Fortnight of Fear (31 page)

“Where did you find this?” I asked Michael.

“In the private papers of Herbert Ponting, the expedition's photographer. I was looking for pictures of the Ross Ice-Shelf and the Beardmore Glacier, the way they used to be.”

“And you don't have any idea who this sixth man could be?”

Michael shook his head. “I went through Scott's diary with a fine-tooth comb. I checked Amundsen's account, too. Amundsen left nobody behind at the Pole; and he saw nobody else.”

I held the photograph up to the window. “It's not a double exposure?”

“Absolutely not.”

I shrugged, and handed the photograph back. “In that case, it's one of the great unexplained mysteries of all time.”

Michael grinned, for the first time that afternoon. “Not if I can help it.”

The Chinook helicopter slowly circled and then landed on the ice, whirling up a white blizzard that sparkled and glittered in the sunlight. The cargo doors were opened up immediately, and the orange-jacketed engineers heaved out tools and ropes and crates of supplies. Michael wiped his spectacles with his thumb, and then tugged the hood of his parka tight around his chin. “You ready?” he asked me.

The Antarctic wind sliced into the open cargo doors like frozen knives. “I thought you said this was summer,” I told him, following him along the fuselage, and then down the steps to the ice.

“It is,” he grinned. “You should try visiting here in June.”

Slowly the Chinook's rotor-blades flickered to a standstill. Michael led me across the hard-packed ice to the largest of the nine huts that made up Falcon Petroleum's Beardmore Research Station. It looked like rush hour. Sno-Cats bellowed from one side of the station to the other, dog-teams panted past us, and dozens of riggers and engineers were working on aerials and scaffolding and two more half-finished huts.

The research station covered more than eleven acres, and the once-pristine Antarctic ice was strewn with discarded caterpillar-tracks; broken packing-cases; and heaps of wind-blown rubbish.

“I thought it was going to be all peace and solitude,” I shouted at Michael.

He shook his head. “Not a hope. These days, the Antarctic is busier than a Bank Holiday in Brighton.”

We entered the hut and stamped the ice from our feet. Huge fan heaters made the inside of the hut roaringly hot, and it stank of stale cigarette-smoke and sweat and something else, something musty, a smell which will always remind me of the South Pole, for ever and ever. It was almost like the smell of something which has been dead and frozen for a very long time, but is at last beginning to thaw.

Michael said, “It's a pretty gruesome life, but you get used to it. We get a regular supply of Johnnie Walker and porno videos from the Falklands.”

He led me along a gloomy sisal-carpeted corridor, and then opened one of the doors. “Here, you're lucky, you can have this room to yourself. Dr Philips had to go back to London for six weeks. His wife got tired of him being away so long, and she's divorcing him.”

I threw my suitcase on to the bed. The room was small, with a narrow steel-framed bed and a small desk and a
packing-case which did duty as a bookshelf. On the chipboard wall was a color photograph of a large mousy-haired woman in a pale blue cardigan, with washing pinned up behind her; and next to it, a pin-up of a massively busty blonde with her legs stretched wide apart.

I thought of Tania. “What does Tania think about
you
, being away for so long?” I asked Michael.

“Oh, she doesn't like it, but she lumps it,” he replied, rather evasively. He went to the window and peered out at the blindingly sunlit ice. “We all have to make sacrifices, don't we? That's what made Britain great – sacrifices.”

I started to unzip my anorak, but Michael said. “Don't take it off yet. Rodney Jones can probably take us out to see the drilling site pretty well straight away. That's unless you're hungry.”

I shook my head. “The chaps on the
Erebus
gave me steak and eggs and all the trimmings.”

We went back along the corridor, and turned left. The first room we came to was marked
Seismic Studies
. It was large and untidy, crammed with desks and packing-cases and all kinds of flickering computer screens and noisily-zizzing fax machines. A handsome thirtyish man with a thick gingery beard was sitting with his thick oiled fishermen's socks propped up on one of the desks, reading a copy of
Woman's Weekly
.

“Hullo, Mike,” he said, dropping the magazine on the desk. “I'm thinking of knitting myself a guernsey and matching scarf, what do you think?”

“You haven't finished my gloves yet,” said Michael.

“I'm having trouble with the reindeer,” Rodney retorted. “All those damned antlers.”

Michael introduced me. “This is James McAlan, pathologist extraordinary, from Sussex University. He's come to look at our discovery.”

Rodney stood up and shook hands. “Glad you could make it.
We
don't know what to do about it. I mean,
we're
only geologists. Is this your first time at the South Pole?”

“This is my first time at either Pole,” I told him. “Up until now, the furthest south I've ever been is Nice.”

“Well, you'll hate it,” said Rodney, enthusiastically. He picked up his wind-cheater from the floor, and banged it with the flat of his hand to beat the dust off. “Borchgrevink said that the silence roars in one's ears. ‘Centuries of heaped-up solitude,' that's what he called it. Borchgrevink was a Norwegian explorer, one of the first to spend the winter here. I've spent three winters here, which qualifies me as the stupidest bugger on the base.”

He led us back out of the hut and across the rutted ice. Off to our left, a pack of huskies were yapping and jumping as they were fed. “Bloody dogs,” Rodney remarked. “I don't care if I never see another dog again, not one, as long as I live.”

It took us only six or seven minutes to reach the site of the excavation. It wasn't very impressive. A shallowish scour, surrounded by heaps of filthy broken-up ice, discarded equipment and a half-completed tower for seismological soundings. In the bottom of the scour, a green tent had been erected, to shield their discovery from the Antarctic weather, and protect it from stray dogs.

Michael led the way down to the tent, and Rodney tugged free the frozen laces, and opened up the flap. It was solid with ice, and it made a sharp cracking noise as he turned it back. “You'll have to crawl,” Rodney told us.

We got down on hands and knees and edged our way into the tent. “I was out all night in a blizzard once,” said Rodney, touching the roof of the tent with his gloved hand. “The snow piled up so heavy on top that the canvas was only an inch away from my nose. And to think I used to get claustrophobic in the Tube.”

We shuffled ourselves into a crouching position. By the darting, criss-crossing light of Michael's torch, I
had already glimpsed something very grim. But now he concentrated the beam on the center of the tent, and there was what he had brought me three-quarters of the way around the world to see.

“Jesus,” I said, under my breath, and my breath froze against my chin.

Rodney sniffed. “You couldn't see it with the naked eye, but there was a deep crevasse just here. We discovered it when we started our sound survey. We dug down sixty feet or so … and this is what we found. We haven't touched either of them.”

Tangled together in the snow lay the remains of two human beings. If there hadn't been two skulls, however, I wouldn't initially have guessed that there were two of them. There were only shoulders and ribs remaining, and ripped-open snow-jackets. But what made the sight so horrifying was that on some of the bones, there were still some fragments of flesh, tanned by age and extreme cold to the color of
prosciutto
. One of the skulls had been stripped almost completely bare of skin and flesh, but the other was practically intact – the mauvish, frozen face of a man dying in abject terror – his eyes empty, his mouth stretched wide, his lips thick with frost.

“Are you sure that it's them?” I asked Michael. Inside the confines of the tent, my voice sounded oddly flat and featureless.

Michael nodded. “Evans and Oates. No doubt about it.” He inclined his head toward the frozen face – still locked in a scream that had been screamed nearly eighty years before. “There were papers, bits and pieces. Not much, but enough for us to be completely sure.”

I couldn't take my eyes away from the gruesome, frost-encrusted remains. “I know that Evans collapsed and died around here, at the head of the Beardmore Glacier. But Oates didn't walk out into the blizzard
until they were well down on the Ross Ice-Shelf, only twenty-nine miles away from One Ton Depot.”

“That's right,” said Michael. “So the question is … how did Oates get all the way back here? He couldn't have walked back. His feet were badly frostbitten, and the whole reason he walked out into the blizzard was because he couldn't drag himself any further. Apart from that, even if he
could
have walked back, why on earth
would
he?”

I peered at the remains more closely. “I think I can probably answer that,” I told him. “These bones have been gnawed. See there – and there – definite teethmarks, although it's hard to guess
what
teethmarks. Eighty years ago, this crevasse could well have been the shelter for some predatory animal. It might have been following Scott and his party, the way jackals follow herds of antelope, just waiting for one to drop and die. Evans dropped, then Oates dropped. It dragged them both back here and used them for its winter food.”

“James …” said Rodney. “I hate to be pedantic, but what kind of predatory animal could that have possibly been? There are plenty of walruses and seals and seabirds in the Antarctic, but there are no natural inland predators – no bears, no tigers, no snow-leopards … nothing that could have used these men as a winter larder.”

I turned to him seriously. “A starving man is a predatory animal.”

Rodney looked dubious. “Scott wasn't the kind of man who would have condoned cannibalism, surely? He was reluctant even to eat his dogs. And there's not a single word in his notes that suggests it so much as crossed his mind.”

“I'm aware of that,” I told him. “But you asked me what happened to these men and I told you. The probability is that some predatory animal dragged them here and ate them. Now, whether that predatory animal was a rogue
husky or a man who was prepared to eat anything and anyone in order to survive, I just don't know … not until I've made all the necessary tests.”

Michael said, “You think it was Scott, don't you?”

I didn't reply. It was difficult, even now, to compromise one of the most glorious tragedies in British history.

But Michael persisted. “You think that Scott was lying, don't you … and that they might have killed and eaten Evans and Oates, just to keep going? All that stuff about Oates going out into the blizzard so that he wouldn't be a burden to the other three … you think that was so much guff … an inspired bit of heroic invention?”

Dry-mouthed, I said, “Yes. But I don't think you can blame anybody for what they did under extreme duress. Remember the Donner Party. Remember those schoolchildren when their aeroplane crashed in the Andes. You can't judge men who were starving to death in the middle of nowhere when you've just eaten steak and eggs on the good ship
Erebus.
”

We hunched our way out of the tent, climbed out of the ice-scour, and walked slowly back to the hut.

“How long will it take you before you know for certain?” asked Michael.

“Twenty-four hours. Not longer.”

Michael said, “You remember that photograph I found? The one of Scott and all the rest of them at the Pole?”

“Of course. Did you ever find out who that mysterious sixth man was?”

Michael shook his head. “I decided in the end that it was probably Evans, in a different hat, and that he'd somehow managed to rig up a very long string to take it.”

“You said you found papers, bits and pieces. Do you think I could see them?”

Back in the hut, Michael brewed up some hot coffee, laced with whiskey, while I poked through the few pathetic
remnants that had been discovered with Oates and Evans in the crevasse. A comb; a pair of leather snow-goggles (unglazed, and very ineffective, since plastic had not yet been invented); a single fur glove, dried up like a mummified cat; and a small snow-blotched diary. Most of the diary's pages had stuck together, but at the back there was a single legible entry … not in Scott's handwriting, but presumably in Oates'.

It said, simply,
Jan 18, now for the run home but Despair will soon overtake us
.

I sat sipping my coffee and frowning at the diary for a long time. The entry seemed simple enough, but the phraseology was odd. Apart from the capital “D” for “Despair”, why had he said that “Despair will soon overtake us”? Despair was an emotion that might certainly have overtaken anybody who found themselves at the South Pole, with 800 miles to walk to safety, and scarcely any hot food. But you didn't normally talk about it overtaking you until it actually did.

It was as odd as saying “Tomorrow, when we climb the mountain, we will be overtaken by fear.” The chances are that you certainly
will
be overtaken by fear, but you just don't express it like that.

I said to Michael, “Can we go to the Pole, and then slowly fly back over Scott's route?”

“If you think it'll help. I was going to take you to the Pole anyway. Bit of a letdown to come all this way and not quite make it.”

We left the research station at the head of the Beardmore Glacier at a little after seven o'clock the next morning. The Chinook lifted itself diagonally into the sunlight, and across the peaks of the Queen Alexandra Mountains, toward the polar plateau. The wind had been rising throughout the night, and when I looked down at the ice, I saw long horse's-tails of snow waving across the ice.