The floor of this valley was almost level and covered with a couple of feet of volcanic earth, and there was room not only for the hut itself, but also for the stores and for a stable for the ponies. A hill behind this valley served as an excellent protection from the prevailing strong south-easterly wind, and a number of seals lying on the bay ice gave promise of a plentiful supply of fresh meat.
Adelie Penguins at Cape Royds. (See page 44)
With this ideal situation and everything else satisfactory, including a supply of water from a lake right in front of our valley, I decided that we had better start to get our gear ashore at once.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LANDING OF STORES AND EQUIPMENT
We now started upon a fortnight full of more checks and worries than I or any other member of the expedition had ever experienced. Nevertheless, in face of most trying conditions, the whole party turned to late and early with whole-hearted devotion and cheerful readiness.
The ponies gave us cause for the most anxiety, because in their half-broken and nervous condition it would have been practically impossible to land them in boats. Finally we decided to build a rough horse-box, get them into this, and then sling it over the side by means of the main gaff. By 3.30 A.M. on the morning of the 6th we had got all the ponies ashore, and they immediately began to paw the snow as they were wont to do in their own far-away Manchurian home.
The poor ponies were naturally stiff after their constant buffetings, but they negotiated the tide-crack all right, and were soon picketed on some bare earth at the entrance to a valley, which lay about fifty yards from the site of our hut. We thought this a good place, but in the future the selection was to cost us dear.
The tide-crack played an important part in connection with the landing of the stores. In the polar regions, both north and south, when the sea is frozen, there always appears between the fast ice, which is the ice attached to the land, and the sea ice, a crack which is due to the sea ice moving up and down with the rise and fall of the tide. When the bottom of the sea slopes gradually from the land, sometimes two or three tide-cracks appear running parallel to each other. When no more tide-cracks can be seen landwards, the ice-foot has always been thought to be permanently joined to the land, and in our case this opinion was strengthened by the fact that our soundings in the tide-crack shoved that the ice-foot on the landward side of it must be aground.
I have explained this fully, for it was only after considering these points that I, for convenience's sake, landed the bulk of the stores below the bare rocks on what I thought was the permanent snow-slope.