Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/57

open smooth snow hollow, hard and windswept as to surface, but in places not cut up by sastrugi. This camp lay about 150 yards below the ridge where we proposed to build our stone hut. [Here we are after a real slog—700 feet up, camped on very hard snow with our hut site chosen off to W. on some moraine—we have been discussing what to call the hut which we hope to build under a big boulder on the slope, walling one side of it—Terra Igloo I expect. It seems too good to be true—19 days out, this is our 15th camp—four days' blizzard. Surely seldom has anyone been so wet—our bags hardly possible to get into—our windclothes just frozen boxes. Birdie's patent balaclava is like iron—it is wonderful how our cares have vanished.] We had originally intended building on the Adélie penguin rookery, but so much of our time has been taken up in getting here, and our oil was already so short, that we decided to build as close as we could to our work with the Emperor penguins, and take the chance of doing so in the blizzard area. In the Adélie penguin rookery we should have been out of the blizzards, but five miles from our principal work. We hoped, however, to find something of a lee for our hut, and to put up with the blizzards.

On the ridge top above the snow hollow where we were camped was a low, rough mass of rock in situ with a quantity of loose rock masses of erratics of various kinds, some granite, some hard basalt, and some crumbly volcanic lava lying around. There was also a lot of rough gravel and plenty of hard snow which could be cut into paving-stone slabs. So here we had all the material we wanted,