Slowly, painfully, I pulled myself up until my feet as well as my hands rested on the iron ladder: The sweat froze on my face as it formed. Great gasps from my lungs. I would have fallen if I had looked down. The ladder continued at a gentler angle once it was round the bulge of the overhang, and brought me out to a shallow plateau, from which the pathway continued to the summit, now clearly visible about five hundred feet farther up. I could not see the others because of the overhang, and although I heard Sailhardy shouting, the wind blew the words away. I tried shouting back, but it was futile. For perhaps a quarter of an hour I rested and recovered my nerve, and then stumbled up the easier gradient to the summit.
I dragged myself over the top. Fifty yards from the edge, up a gentle path, was a wooden hut, heavily shored and stayed against the gales. Lars Christensen's men had built the roverhullet well.
The hut was big enough for a dozen men, and there was an outbuilding which I guessed must be a store-room. Each corner of the structure, as well as the roof, was guyed to steel posts driven between fissures of the rock. In front was an iron 160
flagstaff, which had been bent double like a sapling by the gales. I wished I had the Luger as I moved slowly towards the roverhullet. Its lack of windows added to its air of utter desolation. The backdrop of the massive Christensen glacier made it appear puny. The front door was held by four big sliding bolts, unlocked, which were heavily greased. I slid them back and threw open the door. It was eerie and half-dark and for a moment I wondered whether I would find inside some ghastly corpse like the one the famous explorer, Sir James Clark Ross, had found in the Kerguelen Islands in the 1840s—a man with a bottle in his hand, terror in his eyes, and gigantic footprints leading up to him. .
I put such thoughts from my mind and stepped inside. It was hard to see, and there was that curious smell of frozenness which only the Antarctic can produce. The walls were flasked-lined with ice. There was a big stove in the centre of the first room, and a notice in Norwegian and English said:
" This hut is for the use of distressed seamen. There are stores, provisions, fuel and other necessaries in the store-room beyond. Please put back whatever is not used."
I went through two more rooms and had to bend down to
enter the store-room. When I saw the piles of sleeping bags, blankets, cases of kerosene lamps, and a host of paraphernalia so essential for survival in the Antarctic, I remembered that Christensen had originally planned to establish a weather station on Bouvet but had abandoned the thought after seeing the wildness of the place.
In a rack, heavily greased, were a number of ice-axes, pitons, skis and old-fashioned throwing harpoons, each with a length of rope attached to the shaft. There were coils of thick rope, hundreds of feet of it, but before it could be used it would have to be thawed out. I noted with approval that all the boxes—and indeed the joints of the hut itself—were all dovetails and dowels. There was not a nail to be seen. These men had known their job, for in the Antarctic, wood changes its nature and the cold dries it out so that nails lose their withdrawal resistance.
I took four ice-axes and one of the harpoons, whose steel shaft must have been six feet long, and some pitons. My
immediate task was to bring the party past the ice-ladder to the hut. We could make the path and ladder usable later on, but for the moment they would have to cut steps in the ice as far as the exposed rungs from which I had hung.
I stood at the top of the cliff and looked out at the distant G.I.
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catchers before starting down the track. Crozet was apart from the others. I watched in puzzlement, for I thought I could see her moving, since the orange of the helicopter showed against the general whiteness. Whatever she was about, it needed Sailhardy's eyesight to see. All I could distinguish was that Crozet was much nearer the ice than the others, who remained in the centre of the channel.
Then I saw. Radiating like spokes from a wheel hub, there were a number of other open passages between the ice to the north and north-east, converging on the towering northern cliffs of the island. They would be useless for a ship to negotiate, but for the whaleboat .. .
I craned over the cliff and looked down, ramming the harpoon's blade firmly in a crack of the rocks to hold. My altitude above the sea gave the effect of an aerial photograph of the ice below. A number of fissures in the ice-belt followed the contours of the island ; in other words, there were small open channels running round Bouvet which would easily take the whaleboat into one of the wider channels to the north, and so avoid the catchers, which lay to the south-west. Upton could not miss seeing them either.
I made my way slowly and cautiously down the path back to the great fortress rock and the ice-ladder. I climbed over the overhang, carrying two ice-axes, and shouted. Sailhardy's voice, tense with relief, came back. Crouching on the last exposed rung, I handed the axes down, and felt them being seized by invisible hands. I climbed back to the top of the overhang, with its dizzy drop to the sea.
For about fifteen minutes I heard the clunk of ice-steps being cut, and then Sailhardy, grinning, hauled himself alongside me.
" Bruce, boy!" he exclaimed. " I thought you were a goner that time! Is there a hut?"
I told him about the roverhullet and the supplies. " There's enough there to last us a year or more."
It was also Upton's first question when he appeared next. He seemed in great spirits when I told him about the hut.
Despite the height, he swung himself up and down on his toes in impatience to be off. Pirow looked like a ghost and Walter was sullen. All of them were blue with the cold and it was not until we neared the top that some colour came back into Pirow's face.
Upton, Walter and Pirow made straight for the hut, but I held back, touching Sailhardy's arm.
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" I want you to take a look at the catchers," I said. "I left my glasses behind in the factory ship. Crozet is easy to pick out because of the helicopter. It seems odd that she's against the ice."
Sailhardy took a long look. " It's not so strange," he said quietly. " She's doing exactly what Aurora did to get a steady platform. She's tied up to an iceberg."
" You mean . . ."
" Why should she want a steady platform?" he asked. "
She's going to fly off the helicopter."
11. The Roverhullet
My dread, since the loss of the Antarctica, that Helen would attempt the impossible with the helicopter, crystallised at Sailhardy's words. The south-west quadrant of the horizon was ominously and unnaturally clear ; what wild eddies would arise above Bouvet's stark cliffs, the only projection in the sea for thousands of miles, when the gale hit them, I could not guess.
" We have got to signal her to keep off!" I said. " There are certain to be some emergency flares in the roverhullet store-room."
" Look!" he replied.
I, too, caught the flicker of light above the orange splash: the rotors were spinning.
" Quick!" I went on. " She mustn't come close. It would be suicide here." I gestured to the glacier slope behind the hut.
Sailhardy and I ran to the hut, I leading the way to the store-room. Upton and Walter were examining the stores with satisfaction, and Pirow was busy on his knees trying to get the stove going in the outer room.
" Do you see any flares here?"
Upton's manner changed at my question, and anger started up in his eyes. " Thorshammer?"
" No," I said. " Helen is flying off the helicopter. She'll kill herself. I'm going to signal her."
Although it was dim in the store-room, I could see the brightness of Upton's eyes. He moved swiftly over to the harpoon-rack, whipped up one of the old-fashioned weapons, 163
and stood with it poised above his head, pointing at Sailhardy and me. " Walter! Here! You know how to use one of these things. You'll stay just where you are, Wetherby!
There will be no signalling anyone, do you understand?"
" But Helen .. ." I protested.
"
It's not Helen alone, but the skippers as well," he replied. "
They're coming to fetch us because they can't get into Bollevika by sea."
" For God's sake, doesn't your own daughter's life mean anything to you, except that you may be caught?" I exclaimed.
" She's a fine flier," he replied defensively. " She knows how to look after herself in the air."
" There's no flier born who is good enough for Bouvet's conditions," I snapped back. " Let me find some flares."
Walter balanced another long harpoon from the rack in his massive fist. I had heard it said that he was one of the finest harpoonists in the Southern Ocean. " The harpoon is like a sailing-ship," he said caressingly. " There is no sailor like a sailing-ship sailor. There is no harpoonman like one trained to throw the old harpoons. There is a sense of balance I turned to the stacks of cases. I never saw Walter move, but the head of the harpoon crashed into the heavy timber within a foot of my face.
Walter stood grinning, another harpoon already in his hand. Sailhardy looked unimpressed, but Upton's face was full of admiration. I was shaken by Walter's skill.
" The skippers must have seen us through their glasses come up the pathway," said the islander. " They know we are here—right here in this hut."
" And they have the Schmeisser," I added.
Upton started to laugh. I did not like the sound of it.
" There are no windows in the roverhullet, are there, Wetherby? Are there, Sailhardy?" He didn't wait for our reply. " No one will move outside the hut—understood?
Walter . . ." He grinned again. " How about harpooning something quite new, for a change?"
" The front door will stand wide open," Upton went on. "
We'll hear the helicopter overhead. She'll come down low, but I guess Helen won't try and land right away before she sees the lie of the land. Reidar Bull will be in the machine for certain, with his Schmeisser. He won't expect a 164
harpoon to be heaved at him. He'll think he's quite safe with a gun against unarmed men."
Walter held the harpoon head-high and made a lightning dummy-throw. " By God! I like that ! I like that!" he exclaimed.
" Listen, Upton!" I said. " You've already got blood on your hands. You're making things worse. It's only a matter of time before Thorshammer arrives. She can lie off the island and shell this hut into oblivion if she wishes."
Upton shook his head. " She can, if she wishes," he replied. "
But we won't be here. We're going to Thompson Island in
the whaleboat."
" We can also go to Cape Town in the whaleboat," I said sarcastically. " It is simply sixteen hundred miles across the worst seas in the world."
There was another change in Upton's manner. He was easy and friendly, and he spoke directly to Sailhardy. " You'd sail your boat to Cape Town, wouldn't you, Sailhardy? We could stock her up. There's plenty here ..."
For a moment he caught Sailhardy's imagination with his curious attractive power of drawing a person out of himself.
" We'd have to half-deck the boat against the waves,"
Sailhardy said, lost in the dream Upton had conjured up. "
But she'd make it. Shackleton sailed seven hundred and fifty miles to South Georgia and his was only an ordinary ship's boat."
" Don't talk nonsense!" I said harshly. " Upton . . ."
We heard the roar of the rotors. " Carl!" shouted Upton. "
Come here! Don't go outside! Come here, do you hear!"
Pirow came through to the store-room, the unspoken question dying on his lips when he saw Walter with the harpoon. The hut shook as the machine came low overhead. It could not have been more than thirty feet up. The sound receded, and then returned as the machine came back from the seaward side. The sound hung overhead. The note changed. The machine was coming down. Walter tensed, and then ran quickly forward. I gestured to Sailhardy. With Walter out of the way, Upton with his harpoon by himself was not much threat, and Pirow was unarmed. Sailhardy rushed at Upton. He couldn't handle the harpoon. Sailhardy dodged an
ineffectual thrust and grabbed the weapon from him. I snatched an ice-axe from the rack and rushed after Walter.
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As I darted through the doorway, I saw Walter poise in his stride and lift the harpoon like a javelin-thrower. The helicopter was hanging about fifteen feet above the ground in front of the roverhullet, the nose half pointing towards the doorway. The cabin door was open and in it stood Reidar Bull with the Schmeisser at the ready.
Walter threw. The crackle of the Schmeisser came almost at the same moment, but Walter had dropped on the ground out of the line of fire and started to roll sideways. In the split second the harpoon took to reach its target, the machine dipped a few feet. It might have been that Helen saw it coming, or it might have been an eddy of wind. The harpoon trailing its short length of rope, arced, and missed Reidar Bull.
The steel head and shaft crashed into the spinning rotors.
The rest followed at lightning speed.
I saw the bight of rope snick upwards as it became entangled in the rotors. One moment Reidar Bull was standing firing the automatic pistol, the next the harpoon-rope had snatched off his head. The headless trunk stood, transfixed. I never saw the head fall. The rotors gave a single flailing screech of torn metal like a shot partridge. The headless trunk and the Schmeisser spilled on the ground. A buckled rotor, still under power, bit into the rocky ground and cartwheeled the machine for about thirty yards past the roverhullet into a boulder at the start of the glacier incline.
I sprinted to the wreck. Behind the perspex, I could see Helen in her sea-leopard coat slumped over the controls.
My raider's glasses, which I had left behind at the factory ship, were suspended round her neck. I hacked through the window with my ice-axe. I jumped through and cut the throttle. The thumping clatter stopped. In my anxiety to get Helen clear before the machine caught fire, I forgot her safety belt. I hacked it free. There was a mark across her forehead and she was unconscious. I picked her up in my arms and staggered clear of the machine.
In front of the roverhullet stood Upton, Pirow, Walter and Sailhardy. Walter cradled the Schmeisser in his huge paws.
Behind the group, blood staining the rocks, lay what remained of Reidar Bull.
I carried Helen to them. " Get the stove going," I ordered Pirow. " I don't know how badly she's hurt."
Upton was casual. " She doesn't look too bad."
" You callous bastard .. ." I started to say, but he ignored me.
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" Walter," he went on, " don't hesitate to use it if either Wetherby or Sailhardy starts anything."
" Sir Frederick!" said Pirow. " There's a radio in the helicopter. I'm going to see if it is all right."
" Wait a moment," said Upton. " The machine could still catch fire, although it doesn't seem likely now." He went to the corpse and turned it over with his foot with a measure of cool, pleased appraisal which sickened me.
" For God's sake!" I said. "Sailhardy! Get that stove lighted, will you! And bring some blankets from the store."
Upton grinned. " Throw that thing over the cliff," he told Walter. " Here, give me the gun while you do it."
Walter hesitated. " Throw him over the cliff!" repeated Upton. " What are you waiting for?"
He balanced himself lightly on the balls of his feet.
Walter shook his head. " There should be some sort of prayer. After all, just now he was a man. Perhaps the Captain will say one and then I will throw him over."
"Christ!" burst out Upton. " You, Walter! A catcher skipper!"
Walter became surly. " I'd want it that way, if I was lying there, catcher skipper or no bloody catcher skipper."
" Carry on," said Upton. " There'll be no prayers while I'm around."
I did not wait to see Walter perform his grisly task. I
carried Helen inside, and Sailhardy brought some blankets, in which we wrapped her. She was breathing easily, and I could not
find any bones broken. Both Sailhardy and I reckoned she was merely stunned. He also brought from the store-room some pieces of wood, chopped them up, and lit a fire for our immediate warmth on a piece of metal he had also found.
At the same time he started the big stove in the centre of the room. The ice would take hours to melt off the walls.
In ten minutes she stirred. " Helen!" I exclaimed. "Helen!"
"I'll get a sleeping-bag for her and some more wood,"
said Sailhardy.
She sat up and threw her arms round me. " Bruce, my darling, my darling!" she sobbed. I held her, but she pulled back suddenly. " Where are your glasses? I brought them from the Antarctica."
"Yes," I said gently. " They were round your neck and I have them."
" The helicopter, Bruce! Did it catch fire?"
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" No," I said. " But it will never fly again." I told her briefly about Reidar Bull.
She seemed paler. " That means we can't get off this island."
Upton came in. " Yes, indeed we shall. With bits of your helicopter, if not with the whole." He seemed scarcely concerned about her.
Walter followed, Schmeisser in hand.
" What the hell are you talking about now?" I asked.
" Get this clear, Wetherby," said Upton. " I am going to Thompson Island in Sailhardy's whaleboat. So are you—all of us, in fact. I need you to navigate. I need Sailhardy to sail it." He indicated the Schmeisser. " Beyond that, I have no use for you. Remember that."
Sailhardy came back.
" Sailhardy! You have the material now to half-deck your boat. There's all the aluminium you need. How long
will it take?"
Sailhardy put down the wood and looked at me for support.
" A day, maybe. Two, provided the weather doesn't get much worse. We'll have to carry the aluminium down to the beach, and that will be quite a job."
Helen listened in disbelief. " Father!" she said quietly.
" You have cause so much misery already. Drop this idea of yours about Thompson Island. What we need most is warmth, shelter, civilisation."
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