The Worst Journey in the World (74 page)

O to dream, O to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence,
Quiet breath;
Lo! for there among the flowers and grasses,
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and rivers,
Life and death.

The flowers were of snow, the rivers of ice, and if Stevenson had been to
the Antarctic he would have made them so.

God sent His daylight to scatter the nightmares of the darkness. I can
remember now the joy of an August day when the sun looked over the rim of
the Barne Glacier, and my shadow lay clear-cut upon the snow. It was
wonderful what a friendly thing that ice-slope became. We put the first
trace upon the sunshine recorder; there was talk of expeditions to Cape
Royds and Hut Point, and survey parties; and we ate our luncheon by the
daylight which shone through the newly cleared window.

The coming Search Journey was organized to reach the Upper Glacier Depôt,
and the plans were modelled upon the Polar Journey of the year before.
But now we had no extensive depôts on the Barrier. It was intended that
the dogs should run two trips out to Corner Camp during this spring. It
was hoped that two parties of four men each might be able to ascend the
Beardmore, one of them remaining about half-way up and doing geological
and other scientific work while the other went up to the top.

In our inmost thoughts we were full of doubts and fears. "I had a long
talk with Lashly, who asked me what I candidly thought had happened to
the Southern Party. I told him a crevasse. He says he does not think so:
he thinks it is scurvy. Talking about crevasses he says that, on the
return of the Second Return Party, they came right over the ice-falls
south of Mount Darwin,—descending about 2000 feet into a great valley,
down which they travelled towards the west, and so to the Upper Glacier
Depôt. I believe Scott told Evans (Lieut.) that he meant to come back
this same way."

"Then the stuff they got into above the Cloudmaker must have been
horrible. 'Why, there are places there you could put St. Paul's into, and
that's no exaggeration, neither,' and they spent two nights in it. All
the way down to the Gateway he says there were crevasses, great big
fellows thirty feet across, which we of the First Return Party had
crossed both going and coming back and which we never saw. But then much
of the snow had gone and they were visible. Lieut. Evans was very badly
snowblind most of this time. Then outside the Gateway, on the Barrier,
they crossed many crevasses, and some had fallen in where we had passed
over them."

"This makes one think. Is the state of affairs in which we found the
glacier an extraordinary one, the snow being a special phenomenon due to
that great blizzard and snowfall? Are we going to find blue ice this year
where we found thick soft snow last? Well! I have got a regular bad
needle again, just as I have had before. But somehow the needle has
always worked off when we get right into it. What a blessing it is that
things are seldom as bad in the reality as you expect they are going to
be in your imagination: though I must say the Winter Journey was worse
even than I had imagined. I remember that this time last year the thought
of the Beardmore was very terrible: but the reality was never very bad."

"Lashly thinks it would be practically impossible for five men to
disappear down a crevasse. Where three men got through (and he said it
would be impossible to get worse stuff than they came through), five men
would be still better off. This is not my view, however. I think that the
extra weight of one man might make all the difference in crossing a big
crevasse: and if several men fell through one of those great bridges when
sledge and men were all on it, I do not think the bridge would hold the
sledge."
^[269]

Several trips were made to Cape Royds over the Barne Glacier, and then by
portaging over the rocks to Shackleton's old hut. The sea was open here,
except for small niches of ice, and the hut and the cape were
comparatively free from drifts; probably the open water had swallowed the
drifting snow. Not so Hut Point, which was surrounded by huge drifts: the
verandah which we had built up as a stable was filled from floor to roof:
there was no ice-foot to be seen, only a long snow-slope from the door to
the sea-level. The hut itself, when we had dug our way into it, was
clear. We took down stores for the Search Journey, and brought back with
us the only surviving sledge-meter.

These instruments, which indicate by a clockwork arrangement the distance
travelled in miles and yards, are actuated by a wheel which runs behind
the sledge. They are of the greatest possible use, especially when
sledging out of sight of land on the Barrier or Plateau, and we bitterly
regretted that we had no more. They do not have an easy time on a
glacier, and we lost the mechanism of one of our three Polar Journey
meters when on the Beardmore. Dog-driving is hard on them; and
pony-driving when the ponies are like Christopher plays the very deuce.
Anyway we found we had only one left for this year, and this was more or
less a dud. It was mended so far as possible but was never really
reliable, and latterly was useless. A lot of trouble was taken by Lashly
to make another with a bicycle wheel from one of our experimental trucks,
the revolutions of which were marked on a counter which was almost
exactly similar to one of our anemometer registers. A bicycle wheel of
course stood much higher than our proper sledge-meters, and a difficulty
rose in fixing it to the sledge so as to prevent its wobbling and at the
same time allow it the necessary amount of play.

Meanwhile the mules were being brought on in condition. With daylight and
improved weather they were exercised with loaded sledges on the sea-ice
which still remained in South Bay. They went like lambs, and were
evidently used to the work. Gulab was a troublesome little animal: he had
no objection to pulling a sledge, but was just ultra-timid. Again and
again he was got into position for having his traces hitched on, and each
time some little thing, the flapping of a mitt, the touch of the trace,
or the feel of the bow of the sledge, frightened him and he was off, and
the same performance had to be repeated. Once harnessed he was very good.
The breast harness sent down for them by the Indian Government was used:
it was excellent; though Oates, I believe, had an idea that collars were
better. However, we had not got the collars. The mules themselves looked
very fit and strong: our only doubt was whether their small hoofs would
sink into soft snow even farther than the ponies had done.

No record of this expedition would be complete without some mention of
the cases of fire which occurred. The first was in the lazarette of the
ship on the voyage to Cape Town: it was caused by an overturned lamp and
easily extinguished. The second was during our first winter in the
Antarctic, when there was a fire in the motor shed, which was formed by
full petrol cases built up round the motors, and roofed with a tarpaulin.
This threatened to be more serious, but was also put out without much
difficulty. The third and fourth cases were during the winter which had
just passed, and were both inside Winter Quarters.

Wright wanted a lamp to heat a shed which he was building out of cases
and tarpaulins for certain of his work. He brought a lamp (not a primus)
into the hut, and tried to make it work. He spent some time in the
morning on this, and after lunch Nelson joined him. The lamp was fitted
with an indicator to show the pressure obtained by pumping. Nelson was
pumping, kneeling at the end of the table next the bulkhead which divided
the officers' and men's quarters: his head was level with the lamp, and
the indicator was not showing a high pressure. Wright was standing close
by. Suddenly the lamp burst, a rent three inches long appearing in the
join where the bottom of the oil reservoir is fitted to the rest of the
bowl. Twenty places were alight immediately, clothing, bedding, papers
and patches of burning oil were all over the table and floor. Luckily
everybody was in the hut, for it was blowing a blizzard and minus twenty
outside. They were very quick, and every outbreak was stopped.

On September 5 it was blowing as if it would rip your wind-clothes off
you. We were bagging pemmican in the hut when some one said, "Can you
smell burning?" At first we could not see anything wrong, and Gran said
it must be some brown paper he had burnt; but after three or four
minutes, looking upwards, we saw that the top of the chimney piping was
red hot where it went out through the roof, as was also a large
ventilator trap which entered the flue at this point. We put salt down
from outside, and the fire seemed to die down, but shortly afterwards the
ventilator trap fell on to the table, leaving a cake of burning soot
exposed. This luckily did not fall, and we raked it down into buckets.
About a quarter of an hour afterwards all the chimney started blazing
again, the flames shooting up into the blizzard outside. We got this out
by pushing snow in at the top, and holding baths and buckets below to
catch the débris. We then did what we ought to have done at the beginning
of the winter—took the piping down and cleaned it all out.

Our last fire was a little business. Debenham and I were at Hut Point. I
noticed that the place was full of smoke, which was quite usual with a
blubber fire, but afterwards we found that the old hut was alight between
the two roofs. The inner roof was too shaky to allow one to walk on it,
and so, at Debenham's suggestion, we bent a tube which was lying about
and syphoned some water up with complete success. Our more usual fire
extinguishers were Minimax, and they left nothing to be desired: indeed,
all they left were the acid stains on the material touched.

From such grim considerations it is a pleasure to turn to the out-of-door
life we now led. Emperor penguins began to visit us in companies up to
forty in number: probably they were birds whose maternal or paternal
instincts had been thwarted at Cape Crozier and had now taken to a
vagrant life. They suffered, I am afraid, from the loose dogs, and on one
occasion Debenham was out on the sea-ice with a team of those dogs of
ours which were useless for serious sledging. He had taken them in hand
and formed a team which was very creditable to him, if not to themselves.
On this occasion he had managed with great difficulty to restrain them
from joining a company of Emperors. The dogs were frantic, the Emperors
undisturbed. Unable to go himself, one dog called Little Ginger
unselfishly bit through the harness which restrained two of his
companions, and Debenham, helplessly holding the straining sledge, could
only witness the slaughter, which followed.

The first skua gull arrived on October 24, and we knew they would soon
breed on any level gravel or rock free from snow; and we should see the
Antarctic petrels again, and perhaps a rare snowy petrel; and the first
whales would be finding their way into McMurdo Sound. Also the Weddells,
the common coastal seals of the Antarctic, were now, in the beginning of
October, leaving the open water and lying out on the ice. They were
nearly all females, and getting ready to give birth to their young.

The Weddell seal is black on top, and splashed with silver in other
places. He measures up to 10 feet from nose to tail, eats fish, is
corpulent and hulking. He sometimes carries four inches of blubber. On
the ice he is one of the most sluggish of God's creatures, he sleeps
continually, digests huge meals, and grunts, gurgles, pipes, trills and
whistles in the most engaging way. In the sea he is transformed into one
of the most elastic and lithe of beasts, catching his fish and swallowing
them whole. As you stand over his blow-hole his head appears, and he
snorts at you with surprise but no fear, opening and shutting his
nostrils the while as he takes in a supply of fresh air. It is clear that
they travel for many miles beneath the ice, and I expect they find their
way from air-hole to air-hole by listening to the noise made by other
seals. Some of the air-holes are exit and entrance holes as well, and I
found at least one seal which appeared to have died owing to its opening
freezing up. They may be heard at times grinding these holes open with
their teeth (Ponting took some patient cinematographs showing the process
of sawing the openings to these wells) and their teeth are naturally much
worn by the time they become old. Wilson states that they are liable to
kidney trouble: their skin is often irritable, which may be due to the
drying salt from the sea; and I have seen one seal which was covered with
a suppurating rash. Their spleens are sometimes enormously enlarged when
they first come out of the sea on to the ice, which is interesting
because no one seems to know much about spleens. Speculation was caused
amongst us by the fact that some of these air-holes had as it were a
trap-door above them. One day I was on the ice-foot at Cape Evans at a
time when North Bay was frozen over with about an inch or more of ice. A
seal suddenly poked his nose up through this ice to get air, and when he
disappeared a slab which had been raised by his head fell back into this
trap position. Clearly this was the origin of the door.

Weddell seals and the Hut Point life are inextricably mixed up in my
recollections of October. Atkinson, Debenham, Dimitri and I went down to
Hut Point on the 12th, with the two dog-teams. We were to run two depôts
out on to the Barrier, and Debenham, whose leg prevented his further
sledging, was to do geological work and a plane table survey. Those of us
who had borne the brunt of the travelling of the two previous sledge
seasons were sick of sledging. For my own part I confess I viewed the
whole proceedings with distaste, and I have no doubt the others did too;
but the job had to be done if possible, and there was no good in saying
we were sick of it. From beginning to end of this year men not only
laboured willingly, but put their hearts and souls into the work. To have
to do another three months' journey seemed bad enough, and to leave our
comfortable Winter Quarters three weeks before we started on that journey
was an additional irritation. We ran down in surface drift: it was thick
to the south, the wind bit our faces and hands; we could see nothing by
the time we got in, and the snow was falling heavily. The stable was full
of beastly snow, the hut was cold and cheerless, and there was no blubber
for the stove. And if we had only taken the ship and gone home when the
period for which we had joined was passed, we might have been in London
for the last six months!