The Worst Journey in the World (49 page)

For days Birdie had been urging me to use his eider-down lining—his
beautiful dry bag of the finest down—which he had never slipped into his
own fur bag. I had refused: I felt that I should be a beast to take it.

We packed the tank ready for a start back in the morning and turned in,
utterly worn out. It was only -12° that night, but my left big toe was
frost-bitten in my bag which I was trying to use without an eider-down
lining, and my bag was always too big for me. It must have taken several
hours to get it back, by beating one foot against the other. When we got
up, as soon as we could, as we did every night, for our bags were nearly
impossible, it was blowing fairly hard and looked like blizzing. We had a
lot to do, two or three hours' work, packing sledges and making a depôt
of what we did not want, in a corner of the igloo. We left the second
sledge, and a note tied to the handle of the pickaxe.

"We started down the slope in a wind which was rising all the time and
-15°. My job was to balance the sledge behind: I was so utterly done I
don't believe I could have pulled effectively. Birdie was much the
strongest of us. The strain and want of sleep was getting me in the neck,
and Bill looked very bad. At the bottom we turned our faces to the
Barrier, our backs to the penguins, but after doing about a mile it
looked so threatening in the south that we camped in a big wind, our
hands going one after the other. We had nothing but the hardest
wind-swept sastrugi, and it was a long business: there was only the
smallest amount of drift, and we were afraid the icy snow blocks would
chafe the tent. Birdie lashed the full biscuit tin to the door to
prevent its flapping, and also got what he called the tent downhaul round
the cap and then tied it about himself outside his bag: if the tent went
he was going too.

"I was feeling as if I should crack, and accepted Birdie's eider-down. It
was wonderfully self-sacrificing of him: more than I can write. I felt a
brute to take it, but I was getting useless unless I got some sleep which
my big bag would not allow. Bill and Birdie kept on telling me to do
less: that I was doing more than my share of the work: but I think that I
was getting more and more weak. Birdie kept wonderfully strong: he slept
most of the night: the difficulty for him was to get into his bag without
going to sleep. He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but some of
these nights he had to give it up for the time because he could not keep
awake. He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his hand and let it
fall: and sometimes he had the primus.

"Bill's bag was getting hopeless: it was really too small for an
eider-down and was splitting all over the place: great long holes. He
never consciously slept for nights: he did sleep a bit, for we heard him.
Except for this night, and the next when Birdie's eider-down was still
fairly dry, I never consciously slept; except that I used to wake for
five or six nights running with the same nightmare—that we were drifted
up, and that Bill and Birdie were passing the gear into my bag, cutting
it open to do so, or some other variation,—I did not know that I had
been asleep at all."
^[153]

"We had hardly reached the pit," wrote Bowers, "when a furious wind came
on again and we had to camp. All that night the tent flapped like the
noise of musketry, owing to two poles having been broken at the ends and
the fit spoilt. I thought it would end matters by going altogether and
lashed it down as much as I could, attaching the apex to a line round my
own bag. The wind abated after 1½ days and we set out, doing five or six
miles before we found ourselves among crevasses."
^[154]

We had plugged ahead all that day (July 26) in a terrible light,
blundering in among pressure and up on to the slopes of Terror. The
temperature dropped from -21° to -45°. "Several times [we] stepped into
rotten-lidded crevasses in smooth wind-swept ice. We continued, however,
feeling our way along by keeping always off hard ice-slopes and on the
crustier deeper snow which characterizes the hollows of the pressure
ridges, which I believed we had once more fouled in the dark. We had no
light, and no landmarks to guide us, except vague and indistinct
silhouetted slopes ahead, which were always altering and whose distance
and character it was impossible to judge. We never knew whether we were
approaching a steep slope at close quarters or a long slope of Terror,
miles away, and eventually we travelled on by the ear, and by the feel of
the snow under our feet, for both the sound and the touch told one much
of the chances of crevasses or of safe going. We continued thus in the
dark in the hope that we were at any rate in the right direction."
^[155]
And then we camped after getting into a bunch of crevasses, completely
lost. Bill said, "At any rate I think we are well clear of the pressure."
But there were pressure pops all night, as though some one was whacking
an empty tub.

It was Birdie's picture hat which made the trouble next day. "What do you
think of
that
for a hat, sir?" I heard him say to Scott a few days
before we started, holding it out much as Lucille displays her latest
Paris model. Scott looked at it quietly for a time: "I'll tell you when
you come back, Birdie," he said. It was a complicated affair with all
kinds of nose-guards and buttons and lanyards: he thought he was going to
set it to suit the wind much as he would set the sails of a ship. We
spent a long time with our housewifes before this and other trips, for
everybody has their own ideas as to how to alter their clothing for the
best. When finished some looked neat, like Bill: others baggy, like Scott
or Seaman Evans: others rough and ready, like Oates and Bowers: a few
perhaps more rough than ready, and I will not mention names. Anyway
Birdie's hat became improper immediately it was well iced up.

"When we got a little light in the morning we found we were a little
north of the two patches of moraine on Terror. Though we did not know it,
we were on the point where the pressure runs up against Terror, and we
could dimly see that we were right up against something. We started to
try and clear it, but soon had an enormous ridge, blotting out the
moraine and half Terror, rising like a great hill on our right. Bill said
the only thing was to go right on and hope it would lower; all the time,
however, there was a bad feeling that we might be putting any number of
ridges between us and the mountain. After a while we tried to cross this
one, but had to turn back for crevasses, both Bill and I putting a leg
down. We went on for about twenty minutes and found a lower place, and
turned to rise up it diagonally, and reached the top. Just over the top
Birdie went right down a crevasse, which was about wide enough to take
him. He was out of sight and out of reach from the surface, hanging in
his harness. Bill went for his harness, I went for the bow of the sledge:
Bill told me to get the Alpine rope and Birdie directed from below what
we could do. We could not possibly haul him up as he was, for the sides
of the crevasse were soft and he could not help himself."
^[156]

"My helmet was so frozen up," wrote Bowers, "that my head was encased in
a solid block of ice, and I could not look down without inclining my
whole body. As a result Bill stumbled one foot into a crevasse and I
landed in it with both mine [even as I shouted a warning
^[157]
], the
bridge gave way and down I went. Fortunately our sledge harness is made
with a view to resisting this sort of thing, and there I hung with the
bottomless pit below and the ice-crusted sides alongside, so narrow that
to step over it would have been quite easy had I been able to see it.
Bill said, 'What do you want?' I asked for an Alpine rope with a bowline
for my foot: and taking up first the bowline and then my harness they got
me out."
^[158]
Meanwhile on the surface I lay over the crevasse and gave
Birdie the bowline: he put it on his foot: then he raised his foot,
giving me some slack: I held the rope while he raised himself on his
foot, thus giving Bill some slack on the harness: Bill then held the
harness, allowing Birdie to raise his foot and give me some slack again.
We got him up inch by inch, our fingers getting bitten, for the
temperature was -46°. Afterwards we often used this way of getting people
out of crevasses, and it was a wonderful piece of presence of mind that
it was invented, so far as I know, on the spur of the moment by a frozen
man hanging in one himself.

"In front of us we could see another ridge, and we did not know how many
lay beyond that. Things looked pretty bad. Bill took a long lead on the
Alpine rope and we got down our present difficulty all right. This method
of the leader being on a long trace in front we all agreed to be very
useful. From this moment our luck changed and everything went for us to
the end. When we went out on the sea-ice the whole experience was over in
a few days, Hut Point was always in sight, and there was daylight. I
always had the feeling that the whole series of events had been brought
about by an extraordinary run of accidents, and that after a certain
stage it was quite beyond our power to guide the course of them. When on
the way to Cape Crozier the moon suddenly came out of the cloud to show
us a great crevasse which would have taken us all with our sledge without
any difficulty, I felt that we were not to go under this trip after such
a deliverance. When we had lost our tent, and there was a very great
balance of probability that we should never find it again, and we were
lying out the blizzard in our bags, I saw that we were face to face with
a long fight against cold which we could not have survived. I cannot
write how helpless I believed we were to help ourselves, and how we were
brought out of a very terrible series of experiences. When we started
back I had a feeling that things were going to change for the better, and
this day I had a distinct idea that we were to have one more bad
experience and that after that we could hope for better things.

"By running along the hollow we cleared the pressure ridges, and
continued all day up and down, but met no crevasses. Indeed, we met no
more crevasses and no more pressure. I think it was upon this day that a
wonderful glow stretched over the Barrier edge from Cape Crozier: at the
base it was the most vivid crimson it is possible to imagine, shading
upwards through every shade of red to light green, and so into a deep
blue sky. It is the most vivid red I have ever seen in the sky."
^[159]

It was -49° in the night and we were away early in -47°. By mid-day we
were rising Terror Point, opening Erebus rapidly, and got the first
really light day, though the sun would not appear over the horizon for
another month. I cannot describe what a relief the light was to us. We
crossed the point outside our former track, and saw inside us the ridges
where we had been blizzed for three days on our outward journey.

The minimum was -66° the next night and we were now back in the windless
bight of Barrier with its soft snow, low temperatures, fogs and mists,
and lingering settlements of the inside crusts. Saturday and Sunday, the
29th and 30th, we plugged on across this waste, iced up as usual but
always with Castle Rock getting bigger. Sometimes it looked like fog or
wind, but it always cleared away. We were getting weak, how weak we can
only realize now, but we got in good marches, though slow—days when we
did 4½, 7¼ 6¾, 6½, 7½ miles. On our outward journey we had been relaying
and getting forward about 4½ miles a day at this point. The surface which
we had dreaded so much was not so sandy or soft as when we had come out,
and the settlements were more marked. These are caused by a crust falling
under your feet. Generally the area involved is some twenty yards or so
round you, and the surface falls through an air space for two or three
inches with a soft 'crush' which may at first make you think there are
crevasses about. In the region where we now travelled they were much more
pronounced than elsewhere, and one day, when Bill was inside the tent
lighting the primus, I put my foot into a hole that I had dug. This
started a big settlement; sledge, tent and all of us dropped about a
foot, and the noise of it ran away for miles and miles: we listened to it
until we began to get too cold. It must have lasted a full three minutes.

In the pauses of our marching we halted in our harnesses the ropes of
which lay slack in the powdery snow. We stood panting with our backs
against the mountainous mass of frozen gear which was our load. There was
no wind, at any rate no more than light airs: our breath crackled as it
froze. There was no unnecessary conversation: I don't know why our
tongues never got frozen, but all my teeth, the nerves of which had been
killed, split to pieces. We had been going perhaps three hours since
lunch.

"How are your feet, Cherry?" from Bill.

"Very cold."

"That's all right; so are mine." We didn't worry to ask Birdie: he never
had a frost-bitten foot from start to finish.

Half an hour later, as we marched, Bill would ask the same question. I
tell him that all feeling has gone: Bill still has some feeling in one of
his but the other is lost. He settled we had better camp: another ghastly
night ahead. We started to get out of our harnesses, while Bill, before
doing anything else, would take the fur mitts from his hands, carefully
shape any soft parts as they froze (generally, however, our mitts did not
thaw on our hands), and lay them on the snow in front of him—two dark
dots. His proper fur mitts were lost when the igloo roof went: these were
the delicate dog-skin linings we had in addition, beautiful things to
look at and to feel when new, excellent when dry to turn the screws of a
theodolite, but too dainty for straps and lanyards. Just now I don't know
what he could have done without them.