The Worst Journey in the World (47 page)

I have heard tell of an English officer at the Dardanelles who was left,
blinded, in No Man's Land between the English and Turkish trenches.
Moving only at night, and having no sense to tell him which were his own
trenches, he was fired at by Turk and English alike as he groped his
ghastly way to and from them. Thus he spent days and nights until, one
night, he crawled towards the English trenches, to be fired at as usual.
"Oh God! what can I do!" some one heard him say, and he was brought in.

Such extremity of suffering cannot be measured: madness or death may give
relief. But this I know: we on this journey were already beginning to
think of death as a friend. As we groped our way back that night,
sleepless, icy, and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, a
crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift.

"Things must improve," said Bill next day, "I think we reached bed-rock
last night." We hadn't, by a long way.

It was like this.

We moved into the igloo for the first time, for we had to save oil by
using our blubber stove if we were to have any left to travel home with,
and we did not wish to cover our tent with the oily black filth which the
use of blubber necessitates. The blizzard blew all night, and we were
covered with drift which came in through hundreds of leaks: in this
wind-swept place we had found no soft snow with which we could pack our
hard snow blocks. As we flensed some blubber from one of our penguin
skins the powdery drift covered everything we had.

Though uncomfortable this was nothing to worry about overmuch. Some of
the drift which the blizzard was bringing would collect to leeward of our
hut and the rocks below which it was built, and they could be used to
make our hut more weather-proof. Then with great difficulty we got the
blubber stove to start, and it spouted a blob of boiling oil into Bill's
eye. For the rest of the night he lay, quite unable to stifle his groans,
obviously in very great pain: he told us afterwards that he thought his
eye was gone. We managed to cook a meal somehow, and Birdie got the stove
going afterwards, but it was quite useless to try and warm the place. I
got out and cut the green canvas outside the door, so as to get the roof
cloth in under the stones, and then packed it down as well as I could
with snow, and so blocked most of the drift coming in.

It is extraordinary how often angels and fools do the same thing in this
life, and I have never been able to settle which we were on this journey.
I never heard an angry word: once only (when this same day I could not
pull Bill up the cliff out of the penguin rookery) I heard an impatient
one: and these groans were the nearest approach to complaint. Most men
would have howled. "I think we reached bed-rock last night," was strong
language for Bill. "I was incapacitated for a short time," he says in his
report to Scott.
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Endurance was tested on this journey under unique
circumstances, and always these two men with all the burden of
responsibility which did not fall upon myself, displayed that quality
which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make
for success, self-control.

We spent the next day—it was July 21—in collecting every scrap of soft
snow we could find and packing it into the crevasses between our hard
snow blocks. It was a pitifully small amount but we could see no cracks
when we had finished. To counteract the lifting tendency the wind had on
our roof we cut some great flat hard snow blocks and laid them on the
canvas top to steady it against the sledge which formed the ridge
support. We also pitched our tent outside the igloo door. Both tent and
igloo were therefore eight or nine hundred feet up Terror: both were
below an outcrop of rocks from which the mountain fell steeply to the
Barrier behind us, and from this direction came the blizzards. In front
of us the slope fell for a mile or more down to the ice-cliffs, so
wind-swept that we had to wear crampons to walk upon it. Most of the tent
was in the lee of the igloo, but the cap of it came over the igloo roof,
while a segment of the tent itself jutted out beyond the igloo wall.

That night we took much of our gear into the tent and lighted the blubber
stove. I always mistrusted that stove, and every moment I expected it to
flare up and burn the tent. But the heat it gave, as it burned furiously,
with the double lining of the tent to contain it, was considerable.

It did not matter, except for a routine which we never managed to keep,
whether we started to thaw our way into our frozen sleeping-bags at 4 in
the morning or 4 in the afternoon. I think we must have turned in during
the afternoon of that Friday, leaving the cooker, our finnesko, a deal of
our foot-gear, Bowers' bag of personal gear, and many other things in the
tent. I expect we left the blubber stove there too, for it was quite
useless at present to try and warm the igloo. The tent floor-cloth was
under our sleeping-bags in the igloo.

"Things must improve," said Bill. After all there was much for which to
be thankful. I don't think anybody could have made a better igloo with
the hard snow blocks and rocks which were all we had: we would get it
air-tight by degrees. The blubber stove was working, and we had fuel for
it: we had also found a way down to the penguins and had three complete,
though frozen eggs: the two which had been in my mitts smashed when I
fell about because I could not wear spectacles. Also the twilight given
by the sun below the horizon at noon was getting longer.

But already we had been out twice as long in winter as the longest
previous journeys in spring. The men who made those journeys had daylight
where we had darkness, they had never had such low temperatures,
generally nothing approaching them, and they had seldom worked in such
difficult country. The nearest approach to healthy sleep we had had for
nearly a month was when during blizzards the temperature allowed the
warmth of our bodies to thaw some of the ice in our clothing and
sleeping-bags into water. The wear and tear on our minds was very great.
We were certainly weaker. We had a little more than a tin of oil to get
back on, and we knew the conditions we had to face on that journey across
the Barrier: even with fresh men and fresh gear it had been almost
unendurable.

And so we spent half an hour or more getting into our bags. Cirrus cloud
was moving across the face of the stars from the north, it looked rather
hazy and thick to the south, but it is always difficult to judge weather
in the dark. There was little wind and the temperature was in the minus
twenties. We felt no particular uneasiness. Our tent was well dug in, and
was also held down by rocks and the heavy tank off the sledge which were
placed on the skirting as additional security. We felt that no power on
earth could move the thick walls of our igloo, nor drag the canvas roof
from the middle of the embankment into which it was packed and lashed.

"Things must improve," said Bill.

I do not know what time it was when I woke up. It was calm, with that
absolute silence which can be so soothing or so terrible as circumstances
dictate. Then there came a sob of wind, and all was still again. Ten
minutes and it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of
hysterics. The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar
of it all cannot be imagined.

"Bill, Bill, the tent has gone," was the next I remember—from Bowers
shouting at us again and again through the door. It is always these early
morning shocks which hit one hardest: our slow minds suggested that this
might mean a peculiarly lingering form of death. Journey after journey
Birdie and I fought our way across the few yards which had separated the
tent from the igloo door. I have never understood why so much of our gear
which was in the tent remained, even in the lee of the igloo. The place
where the tent had been was littered with gear, and when we came to
reckon up afterwards we had everything except the bottom piece of the
cooker, and the top of the outer cooker. We never saw these again. The
most wonderful thing of all was that our finnesko were lying where they
were left, which happened to be on the ground in the part of the tent
which was under the lee of the igloo. Also Birdie's bag of personal gear
was there, and a tin of sweets.

Birdie brought two tins of sweets away with him. One we had to celebrate
our arrival at the Knoll: this was the second, of which we knew nothing,
and which was for Bill's birthday, the next day. We started eating them
on Saturday, however, and the tin came in useful to Bill afterwards.

To get that gear in we fought against solid walls of black snow which
flowed past us and tried to hurl us down the slope. Once started nothing
could have stopped us. I saw Birdie knocked over once, but he clawed his
way back just in time. Having passed everything we could find in to Bill,
we got back into the igloo, and started to collect things together,
including our very dishevelled minds.

There was no doubt that we were in the devil of a mess, and it was not
altogether our fault. We had had to put our igloo more or less where we
could get rocks with which to build it. Very naturally we had given both
our tent and igloo all the shelter we could from the full force of the
wind, and now it seemed we were in danger not because they were in the
wind, but because they were not sufficiently in it. The main force of the
hurricane, deflected by the ridge behind, fled over our heads and
appeared to form by suction a vacuum below. Our tent had either been
sucked upwards into this, or had been blown away because some of it was
in the wind while some of it was not. The roof of our igloo was being
wrenched upwards and then dropped back with great crashes: the drift was
spouting in, not it seemed because it was blown in from outside, but
because it was sucked in from within: the lee, not the weather, wall was
the worst. Already everything was six or eight inches under snow.

Very soon we began to be alarmed about the igloo. For some time the heavy
snow blocks we had heaved up on to the canvas roof kept it weighted down.
But it seemed that they were being gradually moved off by the hurricane.
The tension became well-nigh unendurable: the waiting in all that welter
of noise was maddening. Minute after minute, hour after hour—those snow
blocks were off now anyway, and the roof was smashed up and down—no
canvas ever made could stand it indefinitely.

We got a meal that Saturday morning, our last for a very long time as it
happened. Oil being of such importance to us we tried to use the blubber
stove, but after several preliminary spasms it came to pieces in our
hands, some solder having melted; and a very good thing too, I thought,
for it was more dangerous than useful. We finished cooking our meal on
the primus. Two bits of the cooker having been blown away we had to
balance it on the primus as best we could. We then settled that in view
of the shortage of oil we would not have another meal for as long as
possible. As a matter of fact God settled that for us.

We did all we could to stop up the places where the drift was coming in,
plugging the holes with our socks, mitts and other clothing. But it was
no real good. Our igloo was a vacuum which was filling itself up as soon
as possible: and when snow was not coming in a fine black moraine dust
took its place, covering us and everything. For twenty-four hours we
waited for the roof to go: things were so bad now that we dare not unlash
the door.

Many hours ago Bill had told us that if the roof went he considered that
our best chance would be to roll over in our sleeping-bags until we were
lying on the openings, and get frozen and drifted in.

Gradually the situation got more desperate. The distance between the
taut-sucked canvas and the sledge on which it should have been resting
became greater, and this must have been due to the stretching of the
canvas itself and the loss of the snow blocks on the top: it was not
drawing out of the walls. The crashes as it dropped and banged out again
were louder. There was more snow coming through the walls, though all our
loose mitts, socks and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst
places: our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks
over the door. The rocks were lifting and shaking here till we thought
they would fall.

We talked by shouting, and long before this one of us proposed to try and
get the Alpine rope lashed down over the roof from outside. But Bowers
said it was an absolute impossibility in that wind. "You could never ask
men at sea to try such a thing," he said. He was up and out of his bag
continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof to try and
prevent the flapping and so forth. He was magnificent.

And then it went.

Birdie was over by the door, where the canvas which was bent over the
lintel board was working worse than anywhere else. Bill was practically
out of his bag pressing against some part with a long stick of some kind.
I don't know what I was doing but I was half out of and half in my bag.

The top of the door opened in little slits and that green Willesden
canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments in fewer seconds than it
takes to read this. The uproar of it all was indescribable. Even above
the savage thunder of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of
the canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips. The highest rocks
which we had built into our walls fell upon us, and a sheet of drift came
in.

Birdie dived for his sleeping-bag and eventually got in, together with a
terrible lot of drift. Bill also—but he was better off: I was already
half into mine and all right, so I turned to help Bill. "Get into your
own," he shouted, and when I continued to try and help him, he leaned
over until his mouth was against my ear. "
Please
, Cherry," he said, and
his voice was terribly anxious. I know he felt responsible: feared it was
he who had brought us to this ghastly end.