The Worst Journey in the World (43 page)

Our sleeping-bags were getting really bad by now, and already it took a
long time to thaw a way down into them at night. Bill spread his in the
middle, Bowers was on his right, and I was on his left. Always he
insisted that I should start getting my legs into mine before
he
started: we were rapidly cooling down after our hot supper, and this was
very unselfish of him. Then came seven shivering hours and first thing on
getting out of our sleeping-bags in the morning we stuffed our personal
gear into the mouth of the bag before it could freeze: this made a plug
which when removed formed a frozen hole for us to push into as a start in
the evening.

We got into some strange knots when trying to persuade our limbs into our
bags, and suffered terribly from cramp in consequence. We would wait and
rub, but directly we tried to move again down it would come and grip our
legs in a vice. We also, especially Bowers, suffered agony from cramp in
the stomach. We let the primus burn on after supper now for a time—it
was the only thing which kept us going—and when one who was holding the
primus was seized with cramp we hastily took the lamp from him until the
spasm was over. It was horrible to see Birdie's stomach cramp sometimes:
he certainly got it much worse than Bill or I. I suffered a lot from
heartburn especially in my bag at nights: we were eating a great
proportion of fat and this was probably the cause. Stupidly I said
nothing about it for a long time. Later when Bill found out, he soon made
it better with the medical case.

Birdie always lit the candle in the morning—so called and this was an
heroic business. Moisture collected on our matches if you looked at them.
Partly I suppose it was bringing them from outside into a comparatively
warm tent; partly from putting boxes into pockets in our clothing.
Sometimes it was necessary to try four or five boxes before a match
struck. The temperature of the boxes and matches was about a hundred
degrees of frost, and the smallest touch of the metal on naked flesh
caused a frost-bite. If you wore mitts you could scarcely feel
anything—especially since the tips of our fingers were already very
callous. To get the first light going in the morning was a beastly cold
business, made worse by having to make sure that it was at last time to
get up. Bill insisted that we must lie in our bags seven hours every
night.

In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so
many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so
little understanding. Not so down South. These two men went through the
Winter Journey and lived: later they went through the Polar Journey and
died. They were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how
good their companionship was.

Through all these days, and those which were to follow, the worst I
suppose in their dark severity that men have ever come through alive, no
single hasty or angry word passed their lips. When, later, we were sure,
so far as we can be sure of anything, that we must die, they were
cheerful, and so far as I can judge their songs and cheery words were
quite unforced. Nor were they ever flurried, though always as quick as
the conditions would allow in moments of emergency. It is hard that often
such men must go first when others far less worthy remain.

There are those who write of Polar Expeditions as though the whole
thing was as easy as possible. They are trusting, I suspect, in a public
who will say, "What a fine fellow this is! we know what horrors he has
endured, yet see, how little he makes of all his difficulties and
hardships." Others have gone to the opposite extreme. I do not know that
there is any use in trying to make a -18° temperature appear formidable
to an uninitiated reader by calling it fifty degrees of frost. I want to
do neither of these things. I am not going to pretend that this was
anything but a ghastly journey, made bearable and even pleasant to look
back upon by the qualities of my two companions who have gone. At the
same time I have no wish to make it appear more horrible than it actually
was: the reader need not fear that I am trying to exaggerate.

During the night of July 3 the temperature dropped to -65°, but in the
morning we wakened (we really did wake that morning) to great relief. The
temperature was only -27° with the wind blowing some 15 miles an hour
with steadily falling snow. It only lasted a few hours, and we knew it
must be blowing a howling blizzard outside the windless area in which we
lay, but it gave us time to sleep and rest, and get thoroughly thawed,
and wet, and warm, inside our sleeping-bags. To me at any rate this
modified blizzard was a great relief, though we all knew that our gear
would be worse than ever when the cold came back. It was quite impossible
to march. During the course of the day the temperature dropped to -44°:
during the following night to -54°.

The soft new snow which had fallen made the surface the next day (July 5)
almost impossible. We relayed as usual, and managed to do eight hours'
pulling, but we got forward only 1½ miles. The temperature ranged between
-55° and -61°, and there was at one time a considerable breeze, the
effect of which was paralysing. There was the great circle of a halo
round the moon with a vertical shaft, and mock moons. We hoped that we
were rising on to the long snow cape which marks the beginning of Mount
Terror. That night the temperature was -75°; at breakfast -70°; at noon
nearly -77°. The day lives in my memory as that on which I found out
that records are not worth making. The thermometer as swung by Bowers
after lunch at 5.51 P.M. registered -77.5°, which is 109½ degrees of
frost, and is I suppose as cold as any one will want to endure in
darkness and iced-up gear and clothes. The lowest temperature recorded by
a Discovery Spring Journey party was -67.7°,
^[144]
and in those days
fourteen days was a long time for a Spring Party to be away sledging and
they were in daylight. This was our tenth day out and we hoped to be away
for six weeks.

Luckily we were spared wind. Our naked candle burnt steadily as we
trudged back in our tracks to fetch our other sledge, but if we touched
metal for a fraction of a second with naked fingers we were frost-bitten.
To fasten the strap buckles over the loaded sledge was difficult: to
handle the cooker, or mugs, or spoons, the primus or oil can was worse.
How Bowers managed with the meteorological instruments I do not know, but
the meteorological log is perfectly kept. Yet as soon as you breathed
near the paper it was covered with a film of ice through which the pencil
would not bite. To handle rope was always cold and in these very low
temperatures dreadfully cold work. The toggling up of our harnesses to
the sledge we were about to pull, the untoggling at the end of the stage,
the lashing up of our sleeping-bags in the morning, the fastening of the
cooker to the top of the instrument box, were bad, but not nearly so bad
as the smaller lashings which were now strings of ice. One of the worst
was round the weekly food bag, and those round the pemmican, tea and
butter bags inside were thinner still. But the real devil was the lashing
of the tent door: it was like wire, and yet had to be tied tight. If you
had to get out of the tent during the seven hours spent in our
sleeping-bags you must tie a string as stiff as a poker, and re-thaw your
way into a bag already as hard as a board. Our paraffin was supplied at a
flash point suitable to low temperatures and was only a little milky: it
was very difficult to splinter bits off the butter.

The temperature that night was -75.8°, and I will not pretend that it did
not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice
below the circles of fire. Still we slept sometimes, and always we lay
for seven hours. Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and
always we said no. Yet there was nothing I should have liked better: I
was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy. That
day we had advanced 1½ miles by the utmost labour, and the usual relay
work. This was quite a good march—and Cape Crozier is 67 miles from Cape
Evans!

More than once in my short life I have been struck by the value of the
man who is blind to what appears to be a common-sense certainty: he
achieves the impossible. We never spoke our thoughts: we discussed the
Age of Stone which was to come, when we built our cosy warm rock hut on
the slopes of Mount Terror, and ran our stove with penguin blubber, and
pickled little Emperors in warmth and dryness. We were quite intelligent
people, and we must all have known that we were not going to see the
penguins and that it was folly to go forward. And yet with quiet
perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with gentleness those two men
led on. I just did what I was told.

It is desirable that the body should work, feed and sleep at regular
hours, and this is too often forgotten when sledging. But just now we
found we were unable to fit 8 hours marching and 7 hours in our
sleeping-bags into a 24-hour day: the routine camp work took more than 9
hours, such were the conditions. We therefore ceased to observe the quite
imaginary difference between night and day, and it was noon on Friday
(July 7) before we got away. The temperature was -68° and there was a
thick white fog: generally we had but the vaguest idea where we were, and
we camped at 10 P.M. after managing 1¾ miles for the day. But what a
relief. Instead of labouring away, our hearts were beating more
naturally: it was easier to camp, we had some feeling in our hands, and
our feet had not gone to sleep. Birdie swung the thermometer and found
it only -55°. "Now if we tell people that to get only 87 degrees of frost
can be an enormous relief they simply won't believe us," I remember
saying. Perhaps you won't but it was, all the same: and I wrote that
night: "There is something after all rather good in doing something never
done before." Things were looking up, you see.

Our hearts were doing very gallant work. Towards the end of the march
they were getting beaten and were finding it difficult to pump the blood
out to our extremities There were few days that Wilson and I did not get
some part of our feet frost-bitten. As we camped, I suspect our hearts
were beating comparatively slowly and weakly. Nothing could be done until
a hot drink was ready—tea for lunch, hot water for supper. Directly we
started to drink then the effect was wonderful: it was, said Wilson, like
putting a hot-water bottle against your heart. The beats became very
rapid and strong and you felt the warmth travelling outwards and
downwards. Then you got your foot-gear off—puttees (cut in half and
wound round the bottom of the trousers), finnesko, saennegrass, hair
socks, and two pairs of woollen socks. Then you nursed back your feet and
tried to believe you were glad—a frost-bite does not hurt until it
begins to thaw. Later came the blisters, and then the chunks of dead
skin.

Bill was anxious. It seems that Scott had twice gone for a walk with him
during the Winter, and tried to persuade him not to go, and only finally
consented on condition that Bill brought us all back unharmed: we were
Southern Journey men. Bill had a tremendous respect for Scott, and later
when we were about to make an effort to get back home over the Barrier,
and our case was very desperate, he was most anxious to leave no gear
behind at Cape Crozier, even the scientific gear which could be of no use
to us and of which we had plenty more at the hut. "Scott will never
forgive me if I leave gear behind," he said. It is a good sledging
principle, and the party which does not follow it, or which leaves some
of its load to be fetched in later is seldom a good one: but it is a
principle which can be carried to excess.

And now Bill was feeling terribly responsible for both of us. He kept on
saying that he was sorry, but he had never dreamed it was going to be as
bad as this. He felt that having asked us to come he was in some way
chargeable with our troubles. When leaders have this kind of feeling
about their men they get much better results, if the men are good: if men
are bad or even moderate they will try and take advantage of what they
consider to be softness.

The temperature on the night of July 7 was -59°.

On July 8 we found the first sign that we might be coming to an end of
this soft, powdered, arrowrooty snow. It was frightfully hard pulling;
but every now and then our finnesko pierced a thin crust before they sank
right in. This meant a little wind, and every now and then our feet came
down on a hard slippery patch under the soft snow. We were surrounded by
fog which walked along with us, and far above us the moon was shining on
its roof. Steering was as difficult as the pulling, and four hours of the
hardest work only produced 1¼ miles in the morning, and three more hours
1 mile in the afternoon—and the temperature was -57° with a
breeze—horrible!

In the early morning of the next day snow began to fall and the fog was
dense: when we got up we could see nothing at all anywhere. After the
usual four hours to get going in the morning we settled that it was
impossible to relay, for we should never be able to track ourselves back
to the second sledge. It was with very great relief that we found we
could move both sledges together, and I think this was mainly due to the
temperature which had risen to -36°.

This was our fourth day of fog in addition to the normal darkness, and we
knew we must be approaching the land. It would be Terror Point, and the
fog is probably caused by the moist warm air coming up from the sea
through the pressure cracks and crevasses; for it is supposed that the
Barrier here is afloat.

I wish I could take you on to the great Ice Barrier some calm evening
when the sun is just dipping in the middle of the night and show you the
autumn tints on Ross Island. A last look round before turning in, a good
day's march behind, enough fine fat pemmican inside you to make you
happy, the homely smell of tobacco from the tent, a pleasant sense of
soft fur and the deep sleep to come. And all the softest colours God has
made are in the snow; on Erebus to the west, where the wind can scarcely
move his cloud of smoke; and on Terror to the east, not so high, and more
regular in form. How peaceful and dignified it all is.