The Worst Journey in the World (46 page)

The next morning (Thursday, June 20) we started work on the igloo at 3
A.M. and managed to get the canvas roof on in spite of a wind which
harried us all that day. Little did we think what that roof had in store
for us as we packed it in with snow blocks, stretching it over our second
sledge, which we put athwartships across the middle of the longer walls.
The windward (south) end came right down to the ground and we tied it
securely to rocks before packing it in. On the other three sides we had a
good two feet or more of slack all round, and in every case we tied it to
rocks by lanyards at intervals of two feet. The door was the difficulty,
and for the present we left the cloth arching over the stones, forming a
kind of portico. The whole was well packed in and over with slabs of hard
snow, but there was no soft snow with which to fill up the gaps between
the blocks. However, we felt already that nothing could drag that roof
out of its packing, and subsequent events proved that we were right.

It was a bleak job for three o'clock in the morning before breakfast, and
we were glad to get back to the tent and a meal, for we meant to have
another go at the Emperors that day. With the first glimpse of light we
were off for the rookery again.

But we now knew one or two things about that pressure which we had not
known twenty-four hours ago; for instance, that there was a lot of
alteration since the Discovery days and that probably the pressure was
bigger. As a matter of fact it has been since proved by photographs that
the ridges now ran out three-quarters of a mile farther into the sea than
they did ten years before. We knew also that if we entered the pressure
at the only place where the ice-cliffs came down to the level of the
Barrier, as we did yesterday, we could neither penetrate to the rookery
nor get in under the cliffs where formerly a possible way had been found.
There was only one other thing to do—to go over the cliff. And this was
what we proposed to try and do.

Now these ice-cliffs are some two hundred feet high, and I felt
uncomfortable, especially in the dark. But as we came back the day before
we had noticed at one place a break in the cliffs from which there hung a
snow-drift. It
might
be possible to get down that drift.

And so, all harnessed to the sledge, with Bill on a long lead out in
front and Birdie and myself checking the sledge behind, we started down
the slope which ended in the cliff, which of course we could not see. We
crossed a number of small crevasses, and soon we knew we must be nearly
there. Twice we crept up to the edge of the cliff with no success, and
then we found the slope: more, we got down it without great difficulty
and it brought us out just where we wanted to be, between the land cliffs
and the pressure.

Then began the most exciting climb among the pressure that you can
imagine. At first very much as it was the day before—pulling
ourselves and one another up ridges, slithering down slopes, tumbling
into and out of crevasses and holes of all sorts, we made our way along
under the cliffs which rose higher and higher above us as we neared the
black lava precipices which form Cape Crozier itself. We straddled along
the top of a snow ridge with a razor-backed edge, balancing the sledge
between us as we wriggled: on our right was a drop of great depth with
crevasses at the bottom, on our left was a smaller drop also crevassed.
We crawled along, and I can tell you it was exciting work in the more
than half darkness. At the end was a series of slopes full of crevasses,
and finally we got right in under the rock on to moraine, and here we had
to leave the sledge.

We roped up, and started to worry along under the cliffs, which had now
changed from ice to rock, and rose 800 feet above us. The tumult of
pressure which climbed against them showed no order here. Four hundred
miles of moving ice behind it had just tossed and twisted those giant
ridges until Job himself would have lacked words to reproach their Maker.
We scrambled over and under, hanging on with our axes, and cutting steps
where we could not find a foothold with our crampons. And always we got
towards the Emperor penguins, and it really began to look as if we were
going to do it this time, when we came up against a wall of ice which a
single glance told us we could never cross. One of the largest pressure
ridges had been thrown, end on, against the cliff. We seemed to be
stopped, when Bill found a black hole, something like a fox's earth,
disappearing into the bowels of the ice. We looked at it: "Well, here
goes!" he said, and put his head in, and disappeared. Bowers likewise. It
was a longish way, but quite possible to wriggle along, and presently I
found myself looking out of the other side with a deep gully below me,
the rock face on one hand and the ice on the other. "Put your back
against the ice and your feet against the rock and lever yourself along,"
said Bill, who was already standing on firm ice at the far end in a snow
pit. We cut some fifteen steps to get out of that hole. Excited by now,
and thoroughly enjoying ourselves, we found the way ahead easier, until
the penguins' call reached us again and we stood, three crystallized
ragamuffins, above the Emperors' home. They were there all right, and we
were going to reach them, but where were all the thousands of which we
had heard?

We stood on an ice-foot which was really a dwarf cliff some twelve feet
high, and the sea-ice, with a good many ice-blocks strewn upon it, lay
below. The cliff dropped straight, with a bit of an overhang and no
snow-drift. This may have been because the sea had only frozen recently;
whatever the reason may have been it meant that we should have a lot of
difficulty in getting up again without help. It was decided that some one
must stop on the top with the Alpine rope, and clearly that one should be
I, for with short sight and fogged spectacles which I could not wear I
was much the least useful of the party for the job immediately ahead. Had
we had the sledge we could have used it as a ladder, but of course we had
left this at the beginning of the moraine miles back.

We saw the Emperors standing all together huddled under the Barrier cliff
some hundreds of yards away. The little light was going fast: we were
much more excited about the approach of complete darkness and the look of
wind in the south than we were about our triumph. After indescribable
effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and
we were the first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our
grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we
were turning theories into facts with every observation we made,—and we
had but a moment to give.

The disturbed Emperors made a tremendous row, trumpeting with their
curious metallic voices. There was no doubt they had eggs, for they tried
to shuffle along the ground without losing them off their feet. But when
they were hustled a good many eggs were dropped and left lying on the
ice, and some of these were quickly picked up by eggless Emperors who had
probably been waiting a long time for the opportunity. In these poor
birds the maternal side seems to have necessarily swamped the other
functions of life. Such is the struggle for existence that they can only
live by a glut of maternity, and it would be interesting to know whether
such a life leads to happiness or satisfaction.

I have told
^[149]
how the men of the Discovery found this rookery where we
now stood. How they made journeys in the early spring but never arrived
early enough to get eggs and only found parents and chicks. They
concluded that the Emperor was an impossible kind of bird who, for some
reason or other, nests in the middle of the Antarctic winter with the
temperature anywhere below seventy degrees of frost, and the blizzards
blowing, always blowing, against his devoted back. And they found him
holding his precious chick balanced upon his big feet, and pressing it
maternally, or paternally (for both sexes squabble for the privilege)
against a bald patch in his breast. And when at last he simply must go
and eat something in the open leads near by, he just puts the child down
on the ice, and twenty chickless Emperors rush to pick it up. And they
fight over it, and so tear it that sometimes it will die. And, if it can,
it will crawl into any ice-crack to escape from so much kindness, and
there it will freeze. Likewise many broken and addled eggs were found,
and it is clear that the mortality is very great. But some survive, and
summer comes; and when a big blizzard is going to blow (they know all
about the weather), the parents take the children out for miles across
the sea-ice, until they reach the threshold of the open sea. And there
they sit until the wind comes, and the swell rises, and breaks that
ice-floe off; and away they go in the blinding drift to join the main
pack-ice, with a private yacht all to themselves.

You must agree that a bird like this is an interesting beast, and when,
seven months ago, we rowed a boat under those great black cliffs,
and found a disconsolate Emperor chick still in the down, we knew
definitely why the Emperor has to nest in mid-winter. For if a June egg
was still without feathers in the beginning of January, the same egg
laid in the summer would leave its produce without practical covering for
the following winter. Thus the Emperor penguin is compelled to undertake
all kinds of hardships because his children insist on developing so
slowly, very much as we are tied in our human relationships for the same
reason. It is of interest that such a primitive bird should have so long
a childhood.

But interesting as the life history of these birds must be, we had not
travelled for three weeks to see them sitting on their eggs. We wanted
the embryos, and we wanted them as young as possible, and fresh and
unfrozen that specialists at home might cut them into microscopic
sections and learn from them the previous history of birds throughout the
evolutionary ages. And so Bill and Birdie rapidly collected five eggs,
which we hoped to carry safely in our fur mitts to our igloo upon Mount
Terror, where we could pickle them in the alcohol we had brought for the
purpose. We also wanted oil for our blubber stove, and they killed and
skinned three birds—an Emperor weighs up to 6½ stones.

The Ross Sea was frozen over, and there were no seal in sight. There were
only 100 Emperors as compared with 2000 in 1902 and 1903. Bill reckoned
that every fourth or fifth bird had an egg, but this was only a rough
estimate, for we did not want to disturb them unnecessarily. It is a
mystery why there should have been so few birds, but it certainly looked
as though the ice had not formed very long. Were these the first
arrivals? Had a previous rookery been blown out to sea and was this the
beginning of a second attempt? Is this bay of sea-ice becoming unsafe?

Those who previously discovered the Emperors with their chicks saw the
penguins nursing dead and frozen chicks if they were unable to obtain a
live one. They also found decomposed eggs which they must have incubated
after they had been frozen. Now we found that these birds were so anxious
to sit on something that some of those which had no eggs were sitting on
ice! Several times Bill and Birdie picked up eggs to find them lumps of
ice, rounded and about the right size, dirty and hard. Once a bird
dropped an ice nest egg as they watched, and again a bird returned and
tucked another into itself, immediately forsaking it for a real one,
however, when one was offered.

Meanwhile a whole procession of Emperors came round under the cliff on
which I stood. The light was already very bad and it was well that my
companions were quick in returning: we had to do everything in a great
hurry. I hauled up the eggs in their mitts (which we fastened together
round our necks with lampwick lanyards) and then the skins, but failed to
help Bill at all. "Pull," he cried, from the bottom: "I am pulling," I
said. "But the line's quite slack down here," he shouted. And when he had
reached the top by climbing up on Bowers' shoulders, and we were both
pulling all we knew Birdie's end of the rope was still slack in his
hands. Directly we put on a strain the rope cut into the ice edge and
jammed—a very common difficulty when working among crevasses. We tried
to run the rope over an ice-axe without success, and things began to look
serious when Birdie, who had been running about prospecting and had
meanwhile put one leg through a crack into the sea, found a place where
the cliff did not overhang. He cut steps for himself, we hauled, and at
last we were all together on the top—his foot being by now surrounded by
a solid mass of ice.

We legged it back as hard as we could go: five eggs in our fur mitts,
Birdie with two skins tied to him and trailing behind, and myself with
one. We were roped up, and climbing the ridges and getting through the
holes was very difficult. In one place where there was a steep rubble and
snow slope down I left the ice-axe half way up; in another it was too
dark to see our former ice-axe footsteps, and I could see nothing, and so
just let myself go and trusted to luck. With infinite patience Bill said:
"Cherry, you
must
learn how to use an ice-axe." For the rest of the
trip my wind-clothes were in rags.

We found the sledge, and none too soon, and now had three eggs left,
more or less whole. Both mine had burst in my mitts: the first I emptied
out, the second I left in my mitt to put into the cooker; it never got
there, but on the return journey I had my mitts far more easily thawed
out than Birdie's (Bill had none) and I believe the grease in the egg did
them good. When we got into the hollows under the ridge where we had to
cross, it was too dark to do anything but feel our way. We did so over
many crevasses, found the ridge and crept over it. Higher up we could see
more, but to follow our tracks soon became impossible, and we plugged
straight ahead and luckily found the slope down which we had come. All
day it had been blowing a nasty cold wind with a temperature between -20°
and 30°, which we felt a good deal. Now it began to get worse. The
weather was getting thick and things did not look very nice when we
started up to find our tent. Soon it was blowing force 4, and soon we
missed our way entirely. We got right up above the patch of rocks which
marked our igloo and only found it after a good deal of search.