f