The door was the difficulty,
and for the present we left the cloth arching over the stones, forming a
kind of portico. The whole was well packed in and over with slabs of hard
snow, but there was no soft snow with which to fill up the gaps between
the blocks. However, we felt already that nothing could drag that roof
out of its packing, and subsequent events proved that we were right.
It was a bleak job for three o'clock in the morning before breakfast, and
we were glad to get back to the tent and a meal, for we meant to have
another go at the Emperors that day. With the first glimpse of light we
were off for the rookery again.
But we now knew one or two things about that pressure which we had not
known twenty-four hours ago; for instance, that there was a lot of
alteration since the Discovery days and that probably the pressure was
bigger. As a matter of fact it has been since proved by photographs that
the ridges now ran out three-quarters of a mile farther into the sea than
they did ten years before. We knew also that if we entered the pressure
at the only place where the ice-cliffs came down to the level of the
Barrier, as we did yesterday, we could neither penetrate to the rookery
nor get in under the cliffs where formerly a possible way had been found.
There was only one other thing to do--to go over the cliff.
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