Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/60

at all times by day and night, and often working on when there was great difficulty to see anything: one day Birdie was digging with the hurricane lamp by his side.]

The hut was placed so as to escape the force of the southerly wind under the moraine ridge. We were about 800 feet above sea level. Our method of construction was to build four walls of solid rock, leaving a small gap for a door in the lee end. The weather wall was highest, and the breadth of the hut was 7½ to 8 ft., so that the 9-foot sledge rested across from wall to wall as a cross rafter to support the canvas roof. The two side walls were built up to the height of the weather wall at the weather end, but were not so high by a couple of feet at the door end. The length of the hut was about 10 ft.

Against the outer side of the rock-walls were laid large slabs of hard snow like paving stones, each having its icy windswept surface outside. Between the slabs of snow and the rock walls we shovelled moraine gravel. Over all this fell the canvas roof, anchored by lanyards to heavy rocks all round, and battened down to its outer side again by a double banking of ice slabs and gravel; finally, every crevice was packed in by hand with soft snow until the whole wall was uniformly tight all round. The work took us all the light we had of three days to finish. The canvas roof was made so ample in size that it came right down to the ground on the weather side and more than half-way down all the other sides. This, we thought, could not fail to make the walls tight when packed in and over as explained above, but it completely failed to keep out either snow drift or gravel dust when