I don’t know why I found it so easy to sleep, but I did; sometimes, or so the others told me, I dozed off in the middle of a conversation. During those moments when I was dragged back to consciousness by the agony of stomach cramps, I felt Cherry shuddering against my back. One night, dreaming I was watching a tap dancer on the stage of the music-hall, his arms hung forward in that peculiar puppet stance, I woke to hear the chattering of Bill’s teeth.
Blizzard-bound, we passed the time speculating on who might be in that final party to reach the Pole. Both Cherry and I thought Bill would be one of them, for old time’s sake, but he insisted he was a scientist not a foot slogger, and he guessed the Owner would probably take myself and the two seamen, Lashly and Crean. I said surely Oates would be picked instead of me, and what about Teddy Evans, at which Bill laughed and said Evans hadn’t one chance in a hundred of being included. When we’d exhausted the possibilities, we conjectured what Amundsen was up to, and whether his chances were better than our own, bearing in mind the number of dogs he had with him.
Bill was cautious; I suspect he knew a lot more about the Owner’s plans than he let on. ‘There’s no doubt,’ he said, ‘that dogs have always been considered preferable to other forms of transport, but we haven’t really tested the efficiency of the motor vehicles.’
‘Lashly says they only work on perfectly flat surface,’ Cherry argued. ‘And only in certain temperatures.’
‘In my opinion,’ I told them, ‘I think there’s an unsporting element in the use of either motors or dogs. Far better to stride out, nation against nation, man against man.’
Bill held I was perhaps clinging to the inappropriate chivalry of a bygone age.
‘I see no reason to be ashamed of that,’ I retorted.
‘Then you see eye to eye with Con,’ Bill said, in a tone of voice which coming from him was positively chilling. ‘I just hope the rest of us don’t have cause to regret such romantic notions.’
Somewhat taken aback, I dropped the subject and switched to a topic we never tired of, namely what we might do when the whole exciting business was over and done with and we were back in England. ‘I shall spend an entire week swimming,’ I vowed. ‘And before that, an entire week eating.’
Bill said he intended to make straight for the woods near Crippets, his childhood home in the vicinity of Cheltenham. ‘I got more joy from those woods,’ he lamented, ‘and learnt more of things worth knowing than anywhere else on earth. It’s the haunt of the badger, the fox and the owl, and in spring the bluebells mirror the colour of the sky.’
‘Don’t,’ said Cherry, looking fit to cry.
‘When I had tuberculosis I used to go there at dawn, light my pipe, lean against a tree stump clutching Modern Painters and the New Testament, and watch the first sunbeams gradually lighting up the corners of the glade. I’ve never known such happiness. Of course, I believed I was dying, which alone brings extraordinary peace of mind.’
This rather silenced Cherry. Pressed, he astonished Bill and me by blurting forth his ambition of taking out to supper every girl he met. ‘She wouldn’t even have to be pretty,’ he stuttered. ‘Just so long as she seemed to like me.’
The blizzards subsiding, we stumbled onwards. Being the shortest, I led on the traces, Cherry and Bill fanning out behind. In the darkness Cherry was doubly blind; he could never wear his spectacles on the marches.
A curious thing happened when we were relaying the sledges. With only the candle to light the way we found it easier to tread back in our earlier footprints, and at first there was nothing remarkable in our progress. Then I became aware that both Bill and Cherry were floundering behind more than usual. On looking round I was astonished to see they were advancing as though prancing over hot coals. Apparently their footsteps, due to some optical delusion, appeared before them as elevations rather than depressions, and they found themselves compelled to raise their feet to step over what they took to be hummocks. I wasn’t affected. They called each other all kinds of a fool, but it didn’t help, and they were forced into the absurdity of continuing to clamber over phantom mounds. If it hadn’t been so wearisome we might have laughed.
On the twelfth day the temperature registered –69 degrees. Cherry crawled out of the tent and turned his head to the right, and instantly his balaclava froze to his wind-jacket. For four hours he had to pull with his head stuck in that position. Our clothing, with its accumulation of ice, was now becoming as heavy as lead, as were our sleeping-bags, and in the comparative warmth of the tent we lay in sodden misery. The days’ marches compared to the night ‘rests’ were heavenly, and both intervals of time were terrible beyond belief. Strange to think that in my mother’s garden the gold light of summer danced upon the maple leaves. Every morning, after I’d fumbled through the hour or more it took to light the candle in the lantern, Bill asked, ‘Should we turn back?’ and the answer mumbled through cracked lips was always the same, ‘No, we’ll stick it out.’
I don’t know what kept the others going, beyond the fact that Bill wanted his penguin embryos and Cherry was prepared to follow him to hell if need be. For my part, I felt there was something splendid, sublime even, in pitting oneself against the odds. I’ve always been fortunate in the things I’ve wanted to do, always achieved the goals I’ve set myself. Over the years I’ve bumped into fellows I was on the Worcester with, and quite a few of them, not having got anywhere quick enough, had given up the sea and were sitting behind desks in dusty offices, and others of the same age as myself were still no further forward than first mate of some leaky barque trading between Australia and the Philippines.
There is a portion of my life, of course, which has been less satisfactory. I’m well aware of how physically unprepossessing I must appear to the opposite sex, yet none the less I dream of meeting a girl who could care for me, the sort of girl my father found in my beloved mother. Those sisters I met in Melbourne, Dorothy and Mary, were frightfully nice. I liked Dorothy best, but she was the prettiest and had all the fellows flocking round her, and I’m just no good at dancing and paying compliments and all that rot. I never discovered which one sent me the jam, but I hope it was Dorothy. Seeing I haven’t yet reached thirty, I comfort myself with the thought there must be someone out there waiting for me to come through a door. And in the meantime, life is great fun and I couldn’t be more contented with my lot. The world is changing, and soon the machine will be of more importance than the body, and it’s tremendous luck to have been born into the last few seconds of an epoch in which a man is still required to stand up and be counted.
It took us nineteen days to reach Cape Crozier. Bill was terribly bothered, as he’d told the Owner we’d be there and back in ten. I think I knew by then we’d get through. Sometime in the second week, when we were floundering across the pressure ridges, Mt Terror above us, but invisible, and the Barrier to our right, the moon flitted out from behind the clouds, and there, only five paces ahead of us, was a gigantic crevasse lidded with a shiny covering of thin ice. At the time we were running downhill, the sledges at our heels and, but for that sudden pale illumination we would most certainly have perished. I understood then that providence was on our side; it was unthinkable to believe God would save us simply to prolong the agony.
From then on Bill insisted on going ahead with the lantern to make sure the surface was firm. I wanted to take my turn but he begged me to do as he bade. ‘I got us into this mess,’ he said, ‘and I simply couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you and Cherry.’
It wasn’t all misery. On one of our halts we lay spread-eagled on the ice and stared up at a sky blazing with the glory of the most wonderful aurora I’d ever witnessed. I groaned beneath the splendour of those silken curtains, yellow, green, and orange, billowing at the window of the heavens.
‘Tell me, tell me,’ pleaded Cherry; without his glasses the whirling display was but a blur.
I don’t know what I told him, for the effects were at first mesmeric, then hallucina
tory. I was falling, diving towards a sea whose ripples spread and widened until they touched the edges of my soul. I know at one point Bill began to squeal with laughter – our lips were so split and caked with dried blood it was painful to open them fully – and when we demanded to know what was funny, he said, ‘Ask me what I’m doing here, you dear fellows.’
Ever obliging, Cherry croaked, ‘What are you doing here, Uncle Bill?’ And he replied, ‘I’ve never liked crowds’, and then we all squealed, because we could see the humour of it: three ragged, frosted figures lying on their backs in the darkness of nowhere, emitting cries like stuck pigs as God’s own paintbrush splashed among the stars.
At last we reached the Cape, and in a snowy dip between the twin peaks of the Knoll, 800 feet above the sea, we pitched our last camp and set to work to build the igloo. This was Bill’s pet project; before we left we spent hours poring over the sketches he made of this temporary refuge of ice and stones. He called it Oriana’s house, and sometimes we’d pretended to squabble as to where the sofa and the bookcases would go and who should have the bedroom overlooking the sea.
We’d even practised building one like it on the shore below the hut, but that was in daylight and in the ‘mildness’ of March, and here the ice had hardened to the consistency of marble, and it was fearful labour cutting the blocks for the walls and shovelling the bits of gravel and drifted snow with which to pack the cracks. Still, in two days it was finished, the canvas roof secured, the blubber stove in place, and then we fought our way into those devilish sleeping-bags, whereupon I, at least, slept the sleep of the dead.
We rose at three the next morning, into moonlight misty with fog. It’s at Cape Evans that the Barrier, that great wall of ice which extends 400 miles south and east, meets the land, and we could just make out the tumultuous shapes of the pressure fields jostling the smudged edge of the frozen sea. On Bill’s reckoning it was four miles to the cliffs, and he wanted to get there by midday so as to have the benefit of the twilight hour. Blubber for the stove was now a more urgent priority than Emperor eggs; we were a quarter of a way through the fifth of those six precious tins of oil the Owner had so begrudged our taking.
The last two miles took us through the pressure ridges, and by then the moon had gone. Imagine an acre, newly ploughed, in the heart of the English countryside, the noonday sun filtering through the branches of the oak trees at the boundary, the plump plough-horses standing motionless in the shade, the ploughboy fast asleep with his hat over his eyes. Then imagine, if you can, a field churned up by the flails of a plough so monstrous in size that the ensuing furrows sink sixty feet, the embankments on either side twisted and fissured into tortured mounds of glittering ice veined with crevasses, the whole landscape dim as the interior of a cave in which every shadow fades to deepest black. If you can imagine this, you may still have only the faintest, foggiest grasp of what we were up against.
When we did get through, roped together and working with pickaxes; Bill couldn’t find his old route between the rock wall and the ice cliff. No matter how many attempts we made to clamber downwards, there was always too huge an obstacle or too great a drop. Then Bill would veer in another direction and shout out a warning of a crevasse ahead. I would cross, followed by Cherry, who, all but blind without his spectacles, stepped time without number into the void. Poor fellow, he was dreadfully upset at being such a handicap to us.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he panted, on each occasion we hauled him out. ‘I should never have come.’
‘You’re the best travelling companion a chap could wish for,’ I assured him. ‘Even if you do keep giving us the slip.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Bill told him. ‘If anyone’s to blame, I am’, and he gripped Cherry’s arm and begged him to be careful.
On we blundered, staggering, rolling down snowslopes, the sledge catching our heels and knocking us off our feet. We were like flies fluttering against a window that would never open. And by now the twilight had faded. At last, exhausted, we floundered to a halt, all but sinking to our knees. It was then, from somewhere below us on the sea-ice, we heard the Emperors calling.
I can’t tell you how bucked we were, especially for Bill. I was all for going on, but he said it was far too dangerous and we needed food and rest. On the way back I don’t think any of us gave much thought to the crevasses; we were past caring and it was time to put our trust in Someone else, for we had gone beyond the point when we could look after ourselves.
I swear my mother was with me, or rather waiting somewhere ahead, not smiling or beckoning, but there all the same, the firelight flickering across her dear face, her Moody and Sanky hymn book on her lap. There was a moment, levering Cherry up from yet another crevasse, when I thought I heard her singing, and I turned my head to one side the better to catch the tune. I’m not ashamed to say tears came into my eyes, of affection not weakness, tears which froze as they fell.
That night we camped in Oriana’s house and used up yet more oil cooking our supper. We’d gone without food two nights running to save on fuel, making do with a drink of hot water, and I think Cherry might have died if we’d done so again. Truth to tell, the tent with its double lining was warmer than the igloo, but we’d shifted the cooker and the sleeping bags and were simply too done in to lug them back again.
Bill was fearfully alarmed at the state of our clothing. Once they were half-way thawed we’d got into the habit of wrapping them round our limbs in order to prevent them sticking out at odd angles, but it was a risky business; sometimes they froze so tightly to our bodies it was like being encased in armour, with the result we could hardly drag one leg after the other. My green hat, which I’d adapted for the journey by adding ear flaps and neck guards and whatnot, was a never-failing source of amusement. If I’d fallen asleep with it still in place I woke to find its appendages hanging about my cheeks, and when I went outside and pushed them out of the way they froze into the most astonishing shapes. Often I marched with what appeared to be a jerry balanced on my head, handles and all, and another time, ducking my way out of the tent after one of the blizzards, a shower of drift settled on the top and instantly sculptured itself into a rough approximation of an alighting bird, though God knows, an ornithologist would have been hard put to name the species. Spying it, Cherry sang out: ‘For you don’t know Nellie like I do/Said the naughty little bird on Nellie’s hat’, which was the chorus of one of Meares’s favourite gramophone records back at Cape Evans.
We got up early again, and it was no great hardship. I can’t pretend we were rested, yet we were cheerful enough, the experiences of the day before having convinced us that the pressure ridges ran further out into the bay than in Discovery times, and that Bill’s old route had gone. We’d made up our minds there was only one way down – over the cliffs. A 200-foot descent in darkness was unthinkable, but I’d spotted a break in the rocks from which hung an ice-floe. It was just possible we could get down to the rookery on this.
We reached the cliffs seven hours later and descended a fair distance, cutting steps where our crampons couldn’t find a foothold, scrambling over and under those gigantic growths squeezed up by the moving ice, only to meet a glacial wall which even a madman would have recognised as impassable. Like spiders we crawled sideways, and suddenly Bill shouted out triumphantly, ‘Birdie, over here!’, and there in front of us was a black tunnel burrowed into the ice, just wide enough for a man to enter.
‘Here goes,’ Bill said, and we followed him, wriggling and slithering through that fox’s hole until we emerged on a crystallised ledge above the bay. Below us, uttering metallic cries of alarm and looking like so many overworked waiters, strutted the Emperor penguins.
There was a snorter of a drop onto the sea-ice, not so difficult to make if one was planning on staying below, but ticklish if one was contemplating coming up again. Cherry volunteered to stay behind to haul us aloft; being blind as a bat, this was no more than sensible.
Bill and I slaughtered three o
f the Emperors for their blubber – each bird weighed in excess of six stone – and took five of their eggs. Bill was concerned at the decline in their numbers. The Discovery expedition had found over 2000 birds breeding in the bay, and now there were less than a hundred, and half of those were without eggs. I thought them peculiarly and disturbingly human, in that when we lunged forward to plunge a knife into their breasts, and missed, they waddled further off and then stopped to look back, standing there in an attitude of saintly reproachfulness. I couldn’t decide whether they were stupid or possessed of superior intelligence, and prayed it was the former.
Getting back up the cliff was a nightmare. The rope got snagged and we dangled round and round, fighting for a foothold on that slippery incline. Not once throughout our dreadful journey had a cross word come between us, nor had we forgotten the civilities, those please-and-thank-yous which can mean so much when everything else has gone by the board. When it came to it, none of us had dodged the column and each had put the other’s welfare above his own. I believe Bill and Cherry to be giants among men, incapable of self-interest, and time and again I saw them snap their fingers in the face of the Prince of Darkness – and now, when the rope was slack and Cherry’s pickaxe came hurtling past us, Bill broke and shouted out, ‘Cherry, for God’s sake, man, pull.’
The Birthday Boys Page 13