We are asked about love more than other birds are. People have seen the film. They have seen two of us stand chest to chest in the dark and they have decided what it means.

It does not mean that.

Here is how the winter goes. She lays one egg and passes it to me, foot to foot, quickly, because the ice will kill it in under a minute. Then she walks to the sea, which in June is a long way off, and I stand. I do not eat. I hold the egg on my feet under a fold of my belly and I stand for about two months in the dark at fifty below, with several thousand other fathers doing the same.

We do not do it alone. We huddle. The huddle turns, slowly, all winter, so that every bird takes his turn on the outside, in the wind, and every bird gets his turn in the middle. Nobody runs it. Nobody faces anybody. Every one of us is looking at the back of another one's head.

I have seen what you call romance. It is not about gazing into each other's eyes.

She comes back in July, fat from the sea, calling, and I call, and in a colony of thousands she finds me by the voice. She takes the chick and I go. We do not stop to look at each other very long. There is a great deal of ice between here and the water.

A French aviator who crashed in the desert worked this out in 1939, and he said it better than a penguin can. The sentence is his. I only stood in it.

… it is about looking together in the same direction.