In the Land of White Death

by Valerian Albanov

  I cannot believe that Sedov could have caused such devastation during his short stay. It would have taken more time to do such damage. There must have been an earlier expedition that left again as quickly as it had come, without taking the slightest trouble to leave the living quarters in good order. Doors and windows had not even been closed properly. Could it have been this Ziegler expedition, which I had never heard of?

  I then discovered a large sheet of paper with comical drawings for a New Year’s Eve party, which gave me a few clues. The first picture represented two gentlemen drinking whiskey; below this was a caption that we imagined might read: “It’ll soon be time to go and discover the Pole.—Absolutely, what a good idea!” The second picture showed a ship that must have been coming to fetch these people, but was wrecked on a reef on the way. The stern of the sinking ship was visible above the water. The third drawing depicted the rescued crew making their way southward in horse-drawn sleighs and dogsleds, perhaps toward Cape Flora. Finally, a portrait of the entire group shows their repatriation by railroad to civilization, after their “exploits.” These globetrotters have long since been safe and sound at home with their loved ones, regaling them with the most amazing stories of their expedition.

  We also found another empty barrel, which had originally contained wine, on which the words “North Pole” were branded. Its contents were undoubtedly reserved for celebrating the team’s arrival at the Pole. In short, we hardly had a good impression of these people, who had left such a rubbish dump behind them, the leftovers of a “bazaar” that contained everything under the sun. Often when something was lacking in our hut, we would jokingly say, “Let’s go to Ziegler’s, we’ll find exactly what we’re looking for.” This was usually true and we rarely came back empty-handed. For example, “Alexander [Konrad], go over to Ziegler’s and find me a sieve for the oats!” Off he would go and find one. That is how we acquired a coffee grinder, a lamp in working order, cutlery, various tools, dishes, and so on.

  One day as I was walking to the east, I spotted a tall, narrow stone behind a large boulder. Drawing nearer, I found it was an obelisk bearing an inscription engraved in golden letters: “Stella Polare: in memory of those who died during the sledge expedition of 1900.”*

  * The Stella Polare was under the command of the Duke of Abruzzi, whose expedition stopped at Cape Flora while attempting to reach the North Pole. Abruzzi’s sledge team, led by an Italian naval officer named Umberto Cagni, surpassed Nansen’s record of “farthest north” by twenty-three miles, but three men died of starvation along the way.

  It is possible, therefore, that this expedition, too, had left some of its supplies behind.

  Finally, we found an anonymous tomb decorated with a wooden cross, painted in red. This burial place was certainly better than the one we had made for our poor Nilsen.

  After having inspected and sorted all the supplies, we carried them into the big cabin to store them properly. This storeroom was really quite impressive in the end, and could have been called, without exaggeration, a first-class delicatessen. Konrad had to do most of the tedious sorting and stock taking on his own, for since our arrival here my health had been deteriorating by the day. Shivers and fever racked my whole body, and at one point I was so low and delirious that I did not know where I was, or so Konrad later told me. I also had persistent nightmares and imagined that there were three of us on the island. During these mild hallucinations I would get up and hurry over to my sole companion, busy with his excavations, and ask about our third comrade without even knowing who it might be. The fresh air did me good, often bringing me back to my senses and reminding me that there were only two of us. But this reality would send me into a deep fit of melancholy that would in turn drive me back inside the hut. In addition to this mental torment, I was now afflicted with another ailment which worried me greatly. My legs were becoming more and more swollen each day and were very painful. Konrad was also suffering from the same symptoms. Moreover, the sad fate of our lost companions caused us perpetual anxiety.

  When I was well enough, we sat before the door of our “mansion” gazing out toward the open sea. We desperately searched the waves for some sign of our friends. Anything that moved on the horizon became a kayak, miraculously bringing them safely to us. And we would take the binoculars and painstakingly scrutinize each ice floe, always in vain. Colonies of walruses, couched in silent contemplation, drifted past on the floating ice—sometimes heading west, sometimes heading east—content to be borne along aimlessly by the tides.

  JULY 15

  At dawn, Konrad decided to go to Bell Island. If the ice was not broken up in the channel separating it from Prince George Land, he would try to push as far as Cape Grant to look for the missing men. I could not go with him, as I could hardly stand on my own two feet. No doubt he was afraid I might die and leave him completely alone. Perhaps that was the real motive for his expedition. He took some supplies with him, as well as the double-barreled shotgun with ammunition, and set sail on a fine day with a good wind.

  Thus I remained alone, and the hours were difficult. The solitude oppressed me more than ever. I had feverish dreams that brought back memories of all the terrible events of our odyssey, making them seem even worse than they had been in reality; one nightmare followed the next. At times I thought I could hear voices outside, and someone trying to open the door. A victim of my deranged imagination, I leapt off my mattress in terror and went outside to have a look. The fresh air restored my wits for a short time, but the moment I thought of my isolation, a feverish despair would overcome me once more. On the table next to my bed, the loyal Konrad had laid out tins of food and quinine tablets, as well as drinking water. But I had no appetite and only rarely managed to swallow some liquid with a bit of quinine. Then I threw a few logs into the stove and hurried to lie down again, aching all over.

  After two full days, Konrad had still not returned, and I was tormented by the thought that something might have happened to him. On the evening of the seventeenth, I put on my malitsa and sat in front of the door to wait. The incessant uproar of birds from the cliffs was interrupted occasionally by a wild howling. Such a symphony could hardly have failed to depress even those who were in perfect health; now, it only deepened my melancholy. Cascades roared down from the rocky heights above me. The snowmelt eroded the snow pack and the glacial seracs, unleashing immense avalanches that crashed down with a fearful sound. These sounds were especially sinister at night, and brought to mind a witches’ Sabbath. Their rumblings sounded so near that I got up almost every night to go to the door and make sure the encampment was still standing.

  I stayed awake, waiting for Alexander. At around four in the morning I saw, in the direction of Bell Island, a blurry speck moving across the water. Could it be his boat? The ice was drifting slowly southward, which made the black speck look as if it was heading north. Finally I saw something flashing on either side of the speck, in a rhythmical movement, with regular pauses. There could be no doubt! It was a kayak, with the splashing of his double-bladed paddle sparkling in the sun. An hour later he disappeared behind a promontory, then at six o’clock I could see Alexander walking along the shore. I went to meet him.

  He was alone. When he greeted me, he could not contain himself and began to sob; he had found nothing. It had been impossible for him to go as far as Cape Grant because of the floating ice, but he could see it with the binoculars, and had given every imaginable sign of life: shouting, firing shots, gesticulating. And he had spent all night within sight of the cape . . . but nothing.

  Yet we clung to one last hope, and decided we would undertake a second search together, once our winter quarters were ready.

  We could not spend the winter in the little hut, for it was too cold and exposed. We had to resign ourselves to the enormous task of repairing the main cabin. We started the very next day. To begin with, we had to remove the boards covering the door and windows and discard everything that was useless or broken. We dismantled
the bunks, since the walls had to remain bare. A good fire would get the better of the damp. We decided to leave the stove where it was, but soon found out that it did not work, so we dismantled it and built a new one out of some bricks. It would thus have the twofold advantage of retaining the heat and being easier to cook on. We had all the necessary material as well as the craftsman, Alexander himself, who had worked as a stove fitter before signing on to the expedition. But we still had to repair the ceiling and the roof, using turf and moss, of which there was an ample supply. There was also much reindeer lichen, dating no doubt from Jackson’s time; it seems he had even planned to raise reindeer. Every day we worked from seven in the morning until evening, stopping only for a brief pause at noon, and for tea.

  We also made some more discoveries: For example, underneath one of the cubicles we came across over a thousand cartridges for a Ziegler rifle that we had found earlier, and which we hoped to put into working order.

  We had already received three visits from bears, but had not managed to shoot one. They were extremely cautious and stayed out of range. They fled as soon as they saw us, diving into the water and only resurfacing long after. And yet their meat was as vital to us as daily bread, for winter was approaching and even the most perfect canned food could not replace fresh meat forever. In addition, our clothes urgently needed repair, and bearskins would be ideal for the pupose. The walruses would have been just as good, because of their blubber and hides, but we would have needed a good long-range firearm.

  We collected all the scraps of clothing and reindeer hides we could lay our hands on, which we then dried out on the roof to use later for repairing our ragged clothes. For we were envisioning setting up a real little tailor’s shop, for which Ziegler would provide needles, thread, and scissors. We planned to make new underwear out of old sails and some damaged cloth from Ziegler’s reserves; this project would occupy our winter days and we would begin as soon as we returned from our expedition to Cape Grant.

  Among the debris we pulled out of the big cabin, Konrad found a Russian tobacco pouch, lost no doubt by one of Sedov’s men. This brought us great pleasure, as recently we had been smoking every possible kind of ersatz tobacco, even seaweed stuffing from old mildewed mattresses. The last real tobacco we had smoked was on board the Saint Anna, at least a year earlier. Since we lacked a pipe with which to inhale our lucky find, we rolled a cigarette out of paper, and very soon small blue clouds rose in the air. Only those who have known what it means to do without can imagine our delight; indeed, we even felt slightly dizzy.

  As we went about our menial tasks on the evenings that followed, we dreamed up all manner of plans for the future.

  But here is a little tale that will illustrate how enfeebled our minds were at that stage.

  The first sight of Sedov’s inscriptions and the two metal mail tins nailed to the big cabin had convinced me, for no apparent reason, that a ship from Arkhangel’sk would arrive some time this year. This idea had become so firmly anchored in my mind that I really expected the ship to arrive in August. I even began to invent plausible motives for the imaginary steamer’s delay. Unexpected pack ice, I concluded, might well oblige the party to postpone their journey until the following year. To prepare for this eventuality, we repaired the big cabin, prepared all sorts of provisions, and mended our worn clothes. As we could see open sea stretching ahead for ninety nautical miles, we were convinced that to the south there could hardly be any ice, and a vessel could reach us without too much difficulty. It is interesting, from a psychological point of view, that my conviction was founded on nothing at all, but was so deeply rooted that I felt it was totally pointless to open the above-mentioned postal boxes and examine their contents. Those letters would, of course, have provided me with valuable information, and today, now that my thoughts are clear, I am as greatly astonished at my over-sight as the next person. How many times did I walk past those tin letter boxes without even giving them a second glance! And yet I congratulate myself on not having read their contents, which no doubt would have altered all my plans and might even have put us in mortal danger—as we shall soon see.

  In short, we patiently awaited the next stage of our adventures. We had almost finished the tedious cleaning up of the main cabin. All that was left was to have a house-warming celebration, and to keep a fire burning in our tiled stove to thoroughly dry the place out.

  SHIP AHOY!

  On July 20, at about six in the evening, with my daily chores over, I set off to prepare some supper in our “mansion.” Konrad had stayed behind to finish a job in the big cabin. I paused for a few moments in the fresh air, which always did me a lot of good after a day spent in the damp, stuffy air of the cabin. I let my gaze wander out to sea, without the nostalgia that ordinarily beset me when outdoors. The weather was calm and warm, with a slight mist. As nearly always, ice floes of all shapes and sizes were drifting along the coast, some of them carrying motionless walruses. For once, my desire to hunt was keener than usual, and I was about to return for my gun and alert Konrad, when a strange apparition caught my attention. . . . Was it yet another hallucination? No, it was real! I could perfectly well see two masts rising above the sea, one higher than the other: a main mast without a topmast, a mizzen, and between the two, a smokestack, trailing a thin cloud of vapor. The hull was hidden in the mist and still indistinct. It must have been about two nautical miles offshore. As soon as I realized that it was not a mirage, I stood stock-still, my pulse racing.

  When I had recovered from my stupor and found my voice, I shouted at the top of my lungs: “Alexander, a ship! There’s a ship coming!” Soon the hull emerged from the mist and I recognized the Saint Foka, which I had often seen in the port of Arkhangel’sk, while it was being fitted out to take Sedov to the North. At first Alexander must have thought that I was still delirious, for he stared at me warily. I pointed to the ship that was now almost stationary, obviously searching for a safe lead through the ice to the coast. She gathered way again very slowly, but we could tell that the captain was about to drop anchor. What other purpose could he have? Plainly, he had come back for Sedov, whom he had left here a year earlier. We immediately climbed onto the roof of the big cabin, hoisted the flag we had brought with us from the Saint Anna, and fired off a few shots. In my agitation I fired two shots from the double-barreled shotgun simultaneously and wounded the index finger of my right hand, but I paid no heed to my injury and continued firing.

  One might wonder why the arrival of the ship had such an effect upon us, since we had been counting on it. I can only say that we had not expected it until August, when it would have been easier to sail through these regions. Our joy at this premature event was quite understandable: It brought us the certainty of immediate rescue and our return home.

  The ship did not immediately notice our signals, nor did she hear our shots. The fog grew thicker, and hid the Saint Foka from sight. But there was no doubt that she was about to drop anchor, so we rushed to the “mansion” to get ready for our first encounter with civilized people, not wanting them to see us in our filthy rags. Our “Sunday clothes” were already drying on the rocks in front of the house; we had boiled them over and over again with ashes. Now we had to shake all the dead lice out of them, wash ourselves well with Ziegler’s soap, and quickly get dressed. This was done at top speed, and we finally looked as presentable as was possible under the circumstances. We had even cleaned and oiled our boots, although in a drawing room we still would have stuck out like sore thumbs.

  Now that we were decent, we went down to the shore, to paddle the kayak out to the ship through the thick and persistent fog. As we paddled out, I started to hear the voices of the crew and the barking of dogs; already the outline of the ship was becoming clearer. Finally they caught sight of us. I waved my cap in greeting. Everyone rushed on deck and stared at us with great surprise, then they waved their caps and a great cheer went up. Faces lit up with joy. Their welcome touched me deeply, although I was still rather d
azed by the recent turn of events. But I realized they might be taking me for Sedov or one of his companions, so I hastily shouted back, “Gentlemen, Sedov has not yet arrived.” But this news seemed to have no effect upon them, so I went on to explain; “I am the navigator Albanov, from the Brusilov expedition. I left the Saint Anna three months ago and managed to reach Cape Flora.” The reply was a unanimous shout of admiration and a new round of still louder cheering. I asked if they were carrying any mail for the Saint Anna but I do not recollect why I asked this question. I then learned that the Saint Foka had not sailed from Arkhangel’sk, as I had supposed, but Hooker Island, where Sedov had wintered over, thirty miles to the northeast of Cape Flora. I also learned that Sedov had died during his trek to the Pole and was buried on Prince Rudolf Island; that their ship, like us, had been at sea for two years; and that they had no fresh news of the outside world.

  I had been carrying on this conversation as we paddled alongside the slowly moving ship. Suddenly I was startled by loud cries: “Watch out! There’s a walrus right behind you. Climb on board!” At the same moment several shots rang out. I turned around in time to see one of those vicious beasts trying to attack our kayak. Several more shots put an end to his pursuit and sent him under the waves. The Saint Foka had dropped anchor by then, so I clambered on board and greeted the crew. We embraced one another and everyone spoke at once. We exchanged the basic outlines of our adventures. I learned, among other things, that from his winter quarters on Novaya Zemlya, Sedov had requested a fast shipment of coal to be shipped from St. Petersburg, and so the crew had thought at first that I was the captain or navigator of the much-awaited coaler.