The Worst Journey in the World (48 page)

The next I knew was Bowers' head across Bill's body. "We're all right,"
he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we
knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement
was helpful. Then we turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the
bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath
us. And we lay and thought, and sometimes we sang.

I suppose, wrote Wilson, we were all revolving plans to get back without
a tent: and the one thing we had left was the floor-cloth upon which we
were actually lying. Of course we could not speak at present, but later
after the blizzard had stopped we discussed the possibility of digging a
hole in the snow each night and covering it over with the floor-cloth. I
do not think we had any idea that we could really get back in those
temperatures in our present state of ice by such means, but no one ever
hinted at such a thing. Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and
hymns, snatches of which reached me every now and then, and I chimed in,
somewhat feebly I suspect. Of course we were getting pretty badly drifted
up. "I was resolved to keep warm," wrote Bowers, "and beneath my debris
covering I paddled my feet and sang all the songs and hymns I knew to
pass the time. I could occasionally thump Bill, and as he still moved I
knew he was alive all right—what a birthday for him!" Birdie was more
drifted up than we, but at times we all had to hummock ourselves up to
heave the snow off our bags. By opening the flaps of our bags we could
get small pinches of soft drift which we pressed together and put into
our mouths to melt. When our hands warmed up again we got some more; so
we did not get very thirsty. A few ribbons of canvas still remained in
the wall over our heads, and these produced volleys of cracks like pistol
shots hour after hour The canvas never drew out from the walls, not an
inch The wind made just the same noise as an express train running fast
through a tunnel if you have both the windows down.

I can well believe that neither of my companions gave up hope for an
instant. They must have been frightened but they were never disturbed. As
for me I never had any hope at all; and when the roof went I felt that
this was the end. What else could I think? We had spent days in reaching
this place through the darkness in cold such as had never been
experienced by human beings. We had been out for four weeks under
conditions in which no man had existed previously for more than a few
days, if that. During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer
physical exhaustion, as men sleep on the rack; and every minute of it we
had been fighting for the bed-rock necessaries of bare existence, and
always in the dark. We had kept ourselves going by enormous care of our
feet and hands and bodies, by burning oil, and by having plenty of hot
fatty food. Now we had no tent, one tin of oil left out of six, and only
part of our cooker. When we were lucky and not too cold we could almost
wring water from our clothes, and directly we got out of our
sleeping-bags we were frozen into solid sheets of armoured ice. In cold
temperatures with all the advantages of a tent over our heads we were
already taking more than an hour of fierce struggling and cramp to get
into our sleeping-bags—so frozen were they and so long did it take us to
thaw our way in. No! Without the tent we were dead men.

And there seemed not one chance in a million that we should ever see our
tent again. We were 900 feet up on the mountain side, and the wind blew
about as hard as a wind can blow straight out to sea. First there was a
steep slope, so hard that a pick made little impression upon it, so
slippery that if you started down in finnesko you never could stop: this
ended in a great ice-cliff some hundreds of feet high, and then came
miles of pressure ridges, crevassed and tumbled, in which you might as
well look for a daisy as a tent: and after that the open sea. The
chances, however, were that the tent had just been taken up into the air
and dropped somewhere in this sea well on the way to New Zealand.
Obviously the tent was gone.

Face to face with real death one does not think of the things that
torment the bad people in the tracts, and fill the good people with
bliss. I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but
candidly I did not care. I could not have wept if I had tried. I had no
wish to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to have been a
bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road
to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.

I wanted those years over again. What fun I would have with them: what
glorious fun! It was a pity. Well has the Persian said that when we come
to die we, remembering that God is merciful, will gnaw our elbows with
remorse for thinking of the things we have not done for fear of the Day
of Judgment.

And I wanted peaches and syrup—badly. We had them at the hut, sweeter
and more luscious than you can imagine. And we had been without sugar for
a month. Yes—especially the syrup.

Thus impiously I set out to die, making up my mind that I was not going
to try and keep warm, that it might not take too long, and thinking I
would try and get some morphia from the medical case if it got very bad.
Not a bit heroic, and entirely true! Yes! comfortable, warm reader. Men
do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.

And then quite naturally and no doubt disappointingly to those who would
like to read of my last agonies (for who would not give pleasure by his
death?) I fell asleep. I expect the temperature was pretty high during
this great blizzard, and anything near zero was very high to us. That
and the snow which drifted over us made a pleasant wet kind of snipe
marsh inside our sleeping-bags, and I am sure we all dozed a good bit.
There was so much to worry about that there was not the least use in
worrying; and we were so
very
tired. We were hungry, for the last meal
we had had was in the morning of the day before, but hunger was not very
pressing.

And so we lay, wet and quite fairly warm, hour after hour while the wind
roared round us, blowing storm force continually and rising in the gusts
to something indescribable. Storm force is force 11, and force 12 is the
biggest wind which can be logged: Bowers logged it force 11, but he was
always so afraid of overestimating that he was inclined to underrate. I
think it was blowing a full hurricane. Sometimes awake, sometimes dozing,
we had not a very uncomfortable time so far as I can remember. I knew
that parties which had come to Cape Crozier in the spring had experienced
blizzards which lasted eight or ten days. But this did not worry us as
much as I think it did Bill: I was numb. I vaguely called to mind that
Peary had survived a blizzard in the open: but wasn't that in the summer?

It was in the early morning of Saturday (July 22) that we discovered the
loss of the tent. Some time during that morning we had had our last meal.
The roof went about noon on Sunday and we had had no meal in the interval
because our supply of oil was so low; nor could we move out of our bags
except as a last necessity. By Sunday night we had been without a meal
for some thirty-six hours.

The rocks which fell upon us when the roof went did no damage, and though
we could not get out of our bags to move them, we could fit ourselves
into them without difficulty. More serious was the drift which began to
pile up all round and over us. It helped to keep us warm of course, but
at the same time in these comparatively high temperatures it saturated
our bags even worse than they were before. If we did not find the tent
(and its recovery would be a miracle) these bags and the floor-cloth of
the tent on which we were lying were all we had in that fight back
across the Barrier which could, I suppose, have only had one end.

Meanwhile we had to wait. It was nearly 70 miles home and it had taken us
the best part of three weeks to come. In our less miserable moments we
tried to think out ways of getting back, but I do not remember very much
about that time. Sunday morning faded into Sunday afternoon,—into Sunday
night,—into Monday morning. Till then the blizzard had raged with
monstrous fury; the winds of the world were there, and they had all gone
mad. We had bad winds at Cape Evans this year, and we had far worse the
next winter when the open water was at our doors. But I have never heard
or felt or seen a wind like this. I wondered why it did not carry away
the earth.

In the early hours of Monday there was an occasional hint of a lull.
Ordinarily in a big winter blizzard, when you have lived for several days
and nights with that turmoil in your ears, the lulls are more trying than
the noise: "the feel of not to feel it."
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I do not remember noticing
that now. Seven or eight more hours passed, and though it was still
blowing we could make ourselves heard to one another without great
difficulty. It was two days and two nights since we had had a meal.

We decided to get out of our bags and make a search for the tent. We did
so, bitterly cold and utterly miserable, though I do not think any of us
showed it. In the darkness we could see very little, and no trace
whatever of the tent. We returned against the wind, nursing our faces and
hands, and settled that we must try and cook a meal somehow. We managed
about the weirdest meal eaten north or south. We got the floor-cloth
wedged under our bags, then got into our bags and drew the floor-cloth
over our heads. Between us we got the primus alight somehow, and by hand
we balanced the cooker on top of it, minus the two members which had been
blown away. The flame flickered in the draughts. Very slowly the snow in
the cooker melted, we threw in a plentiful supply of pemmican, and the
smell of it was better than anything on earth. In time we got both tea
and pemmican, which was full of hairs from our bags, penguin feathers,
dirt and debris, but delicious. The blubber left in the cooker got burnt
and gave the tea a burnt taste. None of us ever forgot that meal: I
enjoyed it as much as such a meal could be enjoyed, and that burnt taste
will always bring back the memory.

It was still dark and we lay down in our bags again, but soon a little
glow of light began to come up, and we turned out to have a further
search for the tent. Birdie went off before Bill and me. Clumsily I
dragged my eider-down out of my bag on my feet, all sopping wet: it was
impossible to get it back and I let it freeze: it was soon just like a
rock. The sky to the south was as black and sinister as it could possibly
be. It looked as though the blizzard would be on us again at any moment.

I followed Bill down the slope. We could find nothing. But, as we
searched, we heard a shout somewhere below and to the right. We got on a
slope, slipped, and went sliding down quite unable to stop ourselves, and
came upon Birdie with the tent, the outer lining still on the bamboos.
Our lives had been taken away and given back to us.

We were so thankful we said nothing.

The tent must have been gripped up into the air, shutting as it rose. The
bamboos, with the inner lining lashed to them, had entangled the outer
cover, and the whole went up together like a shut umbrella. This was our
salvation. If it had opened in the air nothing could have prevented its
destruction. As it was, with all the accumulated ice upon it, it must
have weighed the best part of 100 lbs. It had been dropped about half a
mile away, at the bottom of a steep slope: and it fell in a hollow, still
shut up. The main force of the wind had passed over it, and there it was,
with the bamboos and fastenings wrenched and strained, and the ends of
two of the poles broken, but the silk untorn.

If that tent went again we were going with it. We made our way back up
the slope with it, carrying it solemnly and reverently, precious as
though it were something not quite of the earth. And we dug it in as
tent was never dug in before; not by the igloo, but in the old place
farther down where we had first arrived. And while Bill was doing this
Birdie and I went back to the igloo and dug and scratched and shook away
the drift inside until we had found nearly all our gear. It is wonderful
how little we lost when the roof went. Most of our gear was hung on the
sledge, which was part of the roof, or was packed into the holes of the
hut to try and make it drift-proof, and the things must have been blown
inwards into the bottom of the hut by the wind from the south and the
back draught from the north. Then they were all drifted up. Of course a
certain number of mitts and socks were blown away and lost, but the only
important things were Bill's fur mitts, which were stuffed into a hole in
the rocks of the hut. We loaded up the sledge and pushed it down the
slope. I don't know how Birdie was feeling, but I felt so weak that it
was the greatest labour. The blizzard looked right on top of us.

We had another meal, and we wanted it: and as the good hoosh ran down
into our feet and hands, and up into our cheeks and ears and brains, we
discussed what we would do next. Birdie was all for another go at the
Emperor penguins. Dear Birdie, he never would admit that he was beaten—I
don't know that he ever really was! "I think he (Wilson) thought he had
landed us in a bad corner and was determined to go straight home, though
I was for one other tap at the Rookery. However, I had placed myself
under his orders for this trip voluntarily, and so we started the next
day for home."
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There could really be no common-sense doubt: we had
to go back, and we were already very doubtful whether we should ever
manage to get into our sleeping-bags in very low temperature, so ghastly
had they become.

I don't know when it was, but I remember walking down that slope—I don't
know why, perhaps to try and find the bottom of the cooker—and thinking
that there was nothing on earth that a man under such circumstances
would not give for a good warm sleep. He would give everything he
possessed: he would give—how many—years of his life. One or two at any
rate—perhaps five? Yes—I would give five. I remember the sastrugi, the
view of the Knoll, the dim hazy black smudge of the sea far away below:
the tiny bits of green canvas that twittered in the wind on the surface
of the snow: the cold misery of it all, and the weakness which was biting
into my heart.