The Wingless Diver - nirgle.net

The south polar evening was dark and frozen. A blizzard hurled snow on its winds over a landscape of ice two thousand feet thick from surface to bottom. There were perhaps sixteen hours of darkness left before the next brief appearance of the sun over the horizon, though that appearance would last only a few short-lived hours. The blizzard would last much, much longer.

In an effort to get as far away as possible from the onslaught, a thousand emperor penguins trekked single file toward the edge of the ice, three miles away. Arriving at the end of the shelf, the line of black beads reflected off the edge of the sheet of ice, gathering around and about itself like a dangled rosary bunching into an open palm. In this way, the penguins slowly built their life-sustaining throng, what the French referred to as a tortue, or turtle. By the time the last of the penguins had joined up with the group, from overhead they resembled a huge black dot on the blanket of pallid ice.

By that time, in instinctive penguin fashion, the apparently immobile mass had begun circulating slowly. The outside rear layers peeled off to spiral around and inward upon the rest of the group at the front, each body in turn sharing time in the middle of the tortue, that epicentre of remarkable warmth in the bitter polar climate. In proper formation, only one-sixth of the bodies of the penguins would be exposed to the thrashing blizzard at any given time. There were no complaints; just an automatic cooperation in the interest of mutual preservation.

The emperor penguin itself, Aptenodytes forsteri, was three feet tall and all black and white, except for a tuft of bright yellow plumage on its head. On this evening, a thousand of these short, fat tuxedos moved slowly around each other, exposing their sun-yellow heads on the circumference of the tortue for a few minutes each before shuffling to the leading edge to be taken back into the crowd.

A hundred metres into the march, one penguin, with bright red plumage where the yellow would normally be, nudged out onto the periphery of the group, standing out from the rest. This particular penguin, head gazing out into the white nothing, followed his cue behind the other members on the outside of the group, taking his turn on the frosty, wind-hammered exterior. He moved slowly around the circle like a red dot on a yellow, rotating compass rose, coming to a stop at his new place on the leading edge of the assembly. Then, with a shudder of his body, he stood there at the edge and peered around, scanning the horizon, which was now about twenty feet away in the blowing snow. He turned inward to face the crowd, and was soon overwhelmed by a wall of bouncing black, white and yellow blobs moving around to protect him from the blizzard hammering his black backside.