I replied that I had no idea.
‘I climbed out of that trench and ran. Fought like the devil himself was chasing me until I caught the rest of you up, and then a bit more. It was the oddest feeling, Will. I didn’t care a whit what happened to me. All I could see was poor old Dicky Mulligan lying there in the mud, with a British bullet in his brain. He looked so surprised. Not even scared, at the end.’
I didn’t know quite how to respond. I imagine that I muttered some platitude, but to be perfectly honest, I can’t recall saying a thing. It was of no consequence, in any case, because George continued.
‘And afterwards, when you went and dragged me back to that bomb hole and refused to go on without me, I was damned cross, let me tell you. Not because I’d been shot, but because the bloody huns hadn’t even bothered to do the job properly. I looked at you there, Will, lobbing those German grenades back before they could explode, and I cursed myself for being a fool and swore that if we managed to get out, I’d never again lead men into a futile battle. But I’m starting to wonder if I might have done just that by persuading you and all these others to follow Edward and me down here.’
I told the Captain that I didn’t see things that way at all and, for the first time in the conversation, he turned and looked directly at me.
‘I appreciate the sentiment, Will, but you saw how Edward dealt with Captain McLaren earlier. He’s become no better than that British officer – he’s blind to the reality of our situation and that concerns me more than anything else. For the moment it’s not critical, but it could well become so, and when it does I need you to promise me something.’
I nodded, not so much in assent as to encourage George to continue.
‘I need you to promise that if the time comes when we need to stand up to Edward you’ll be with me, no matter what happens, or what measures we might need to take for the greater good of everyone aboard.’
‘It might never happen,’ I ventured, to which George offered a grim nod.
‘Let’s hope not.’
Without another word, George shuffled back towards the poop, leaving me alone at the rail. Only a few moments after he’d gone, I became aware of a presence nearby, and turned to discover Randolph Lawson sitting unobtrusively in one of the nearby kennels, where he’d been patting a dog. He met my eye with an amused grin.
‘Well, that was interesting,’ he said.
* * *
FOURTEEN
DOCTOR JAMES HOUSEMANN (PART ONE). A SECRET POCKET. A CAVE IN THE HILLS. A DISCOVERY. THE RAVEN IN THE ICE. A MAD RUSSIAN.
Having effectively purloined for myself the journal of William Downes, I was naturally curious to discover how it had come to rest below the shelves in the Casey Station library. Clearly somebody had placed it there, and that person, whoever he or she may be, was the only real threat to my claiming the ‘discovery’ of the story of the Raven for myself.
Luckily, the answer to this particular aspect of the mystery is a simple one; the journal was placed there in 1992 by an expeditioner, a glaciologist by the name of James Housemann.
How do I know this? Because he told me.
And where, in turn, did he obtain the journal? Now therein lies a tale …
Before telling it, however, perhaps it would be prudent of me to explain precisely what happened in the moments immediately following my ‘liberation’ of the journal from the library. With it tucked firmly inside my freezer suit, I quickly made my way to the outside ‘donga’ – the accommodation unit which I was sharing with three others. A donga is nothing more than a refrigerated shipping container being used in reverse; its heavy insulation keeps the cold out, rather than in. Inside are four bunks, two at each end, a set of shelving, a small desk and lamp, and an industrial heater. It’s not the most salubrious accommodation – the vagaries of thermal dynamics mean that at any given moment, it can be about thirty-five degrees on the top bunks, and about minus ten on the bottom. The nearest bathrooms are in the Red Shed, thirty or forty metres away, making a midnight trip to the loo a ten-minute exercise.
That evening, however, the donga did have one advantage – privacy. Two of my three room-mates were still out and about in the field somewhere, and the third, an ornithologist who’d be up early to visit penguin rookeries on the other side of the old Wilkes station, was fast asleep.
Climbing into my bunk, I drew the privacy curtains, switched on my reading light, and began to comb carefully through the journal, examining each page in turn. Exactly what I was looking for I wasn’t certain, except to say that I felt there must have been some clue, somewhere, as to how the journal had ended up where it had.
Finally, I found it on the very last page, or rather, behind it. It had been done so cleverly I’d almost missed it. The final page of the journal, upon which Downes had never written, had been carefully glued at its edges to the back cover, forming a kind of sealed envelope at the back of the book. By tracing my fingers around the edges, I could just feel a slight thickness inside, as though something was concealed therein.
Excited by this find, I retrieved from my bag the pocket knife that I habitually carry with me when travelling and, using the smallest blade, carefully slit the top of the page, opening the ‘envelope’ and retrieving from it several sheets of foolscap writing paper – the thin sort once used for aerograms – covered in spidery handwriting, completely different to the elegant copperplate hand which filled the rest of the journal.
Intrigued, I unfolded the sheets and spread them before me across my pillow. At the top of the first sheet is the date 13th January 1992, and below that James Housemann begins his tale in peremptory fashion:
This is an account of my discovery of the Journal of Lieutenant William Downes, in the vicinity of the Bunger Hills, in Wilkes Land on the Eastern Coastline of Antarctica, on 18th December 1991, written by Dr James Housemann, Glaciologist with the Australian Antarctic Division.
Along with my colleague Dr Michael Spinks, I was engaged by the AAD to conduct ice surveys in and around the Edgeworth David base, including examination of blue ice on the Apfel glacier, taking a series of measurements of depth, density, and movement. This work was to take place throughout the summer of 1991/1992 and, after arriving at Casey Station aboard the MV Icebird early in the season, we were dropped by helicopter at the Edgeworth David Base in the Bunger Hills in mid December to commence our work.
At that point in the season the sea ice was still fast all the way to Thomas Island to the east and around Cape Hordern to the Apfel Glacier in the south …
I shall intrude again into Housemann’s narrative at this point, because the paragraphs which follow are somewhat heavy in scientific detail, and light in relevance. Instead, we shall jump ahead to the middle of the second page …
… having established our camp in the lee of a large, ice-free outcrop, we cooked up a meal and then Mike settled in to write up the day’s measurements. Outside was a perfect evening, dead still with visibility clear out to ten or fifteen kilometres, and so I took the opportunity to explore the rocky hills immediately east of our campsite. Leaving Mike to his notes, and taking my pack and ice pick, I set off, making my way at first down to sea level, then across a small shelf of fast ice, before climbing back up onto the ice-free rocks which marked the coastline. After perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, I was high enough to make out the distant line of the moraine far up the glacier; in the other direction, out to sea beyond the Edisto Glacier Tongue, the westernmost islands of the Highjump Archipelago were a dark smear against the otherwise white horizon. With the sun low, the entire landscape took on an unearthly light – the frozen, shimmering white of the ocean contrasted by the stark, dark granite of the hills themselves.
Looking around, it took me only a few moments to find a suitable, flattish outcrop upon which to perch and for some time I sat there, taking in the silence, which was almost absolute – the breeze which had caused us such discomfort earlier in the afternoon had dropped completely and, apart from s
poradic reports of cracking ice, which echoed like distant gunshots from the Apfel Glacier, there was not a sound to be heard.
Once my breathing had returned to normal, I stood and re-shouldered my pack, intending to return the way I’d come and turn in for the evening. As I began my careful descent, however, something caught my eye – a shadow within a shadow, an oddly dark space formed below the apex of two boulders, which leaned against each other just a hundred metres or so away.
I stared directly at the rocks, wondering what had caused me to look in that direction, and realised that deep within the cave-like space between the two stones was a slight movement, little more than a vague quiver of motion which must have registered in my peripheral vision.
Intrigued, I picked my way carefully across the loose slope which led to the boulders and there I dropped my pack and crawled on hands and knees into the gap between the boulders. To my surprise, I found myself confronted by a wall of heavy material, something like canvas, frozen almost solid and falling like a curtain across the entire width of the cave. Along the bottom edge, it had been weighted with heavy stones and along the top and sides it was frozen onto the bare rock. One edge, though, had been thawed slightly by the late summer sun, angling up from the horizon, and the movement of air through this narrow gap set it into gentle motion, as though the cave beyond was breathing, ever so slightly. This movement was what had caught my attention.
The concealment was clearly the work of human hands and so, after retrieving my torch and ice-axe from my pack, I set about the process of carefully levering the stiff material aside, uncertain what I’d discover beyond.
The canvas proved surprisingly resistant to my efforts and I was soon forced to strip off my jacket and lambskin beanie, before chipping the bottom edge of the barrier free of the frozen rocks which held it in place. Finally, after five or ten minutes, I had freed up enough of a gap to squeeze through, holding my torch in front of me.
The opening led into a narrow tunnel, which burrowed back into a passageway that might once have been large enough to walk along in a crouch, but which was now almost completely chocked with solid ice. My torch’s beam down the tunnel revealed only impenetrable darkness further on. The ice walls and roof would be a squeeze, but I judged that if I were to lower myself onto my stomach then I’d be able to crawl forward, pushing my torch ahead of me.
Once in the tunnel, I found it an even tighter fit than I’d expected. Uneven facets in the walls dug into my sides and, at one point, the roof came so low that I was almost forced to press my cheek into the floor in order to squeeze through the gap. Turning around from there on would have been impossible and so I was relieved when, after perhaps seven or eight metres, the tunnel widened out sharply into a cave which, while small, was at least large enough for me to sit upright in.
It was immediately apparent that I’d stumbled across a shelter of some sort – the signs of human habitation were clear. On one side a rough wooden table, constructed of planks and rocks, was half frozen into a cascade of ice. Upon it rested an old kerosene lamp, the melted stumps of several candles, matches and a rectangular bundle, tightly wrapped in oilskin. At the back end of the cave a hollow had clearly once formed a sleeping alcove of sorts. This was similarly filled with ice, the edge of a fur sleeping bag only just discernible as a dark blur frozen within it. Without chipping the ice out of the alcove it would be impossible to say for certain whether or not the bag was occupied, though it didn’t appear so to me at the time.
A rough fireplace had been constructed near the opening passageway, and this too was mostly buried in ice, only a couple of flat stones and a dented tin can still protruding into the cave.
For several minutes, I crouched beside the entrance, reluctant to disturb anything. Every object and surface was covered in a white rime of ice crystals; even the dullest items glittered in the beam of my torch. The gentle waft of air in from the tunnel behind me was reassuring, as was the dull pool of light from outside. There were no footprints in the icy crust on the stone floor – clearly nobody had entered that frozen chamber in many years.
As my eyes adapted, I commenced a careful examination of the cave, though there was little else to see; I found no evidence of food stocks, nor any records of who had lived there and, after perhaps five or six minutes, I had reached the point where, without my parka and beanie, which were still lying beside my pack outside the tunnel, I could no longer endure the cold. I removed the oilskin-wrapped bundle from the table and crawled back through the passageway, out into the clear evening.
Once out, my first priority was to warm myself up – my down-filled jacket has never felt quite so luxurious. I ate a little chocolate and then attempted to unwrap the oilskin package which I’d removed from the cave. Unfortunately, the knotted twine bindings had been well tied and had long since frozen onto the oilskin itself. The small knots proved too difficult for my gloved fingers to manipulate and so, reluctantly, I placed the bundle into my backpack and resolved to examine it once I had the opportunity to do so properly.
Re-sealing the opening to the cave took only a couple of minutes and then, after taking a good look around to memorise the location, I set off back down the slope towards our camp.
* * *
From the Journal of Lieutenant William Downes
14th January, 1922
Polar Exploration Vessel Raven
Approx. 66°19’S, 138°3’E
Another frustrating day of bashing around icebergs and going nowhere in a hurry. This morning we had clear weather, and the land sky to the south appeared temptingly close. Despite our best efforts, however, we have been unable to make much more southern progress than we managed during our first two days in the pack and, when the weather closed out this afternoon, that promising horizon was no closer than it had been when we started the day.
The Raven continues to handle the ice reasonably well, though it is tremendously noisy aboard – the constant grind and bashing of ice floes against the hull raises an awful din below decks, and the shuddering that trembles through the ship every time we attempt to nudge or crush our way between the bigger floes is difficult to describe. Nobody has had a decent night’s sleep in three days.
The cutter bow is serving its purpose – allowing the ship to ride up onto the pack ice, rather than being driven down or aside by it – and the armour plating would appear to be performing its task admirably. This afternoon I stood on the foredeck with a number of the crew and watched as the lead ahead of us appeared to close up completely, blocked by a large floe of pancake ice, perhaps a foot or so thick. Captain McLaren ordered full steam ahead and drove the Raven onto the ice shelf at a speed of perhaps five knots. Her bow rode up slightly onto the ice and then with a loud ‘crack’ a seam opened up ahead, snaking away until it broke that particular floe in two. We then used the bulk of the ship to drive the two halves of the floe further asunder, allowing us passage between them.
The chief danger, of course, is that the rudder or propeller might strike against a piece of submerged ice and suffer damage. None of us fancies a dive below the ship to attempt repairs at the moment! As a precaution, several men with long poles are stationed on either side of the poop during these manoeuvres, and it is their task to nudge any chunks of ice away from our fragile steering gear.
Even so, our progress these last two days has been less than impressive. For every floe that we manage to break through, more often than not we find ourselves either blocked by impenetrably thick barriers, or turned around as we follow leads which, almost inevitably it seems, end up winding us back towards the north. Mr Rourke is becoming increasingly aggravated and this, naturally, is doing little to diminish the general feeling of tension aboard.
And yet, despite all the frustrations it has wrought upon us, the icepack is a stunning place. I can understand, I think, why men such as Shackleton and Mawson continue to come down here. The brightness is hard to put into words – coming up on deck in the morning, one is faced with a wor
ld turned to white. The sunlight, which is more or less constant at this time of the year, is reflected back off every surface – water, floes and icebergs – with an effect that is dazzling. At one point today I removed my dark eye-glasses for a few minutes. Immediately my eyes began watering profusely and shortly after I felt the bright burst of a headache beginning.
The water, for the most part, seems as black as the inside of the coal bunker and yet, when we venture near the bases of the larger icebergs, it reveals itself to be almost completely clear, and in the ice below the surface can be seen every shade of blue, from pale cornflower to the deepest ultramarine.
The wildlife continues to be prolific – seals of all variety, and birds. We have lost count of the number of penguins that we have spotted. This afternoon we pulled up alongside a large floe to enable Mr Ryan to hunt a few to use for feeding the dogs. It took him and two of the crew only about ten or fifteen minutes to bag three large emperors, as well as several of the smaller Adelie penguins and, after more than three weeks on dried food, you can imagine how his efforts were received by our canine companions. There was a near riot on deck when the cut-up penguin meat was thrown down to them, and fights broke out immediately among the larger males. Several of the crew had to wade in to the melee to separate one dog from another, and one of the smaller animals sustained several nasty bites.
Unfortunately, Piotre was of little assistance in all this commotion. Indeed, the boy’s fragile condition has only worsened since the tragedy of Ivan’s death. Despite the best efforts of a number of men, including the doctor, to calm and settle him, Piotre still weeps constantly. He is half-bald now from tearing at his hair, and anybody brave enough to venture near him finds themselves assaulted with either a barrage of incomprehensible pleading, or darkly threatening abuse. During this afternoon’s feeding, while Mr Ryan and his men were pulling the dogs from one another’s throats, Piotre, who’d been ordered from his hammock by Mr Rourke, simply crouched by the kennels and observed the whole process with a thunderous expression on his face.
Into White Silence Page 18