The Worst Journey in the World (44 page)

That was what you might have seen four months ago had you been out on the
Barrier plain. Low down on the extreme right or east of the land there
was a black smudge of rock peeping out from great snow-drifts: that was
the Knoll, and close under it were the cliffs of Cape Crozier, the Knoll
looking quite low and the cliffs invisible, although they are eight
hundred feet high, a sheer precipice falling to the sea.

It is at Cape Crozier that the Barrier edge, which runs for four hundred
miles as an ice-cliff up to 200 feet high, meets the land. The Barrier is
moving against this land at a rate which is sometimes not much less than
a mile in a year. Perhaps you can imagine the chaos which it piles up:
there are pressure ridges compared to which the waves of the sea are like
a ploughed field. These are worst at Cape Crozier itself, but they extend
all along the southern slopes of Mount Terror, running parallel with the
land, and the disturbance which Cape Crozier makes is apparent at Corner
Camp some forty miles back on the Barrier in the crevasses we used to
find and the occasional ridges we had to cross.

In the Discovery days the pressure just where it hit Cape Crozier formed
a small bay, and on the sea-ice frozen in this bay the men of the
Discovery found the only Emperor penguin rookery which had ever been
seen. The ice here was not blown out by the blizzards which cleared the
Ross Sea, and open water or open leads were never far away. This gave the
Emperors a place to lay their eggs and an opportunity to find their food.
We had therefore to find our way along the pressure to the Knoll, and
thence penetrate
through
the pressure to the Emperors' Bay. And we had
to do it in the dark.

Terror Point, which we were approaching in the fog, is a short twenty
miles from the Knoll, and ends in a long snow-tongue running out into the
Barrier. The way had been travelled a good many times in Discovery days
and in daylight, and Wilson knew there was a narrow path, free from
crevasses, which skirted along between the mountain and the pressure
ridges running parallel to it. But it is one thing to walk along a
corridor by day, and quite another to try to do so at night, especially
when there are no walls by which you can correct your course—only
crevasses. Anyway, Terror Point must be somewhere close to us now, and
vaguely in front of us was that strip of snow, neither Barrier nor
mountain, which was our only way forward.

We began to realize, now that our eyes were more or less out of action,
how much we could do with our feet and ears. The effect of walking in
finnesko is much the same as walking in gloves, and you get a sense of
touch which nothing else except bare feet could give you. Thus we could
feel every small variation in surface, every crust through which our feet
broke, every hardened patch below the soft snow. And soon we began to
rely more and more upon the sound of our footsteps to tell us whether we
were on crevasses or solid ground. From now onwards we were working among
crevasses fairly constantly. I loathe them in full daylight when much can
be done to avoid them, and when if you fall into them you can at any rate
see where the sides are, which way they run and how best to scramble out;
when your companions can see how to stop the sledge to which you are all
attached by your harness; how most safely to hold the sledge when
stopped; how, if you are dangling fifteen feet down in a chasm, to work
above you to get you up to the surface again. And then our clothes were
generally something like clothes. Even under the ideal conditions of good
light, warmth and no wind, crevasses are beastly, whether you are pulling
over a level and uniform snow surface, never knowing what moment will
find you dropping into some bottomless pit, or whether you are rushing
for the Alpine rope and the sledge, to help some companion who has
disappeared. I dream sometimes now of bad days we had on the Beardmore
and elsewhere, when men were dropping through to be caught up and hang at
the full length of the harnesses and toggles many times in an hour. On
the same sledge as myself on the Beardmore one man went down once head
first, and another eight times to the length of his harness in 25
minutes. And always you wondered whether your harness was going to hold
when the jerk came. But those days were a Sunday School treat compared to
our days of blind-man's buff with the Emperor penguins among the
crevasses of Cape Crozier.

Our troubles were greatly increased by the state of our clothes. If we
had been dressed in lead we should have been able to move our arms and
necks and heads more easily than we could now. If the same amount of
icing had extended to our legs I believe we should still be there,
standing unable to move: but happily the forks of our trousers still
remained movable. To get into our canvas harnesses was the most absurd
business. Quite in the early days of our journey we met with this
difficulty, and somewhat foolishly decided not to take off our harness
for lunch. The harnesses thawed in the tent, and froze back as hard as
boards. Likewise our clothing was hard as boards and stuck out from our
bodies in every imaginable fold and angle. To fit one board over the
other required the united efforts of the would-be wearer and his two
companions, and the process had to be repeated for each one of us twice a
day. Goodness knows how long it took; but it cannot have been less than
five minutes' thumping at each man.

As we approached Terror Point in the fog we sensed that we had risen and
fallen over several rises. Every now and then we felt hard slippery snow
under our feet. Every now and then our feet went through crusts in the
surface. And then quite suddenly, vague, indefinable, monstrous, there
loomed a something ahead. I remember having a feeling as of ghosts about
as we untoggled our harnesses from the sledge, tied them together, and
thus roped walked upwards on that ice. The moon was showing a ghastly
ragged mountainous edge above us in the fog, and as we rose we found that
we were on a pressure ridge. We stopped, looked at one another, and then
bang
—right under our feet. More bangs, and creaks and groans; for that
ice was moving and splitting like glass. The cracks went off all round
us, and some of them ran along for hundreds of yards. Afterwards we got
used to it, but at first the effect was very jumpy. From first to last
during this journey we had plenty of variety and none of that monotony
which is inevitable in sledging over long distances of Barrier in summer.
Only the long shivering fits following close one after the other all the
time we lay in our dreadful sleeping-bags, hour after hour and night
after night in those temperatures—they were as monotonous as could be.
Later we got frost-bitten even as we lay in our sleeping-bags. Things are
getting pretty bad when you get frost-bitten in your bag.

There was only a glow where the moon was; we stood in a moonlit fog, and
this was sufficient to show the edge of another ridge ahead, and yet
another on our left. We were utterly bewildered. The deep booming of the
ice continued, and it may be that the tide has something to do with this,
though we were many miles from the ordinary coastal ice. We went back,
toggled up to our sledges again and pulled in what we thought was the
right direction, always with that feeling that the earth may open
underneath your feet which you have in crevassed areas. But all we found
were more mounds and banks of snow and ice, into which we almost ran
before we saw them. We were clearly lost. It was near midnight, and I
wrote, "it may be the pressure ridges or it may be Terror, it is
impossible to say,—and I should think it is impossible to move till it
clears. We were steering N.E. when we got here and returned S.W. till we
seemed to be in a hollow and camped."

The temperature had been rising from -36° at 11 A.M. and it was now -27°;
snow was falling and nothing whatever could be seen. From under the tent
came noises as though some giant was banging a big empty tank. All the
signs were for a blizzard, and indeed we had not long finished our supper
and were thawing our way little by little into our bags when the wind
came away from the south. Before it started we got a glimpse of black
rock and knew we must be in the pressure ridges where they nearly join
Mount Terror.

It is with great surprise that in looking up the records I find that
blizzard lasted three days, the temperature and wind both rising till it
was +9° and blowing force 9 on the morning of the second day (July 11).
On the morning of the third day (July 12) it was blowing storm force
(10). The temperature had thus risen over eighty degrees.

It was not an uncomfortable time. Wet and warm, the risen temperature
allowed all our ice to turn to water, and we lay steaming and beautifully
liquid, and wondered sometimes what we should be like when our gear froze
up once more. But we did not do much wondering, I suspect: we slept. From
that point of view these blizzards were a perfect Godsend.

We also revised our food rations. From the moment we started to prepare
for this journey we were asked by Scott to try certain experiments in
view of the Plateau stage of the Polar Journey the following summer. It
was supposed that the Plateau stage would be the really tough part of the
Polar Journey, and no one then dreamed that harder conditions could be
found in the middle of the Barrier in March than on the Plateau, ten
thousand feet higher, in February. In view of the extreme conditions we
knew we must meet on this winter journey, far harder of course in point
of weather than anything experienced on the Polar Journey, we had
determined to simplify our food to the last degree. We only brought
pemmican, biscuit, butter and tea: and tea is not a food, only a pleasant
stimulant, and hot: the pemmican was excellent and came from Beauvais,
Copenhagen.

The immediate advantage of this was that we had few food bags to handle
for each meal. If the air temperature is 100 degrees of frost, then
everything in the air is about 100 degrees of frost too. You have only to
untie the lashings of one bag in a -70° temperature, with your feet
frozen and your fingers just nursed back after getting a match to strike
for the candle (you will have tried several boxes—metal), to realize
this as an advantage.

The immediate and increasingly pressing disadvantage is that you have no
sugar. Have you ever had a craving for sugar which never leaves you, even
when asleep? It is unpleasant. As a matter of fact the craving for sweet
things never seriously worried us on this journey, and there must have
been some sugar in our biscuits which gave a pleasant sweetness to our
mid-day tea or nightly hot water when broken up and soaked in it. These
biscuits were specially made for us by Huntley and Palmer: their
composition was worked out by Wilson and that firm's chemist, and is a
secret. But they are probably the most satisfying biscuit ever made, and
I doubt whether they can be improved upon. There were two kinds, called
Emergency and Antarctic, but there was I think little difference between
them except in the baking. A well-baked biscuit was good to eat when
sledging if your supply of food was good: but if you were very hungry an
underbaked one was much preferred. By taking individually different
quantities of biscuit, pemmican and butter we were able roughly to test
the proportions of proteids, fats and carbo-hydrates wanted by the human
body under such extreme circumstances. Bill was all for fat, starting
with 8 oz. butter, 12 oz. pemmican and only 12 oz. biscuit a day. Bowers
told me he was going for proteids, 16 oz. pemmican and 16 oz. biscuit,
and suggested I should go the whole hog on carbo-hydrates. I did not like
this, since I knew I should want more fat, but the rations were to be
altered as necessary during the journey, so there was no harm in trying.
So I started with 20 oz. of biscuit and 12 oz. of pemmican a day.

Bowers was all right (this was usual with him), but he did not eat all
his extra pemmican. Bill could not eat all his extra butter, but was
satisfied. I got hungry, certainly got more frost-bitten than the
others, and wanted more fat. I also got heartburn. However, before taking
more fat I increased my biscuits to 24 oz., but this did not satisfy me;
I wanted fat. Bill and I now took the same diet, he giving me 4 oz. of
butter which he could not eat, and I giving him 4 oz. of biscuit which
did not satisfy my wants. We both therefore had 12 oz. pemmican, 16 oz
biscuit and 4 oz. butter a day, but we did not always finish our butter.
This is an extremely good ration, and we had enough to eat during most of
this journey. We certainly could not have faced the conditions without.

I will not say that I was entirely easy in my mind as we lay out that
blizzard somewhere off Terror Point; I don't know how the others were
feeling. The unearthly banging going on underneath us may have had
something to do with it. But we were quite lost in the pressure and it
might be the deuce and all to get out in the dark. The wind eddied and
swirled quite out of its usual straightforward way, and the tent got
badly snowed up: our sledge had disappeared long ago. The position was
not altogether a comfortable one.

Tuesday night and Wednesday it blew up to force 10, temperature from -7°
to +2°. And then it began to modify and get squally. By 3 A.M. on
Thursday (July 13) the wind had nearly ceased, the temperature was
falling and the stars were shining through detached clouds. We were soon
getting our breakfast, which always consisted of tea, followed by
pemmican. We soaked our biscuits in both. Then we set to work to dig out
the sledges and tent, a big job taking several hours. At last we got
started. In that jerky way in which I was still managing to jot a few
sentences down each night as a record, I wrote:

"Did 7½ miles during day—seems a marvellous run—rose and fell over
several ridges of Terror—in afternoon suddenly came on huge crevasse on
one of these—we were quite high on Terror—moon saved us walking in—it
might have taken sledge and all."