Page:The Worst Journey in the World volume 1.djvu/50

Rh below were numerous little dots which resolved themselves into Emperor penguins. Could this be the breeding-place of these wonderful birds? If so, they must nurse their eggs in mid-winter, in unimagined cold and darkness.

Five days more elapsed before further investigation could be made, for a violent blizzard kept the party in their tents. On October 18 they set out to climb the high pressure ridges which lie between the level barrier and the sea. They found that their conjectures were right: there was the colony of Emperors. Several were nursing chicks, but all the ice in the Ross Sea was gone; only the small bay of ice remained. The number of adult birds was estimated at four hundred, the number of living chicks was thirty, and there were some eighty dead ones. No eggs were found.

Several more journeys were made to this spot while the Discovery was in the south, generally in the spring; and the sum total of the information gained came to something like this. The Emperor is a bird which cannot fly, lives on fish which it catches in the sea, and never steps on land even to breed. For a reason which was not then understood it lays its eggs upon the bare ice some time during the winter and carries out the whole process of incubation on the sea ice, resting the egg upon its feet pressed closely to a patch of bare skin in the lower abdomen, and protected from the intense cold by a loose falling lappet of skin and feathers. By September 12, the earliest date upon which a party arrived, all the eggs which were not broken or addled were hatched, and there were then about a thousand adult Emperors in the rookery. Arriving again on October 19, a party experienced a ten days' blizzard which confined them during seven days to their tents, but during their windy visit they saw one of the most interesting scenes in natural history. The story must be told by Wilson, who was there:

"The day before the storm broke we were on an old outlying cone of Mount Terror, about 1300 feet above the sea. Below us lay the Emperor penguin rookery on the