Into White Silence

by Anthony Eaton

  He, though, remained unconvinced, and even managed a short laugh.

  ‘Good God, man! Alex is wrong about you. You’re no rook – you don’t have an attacking bone in your body. If anything you’re a pawn, just like the rest of us.’

  Realising that he was trying to goad me into further argument and unwilling to become engaged in such, I turned and returned to the ship, leaving him standing there alone upon the ice.

  8th April, 1922

  Woke this morning after a freezing night to find Per Petersen, who never made a full recovery from his surgery, dead in his hammock. Doctor Dalby suspects that the cold overcame him, and in the end his heart just gave up.

  Not a good start to the day.

  The ice is now too thick to drill a hole suitably large enough to allow us to commit his body to the deep, and so instead Mr Ryan and several of the men are currently excavating a grave some yards to the south-west of the ship, and there we will bury him in the ice. I imagine that when the summer thaw comes he will eventually be dropped through, but hopefully by that time we will be long gone from here.

  Lawson has been avoiding me assiduously since our conversation the other day, though I have noticed him in quiet, regular conferences with a number of the men, including Alex, Michael Burke, Tom Irvine and Greg Shannon-Stacey. The moment I approach them, the meetings break up immediately, which leads me to suspect that his agitating for a change of leadership is still continuing. After Per’s interment this afternoon, I intend having the matter out with Lawson, once and for all.

  10th April, 1922

  Used the final reserves of coal last night, burning through the last scrapings from the bottom of the bunker in a little under two hours, then spent the rest of the night in miserable cold. Mr Weymouth is currently making the conversion to blubber, and luckily we have enough of this defrosted on the small stove to get things moving, but it’s going to be a chilly couple of days, no doubt.

  Also last night, the dogs could be heard howling for several hours, somewhere out on the ice. Despite the savagery of the sound, it is still oddly reassuring to know that at least a few of them are somehow managing to survive out there. If they can endure the conditions without the advantages of food and shelter that we have, then perhaps there is still some hope for the rest of us.

  14th April, 1922

  Much excitement during the middle watch last night, when George Dalby, who is usually remarkable for his level-headedness, stormed in from outside at around 0120, shouting at the top of his voice that he’d just spotted somebody out on the ice, running from the ship.

  This caused a storm of activity, as men rolled from their sleeping bags into their boots and hurried out to see for themselves.

  Outside, the night was close to perfect – still and silent, with the southern lights shifting hazily in the sky somewhere over the continent. There was not a breath of wind and the air, though bitingly cold, felt crisp and almost invigorating. Under the odd light of the aurora, the ice seemed to shimmer and glow and strange shadows, thrown up by tiny hummocks and pressure ridges about the ship, danced across the white surface.

  The Doctor led us down onto the floe beside the ship and we followed him south, around the bow and then out past the weather screens and anemometer, to a point perhaps fifty yards away.

  ‘Here.’ He pointed, and immediately a hush fell over us all, for there in the fresh snow, which had fallen just this afternoon and so was only eight or nine hours old, was a single set of footprints; light, crisp impressions upon the surface of the sea, heading steadily south into the restless purple curtain of the aurora.

  At first light this morning, Mr Rourke, myself, Dick Ryan and the Doctor set out along the path of the tracks, dragging with us a sledge of supplies, including a tent and kerosene cooker in case we should need to camp out on the ice overnight, but within an hour of setting out, the footprints vanished into a field of fissured and broken ice. For several hours Mr Rourke had us comb the ice-field – me working with Ryan, himself with the Doctor – but our efforts turned up nothing except the frozen carcass of a medium-sized Weddell seal, which we dragged back and installed upon the sledge.

  The entire time that we were scrambling around in the broken pack ice, Ryan said not a word to me, apart from the odd grunt of acknowledgement when one of us was required to assist the other over a particularly difficult ridge or sastrugi. During one such moment, though, I chanced to brush my hand against his side and am certain that I felt, hidden away somewhere within the deep pockets of his parka, the heavy bulk of one of Mr Rourke’s pistols. This was something of a surprise, as neither the Doctor nor myself had been issued with one, however I said nothing of it.

  Upon our return to the ship, most of the men were remarkably withdrawn and silent, a funereal air hanging over the entire camp.

  15th April, 1922

  Tom Irvine, one of the regular seamen and a crew member who has proven his worth on several occasions throughout the course of this voyage, disappeared last night, along with his mate Ernie Tockson. They were last seen by Danny Carston when he woke them both for watch at 0300, and Danny said that they seemed in comparatively good spirits, commenting that the extra stove time which we had allowed ourselves last night had warmed the ’tween deck up considerably and they’d both slept like babies.

  They then pulled on their gear, climbed the chartroom companionway onto the deck, and neither has been seen since. A search of the ship and surrounding ice was organised and took up most of the day, but proved no more successful than any of our other searches.

  Naturally, this has caused a good deal of consternation, especially following on from yesterday’s inexplicable discovery of the footprints. Throughout the ship, men can be heard whispering to one another in urgent and often angry tones, and many of the men are refusing to make eye contact with me, or anybody else seen as being ‘in authority’. Dinner tonight was consumed by all aboard in thick, sullen silence, and then the men quickly went their own ways, turning in or disappearing out onto the ice in twos or threes for a last quick stroll around the ship and a smoke before lights out.

  Strangely, Mr Rourke seemed oblivious to this change in the mood, and when I mentioned it, he appeared remarkably unconcerned, telling me that I shouldn’t bother myself with ‘matters out of your responsibility’, and that I should just ‘continue to watch each man like a hawk, because one of them is most certainly our saboteur, and it is only a matter of time until the bastard shows himself’.

  Thus dismissed, I returned to my cabin and lay awake for several hours, the cold steel head of my ice axe a reassuring presence in the bunk beside me.

  18th April, 1922

  Another sighting of the Ice Man last night, this time by David Lacey. No footprints, but David swears he saw a figure skulking around in the shadows on the ice at the side of the ship. This, of course, led to yet another fruitless search this morning …

  19th April, 1922

  No sign of Charles Weymouth this morning. He was seen rolling out of his hammock some time in the middle of the night and told the men on watch that he was just heading out to the latrine ‘for a couple of moments’. He was not seen again. No sign of any discernible tracks, largely because a strong breeze has blown a heavy layer of fresh snow in from the south, covering the sea ice thoroughly. Naturally, a search was organised, and naturally, we turned up nothing for our efforts …

  20th April, 1922

  Came up for my watch at 0400 this morning to find the night sky blotted out with low grey cloud and to be greeted by the sound of the dogs howling somewhere out on the pack ice.

  By morning, the wind had settled hard from the south and the snow was lifting from the ice in thick blanketing sheets. An hour and a half of furious activity had us storm ready, and by mid-morning all of us were settled in the ’tween deck, playing cards and listening to the banshee wail of the wind through the rigging.

  I found myself at the wardroom table with Greg, Alex, Lawson and a couple of the cre
w and, for the first time in several weeks, the atmosphere was almost companionable – perhaps the one good thing about the blizzard is that it has driven from our minds, for a while at least, any concerns about the Ice Man.

  Naturally, though, conversation soon turned to the series of tragedies that seem to have punctuated the last three weeks, especially the odd disappearance of Charles Weymouth. I suggested that he’d most likely walked some distance from the ship and perhaps fallen through a snow-covered lead and into the freezing water, but this theory was dismissed summarily as impossible, owing to the thickness of the ice now. Greg Shannon-Stacey had an altogether less comfortable notion to put forward.

  ‘You know what I think? Most likely the dogs got him.’

  This remark evoked a considerable discussion and, in response to several questions, he was quick to elaborate.

  ‘We still hear them out there, most nights, and they have to be living off something. Don’t forget, chances are that most of them are only one or at most two generations removed from wolves – Canis Lupus – and we’ve got a whole pack of them out there, starving.’

  ‘But they’re used to us …’ one of the men interjected, and Greg shook his head.

  ‘They’re still animals.’

  ‘Just like us,’ Lawson observed, which remark provoked a cloud of silence about the table, only broken when Alex stated his opinion.

  ‘Randolph’s right. It’s not the dogs we should be worried about. It’s the humans. But not those aboard this ship.’

  And of course, this brought us right back to the wretched Ice Man, and there followed a round cursing of Piotre as the source of all our troubles. In the middle of this, Lawson rose from his seat and threw a distinctly chilly glare at all assembled, before stalking off in the direction of the ’tween deck without another word.

  23rd April, 1922

  Still blizzed in, with the usual fraying of tempers and irritability. The good news is that we have reassessed our fuel supplies and, between the blubber that we still have stored in the larder and the kerosene which we carried down with us, we have decided that it is possible to leave the stove burning through the nights, which has warmed the ship considerably and with it thawed several short tempers. This morning was spent hauling fuel drums up from the lower hold so that they might thaw in the warmth of the ’tween deck; the intense cold down below has given the fuel a thick, gelatin-like consistency …

  25th April, 1922

  No change in the weather.

  With so many of us living in such close quarters, the ship itself has almost become a living thing. Sometimes when I am lying in my bunk of an evening, I amuse myself with the notion that the Raven is breathing around me; the occasional creaking groan of the ice shifting against the hull only adds to this impression. Most mornings, the walls of the ’tween deck are slick with a thin layer of frozen condensation from the breathing of the men sleeping in there and, during the evenings, the hollow echo of wind down the funnel can sound something like distant heavy breathing.

  It is as though all of us live in this steel and wood womb, and from it we emerge every so often into a bright, harsh and beautiful world and, when we do, the first breaths we draw feel like those of a newborn.

  26th April, 1922

  The blizzard lifted this morning, and within a couple of hours of the wind dying, the day was clear and calm enough for us to open the ship up somewhat and allow fresh air down into the fug of the interior. It was a joy to be out in the open, however the pleasure of the moment was short-lived, because we soon discovered that, during the course of the blizzard, someone had stolen one of the man-hauled sledges, and had been busy removing almost every last scrap of meat and blubber from the Larder, leaving us with only enough for a scant few days at best.

  Mr Rourke is on the warpath, screaming and abusing men without rhyme or reason, accusing all and sundry of plotting against him and his expedition. He has armed Dick Ryan again, of this I am certain, and I suspect that George Smythe-Davis is also carrying a sidearm.

  At this point there has been no talk of a search, however one will be organised as soon as Mr Rourke achieves some kind of equilibrium again. In the meantime, most of the men are lying low or busily engaging themselves in other tasks so they might escape our Leader’s notice.

  One thing is clear – unless we can recover at least a good proportion of our lost supplies, we are almost certainly going to die down here.

  27th April, 1922

  After I’d completed my entry yesterday afternoon, all hands were summoned to the ice at the side of the ship and told by Mr Rourke to arm ourselves with whatever came to hand. After an interval of perhaps fifteen minutes everybody reassembled, clutching an eclectic arsenal including ice-axes, belaying pins, galley knives and all manner of other improvised weapons.

  Then the Leader announced that we were not to think of our afternoon’s endeavour as searching so much as hunting, that our quarry was Piotre, and that we would continue to hunt until we had found his tracks, chased him to ground and then put him down by whatever means were necessary.

  Several voices, including my own and Lawson’s, were raised in protest at this, and Rourke immediately ordered those of us who had objected back to the ship to remain on deck until he returned to, in his words, ‘deal with you later’.

  At this, Mike Burke stepped forward, threw his ice pick down at Rourke’s feet and informed the leader, in no uncertain terms, that he could give all the orders he wanted, but no power in the world could make him follow them. In response, Mr Rourke stared levelly into Mike’s eyes for some seconds and then nodded almost imperceptibly at Dick Ryan, who produced his pistol from a pocket, aimed it directly at Burke’s head, and cocked the hammer back with his thumb.

  This tableau held for several long seconds until, at a second nod from the Leader, Ryan lowered the gun and replaced it carefully into his pocket. When Rourke turned back to the rest of us, there was no mistaking the glittering anger behind those dark eyes.

  ‘I hope this makes my position on mutiny completely clear, gentlemen. Now, we have to hunt down the man who is determined to kill us. Those of you too cowardly to participate, return to the ship. The rest, with me.’

  Only Lawson and myself climbed back aboard the Raven.

  The rest soon vanished into the whiteness and Lawson and I have been left to our own devices. Despite Rourke’s edict that we remain on deck, I have come below and retrieved this journal, so that I might continue to set down, for as long as is possible, the minutes of this terrible journey.

  28th April, 1922

  Another to add to our growing list of vanished shipmates, this time Michael Burke, who failed to return from the ‘hunting party’ yesterday evening. Nobody is quite certain when or even where he disappeared but, by the time the last group returned at 1930 last night, it was clear that he wasn’t among their number. Lawson and I remain confined to our separate quarters and, despite several sympathetic glances in our directions, everybody is adhering to Rourke’s edict that we not be spoken to under any circumstances. Dick Ryan’s pistol is still being kept clearly in evidence.

  The only bright aspect to the day is Rourke’s ongoing failure to find even so much as a footprint to follow. If the Ice Man is indeed out there, he’s doing a remarkable job of evading capture.

  30th April, 1922

  Have only just recovered enough strength to write. Doctor Dalby has been busy looking after me since yesterday morning. He won’t tell me how Lawson is faring, though.

  God, my hands are shaking. The pain is excruciating but I have refused the Doctor’s offer of morphine, as I am determined to keep my head clear.

  Cannot write more now.

  * * *

  TWENTY-ONE

  THERE BE DRAGONS. THE MONTH OF MAY. A SENTENCE PASSED AND CARRIED OUT. A FIGURE ON THE ICE. THE DOCTOR DEFIANT.

  I am certain that we have all read, at one time or another, of the habit of ancient cartographers, when faced with a blank expanse of oce
an that needed to be filled.

  ‘There be dragons …’ was generally their phrase of choice and, during the vast expansion of geographic knowledge that came with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, perhaps no other quarter of the globe received this accolade more than Antarctica – cloaked as it was in fogs and guarded by raging seas and hellish winds.

  So let us then, briefly, turn our attention to maps and dragons …

  At the beginning of April, the latitude and longitude given by Downes placed the Raven almost directly north of Vincennes Bay and the barren, rocky piece of coast where Casey Station now perches. It seems likely that some time during the period between the loss of their dogs, and between Rourke’s ‘hunting party’, Downes and his companions passed within perhaps fifty or sixty miles of the Browning Peninsula, where I was lucky enough to spend a night in a tiny field hut, seventy-five years later.

  By the start of May my best estimate – based on their rate of drift and deduced from later positions provided by Downes – puts them somewhere off Cape Peremennyy, roughly three-hundred kilometres further to the west of Casey.

  Those who’ve wintered down in that section of the coast describe May as a difficult month; by that point in the calendar, the sea has well and truly frozen over and the isolation of those at the stations is complete. The winter blizzards begin in earnest, and the days become progressively shorter – down to ten, then seven, then five hours of pale and ineffectual sunlight each day.

  And the cold.

  In Antarctica during May, I’ve been told, those who experience it understand for the first time in their lives what real cold is. This is a cold driven by winds which can blow through every layer of thermal-wear, wool, down and nylon, to chill the depths of the human body far beyond its normal capacity for endurance. It is a cold that flows in streams downwards from the heights of the Antarctic Plateau – the air chilled by that vast, inhuman sheet, until it has been sucked dry of all moisture and is then sent hurtling north towards the warmer, damper, rising thermals surrounding the equator, half a world away.