It’s a coldness that can only be described to, and never truly understood by, those who haven’t experienced it for themselves.
It’s a coldness that changes the very physiology of the human body. Circulation, respiration, digestion, healing and growing, all slow and struggle under the constant onslaught of temperatures which can plummet to minus thirty or forty degrees in a matter of moments. Cuts on the skin stay open for months. Broken bones heal with painful slowness, if at all. Blood supply is restricted to the fingers and toes, increasing exponentially the risk of frostbite and gangrene. Teeth can shatter if they are exposed directly to the air. Fatigue becomes a constant companion, no matter how many hours of the day or night you sleep.
And these are just the physical impacts – the mental ones often run far deeper.
People trapped together through the months of polar darkness fall into and out of love, into and out of hate. The smallest personal foibles can irritate and aggravate others until they become the stuff of full-blown feuds. A slammed door in the middle of the night can lead to a screaming match three weeks later. An annoying laugh, or a nasal voice, or a person’s unforgivably poor taste in films has been known to set people’s teeth on edge and reduce otherwise friendly, approachable men and women to seething bundles of rage.
This is not to say that everybody who ‘winters’ ends up teetering on the edge of pathological madness; on the contrary, the bond formed between those who struggle through the Antarctic winter together, relying solely and upon one another for companionship, safety and entertainment during those long, isolated months, is one so deep that, again, it is difficult for those who have not been privy to it to even comprehend.
But the inescapable fact remains that the night is long and cold and dangerous, and that perhaps the ancient map-makers were not always so far from the truth, for sometimes there do indeed be dragons there …
* * *
From the Journal of Lieutenant William Downes
3rd May, 1922
Polar Exploration Vessel Raven
Approx. 67°S, 105°E [author’s estimate]
Today being the first day that I have been able to find it in me to write for any length of time, and as I am determined to recount the events of last week, I have taken the opportunity to secrete myself in the brig, suitably rugged up against the bitter cold that has now taken complete charge of the hold. Here I will set my story down, taking as long as I need to in order to leave a complete account. My left hand still aches abominably, of course, and Doctor Dalby would be mortified to discover me down here, but I may not have another opportunity.
I will be frank here, and admit that there have been times in the last week that I feared for my life, and that I am set in my decision to treat Messrs Rourke and Ryan with extreme caution from this point on.
Comparatively, I have been lucky, however. Lawson is still in his bunk, his face a frostbitten wreck, and the Doctor gives him only a fifty/fifty shot at seeing it through the next couple of days. If there is any good at all that might come of this, it is that his actions the other night, in the midst of our ordeal, have certainly caused me to see him in a new light.
But already I am getting ahead of myself – the pain clouding my thoughts, no doubt, and will endeavour to provide a more structured and thorough laying out of these events.
On the morning of 29th April, Rourke summoned the whole company, except for Lawson and myself, out onto the ice. I assumed they were going out once more to ‘hunt’ for Piotre, however I was mistaken because, several minutes later, the sound of raised voices and shouting reached us from outside and Lawson called softly to me from his cabin, asking, ‘What the hell do you think is going on out there, old chap?’
I replied that I had no idea. We then returned to our silence, neither of us willing to risk a further breach of Mr Rourke’s edict, just in case he’d left Ryan lurking somewhere nearby.
Our isolation continued until late in the afternoon, probably at around 1630, when we were both roused from our beds and told to dress in our full kits, then escorted by Ryan onto the ice, where Rourke had assembled the whole company beside the ship.
The moment I saw them, a sickening feeling settled upon me and I understood immediately that something was terribly amiss. Nobody would meet my eye, not even Alex and Greg, who have been silently sympathetic during the period of our internment. The gathering resembled something like a very large firing squad, and the atmosphere was most definitely funereal; for a moment, all sorts of silly scenarios flashed across my imagination, but I soon pulled myself together.
Reaching the group, we were pulled roughly to a halt by Ryan and, as Rourke stepped forward, Lawson went immediately on the offensive, demanding to know, ‘What the bloody hell is this all about, then?’
Rourke ignored him, and instead turned his back on us and faced the gathered company, addressing them thus:
‘You all saw these two the other day, disobeying my direct orders. Now, I’ve made it clear to all here, on many occasions, that I cannot and will not abide any sort of dissent aboard my ship.’
As he talked, he began to pace forwards and backwards on the ice in front of us, and I understood with an awful jolt that we’d been hauled out here as the accused in some sort of strange court-martial. Rourke continued:
‘I know several of you count these two among your mates and I am also aware that Downes has, up until this incident, acted at all times in what he thought to be the best interests of this expedition. However, the insubordination they displayed in refusing to assist in the hunt for Piotre Dimitri, despite my orders to the contrary, cannot go unpunished, and you will all stand witness to this.’
Realising that we were to be condemned and sentenced without being given so much as an opportunity to defend ourselves, I began to protest, but was silenced by a hard slap from Dick Ryan, which almost set my teeth ajar. Rourke continued, as though nothing had happened.
‘Downes and Lawson will spend the next twenty-four hours outside on the ice. They’ll receive no food, no shelter, no water, and no light.’ He gestured at a series of small piles of snow that had been thrown up in a wide circle around the ship. ‘Mr Ryan has set up a perimeter roughly fifty yards out and if either of them so much as sets foot within it, then a more …’ he paused at this point, carefully selecting his next word, ‘… vigorous punishment will be administered. Nobody is to speak to them, approach them, or assist them in any way, unless they feel inclined to join the two of them out here for the night. Is that understood?’
Not a single man responded, but Rourke seemed to take it as read. Then he nodded at Ryan and we were shoved forward again, following as Rourke led the way out to the perimeter. There, out of earshot of the rest of the company, he finally turned to face the two of us, glancing at his pocketwatch.
‘It’s now 1655. Neither of you will set foot inside this circle until this time tomorrow evening. Mr Ryan will be on watch tonight, along with a couple of other reliable men’ – his tone of voice made it completely clear that this description no longer applied to either Lawson or myself – ‘and they will be armed, and will have my permission to shoot anything that moves inside this circle, so if you feel the need to try your luck, please feel free to do so.’
With that, he turned sharply upon his heel, marched a few steps back towards the ship, stopped briefly and spoke to us again.
‘Also, I won’t be particularly upset if neither of you are anywhere to be found in the morning, so do feel free to bugger off, won’t you?’
We watched him return to the assembled men, say another couple of words, and then the whole party walked en masse back to the Raven. Several men risked his wrath to throw quick, sympathetic nods in our direction, but for the most part they assiduously avoided so much as glancing at the spot where Lawson and I stood. It was as though there was a hole in the air into which we’d fallen.
The last of them vanished into the ship and soon after, black smoke began to pour from the funnel, into wh
ich the chimney from the galley stove had been plumbed, as they fired it up for the evening. On the poop, a slouched figure that could only have been Dick Ryan took up position, sitting on a deck box alongside the mizzenmast.
It took us several moments to fully realise the enormity of the predicament into which we’d been thrust. Lawson plonked himself down in the snow and, if the expression on my face was anything near as despondent as the one upon his, we must have made for quite a miserable sight.
By this point the sun was below the horizon and, although sunset at the moment generally lasts several hours, I knew that the temperature, which was already cold thanks to a stiff breeze from out of the south-west, would only plummet further in the next few hours. I coaxed Lawson to his feet and together we set off, walking in silence, looking for somewhere we could find some form of shelter.
Neither of us spoke as, really, there didn’t seem much to say. Instead, we made our way side by side over the slick, featureless floe ice and headed for the low hummock of a pressure ridge that had risen about a week ago, roughly five or six hundred yards from the ship. There, I was pleased to discover that the strong winds had flowed across the ridge in such a way as to leave a deep bank of soft snow piled along the leeward side, and into this we were able to burrow and construct for ourselves something of a cave, which at least protected us from the worst of the wind.
And there we sat into the night, both of us sunk in the glum silence of our own bleak thoughts. I have no idea what occupied Randolph’s mind during those long, cold hours, but I contented myself with memories. I thought at first of Weatherly, and recalled the heat off the paddocks at the end of a summer day. It came as something of a shock to realise that, by this stage in the year, it is probably getting cold back home and that Mum and Dad are most likely putting in wood for the winter, their thoughts already turning towards the spring lambing. I tried for several minutes to imagine the fields as they must look right now – fallow and bare and colourless beneath a grey, autumnal, Victorian sky – but each time I did so, they quickly transformed into the baked, hot summer fields that I left behind me, all those months ago.
Next I thought of Elsie and, for the first time in months, was easily able to recall the warmth of her tiny body and the taste of her lips pressed against mine. The melancholy knowledge that I will never see her again made such thoughts difficult to bear and so, not wanting to put on a display in front of Lawson, I turned my attention to other matters.
Finally, I must have fallen into a fitful doze, because I dreamed – terrible, awful nightmares in which the ice had given way below me, and I was plunging down into the freezing water, dragged deeper by my heavy furs and clothing while the grip of the cold clutched at my chest and drove the last bubbles of silvery air from my lungs, until I was filled with nothing but cold.
And then I was awake again, shaken from this nightmare by Lawson, who was by this time nothing more than a dark shadow, an outline against the mouth of the cave, which was lit by the unearthly glow of the aurora.
‘Listen!’ he said, and immediately the howling of the dogs floated through the night.
‘It started a minute ago,’ he told me.
‘They’re close,’ I observed, and he agreed. I was trying desperately at this point not to concern myself with Greg Shannon-Stacey’s comments in the wardroom during the blizzard, and I am certain that Lawson was doing the same.
The howling continued for quite some time, during which Lawson and I huddled together in the back of our little cave – even that little human contact taking some of the tension out of the situation.
Then an enormously loud creaking and our shelter trembled around us, shaking a fine powder of snow down from the ceiling. We scrambled from the cave just in time, as it collapsed behind us with a quiet thump, leaving a roughly hummocked pile of snow as the only indication of its whereabouts.
Below our feet the floe shuddered again and the distant booming of pressure building in the pack ice somewhere nearby echoed around us. Then, with a loud report, a long fissure snaked through the ice ahead of us; a dark, angular shadow that streaked across the floe like an unnaturally fast snake. Lawson realised the danger before I did, and launched himself into a sprint, shouting at me to hurry up, else we find ourselves separated from the ship.
I needed no second invitation and tore after him, as fast as my legs could manage in their bulky pants. We leapt over the widening chasm in the knick of time and then retreated a safe distance from the edge, moving back towards the ship while keeping a weather eye on the shifting ice behind us.
Gradually, after a period of perhaps fifteen minutes, the rumbling movements in the pack subsided and, with a hiss that sounded almost like a sigh, the fissure over which we had leapt closed up again, a hairline fracture across the ice as the only telltale sign of its existence.
Panting from exertion, we both collapsed onto the ice and lay there for several minutes. It was bitingly cold and, even within the fur-lined hood of my parka, I could feel the skin of my face pinching so I roused Lawson and we hauled ourselves back to our feet again, stamping our legs and clapping our hands in their mittens and trying to restore some circulation to those extremities of our bodies.
I suggested that we walk the perimeter of Ryan’s boundary line, as a means of keeping warm as much as anything, and Lawson readily agreed. We set off, heading clockwise around the ship and keeping the boundary markers on our right. Fifty yards away, the black shape of the Raven hunched in the ice; if not for her spindly, angular masts and the unnatural bulk of her funnel, she would have appeared no different to any of the thousand and one other ridges and ice hummocks that have become the topography of our world.
We had completed perhaps two and a half laps when the sound of the dogs howling, which had accompanied us unceasingly, came to an abrupt halt, leaving only the whispering of the wind across the ice, which seemed almost silent by comparison. I remember glancing at Lawson at this juncture and being shocked to discover that despite his heavy clothing, the man was trembling violently, his teeth clenched so tightly that he was unable to manage even a couple of words.
Turning him so that his face was lit by the sparse light from the sky, I pushed his hood back slightly and noted with concern that his eyes had puffed almost shut, and the skin of his cheeks and nose turned waxy and pale.
Immediately I sat him in the snow and set about rubbing him furiously, trying to restore some circulation to his body, but realising the whole time that I was most likely fighting a losing battle. Finally, I rolled him onto his side, facing away from the wind, and used my hands to scoop a pile of snow about us both, hoping that it would provide some scant protection. In the process, my gloves gradually filled with snow and ice, which melted inside them and, by the time I had finished constructing my ice-wall, I realised to my great dismay that both my gloves had soaked through.
With Lawson now more or less unconscious, I curled myself beside him, hoping to preserve as much of our body heat as possible and then lay there, waiting for either dawn or death to come and not particularly concerned which arrived first.
Perhaps I slept again, perhaps not. I cannot say for certain, as my recall of the hours that followed is, at best, distorted and broken. Certain images have managed to lodge themselves in my memory, but in a most disjointed way – as though recalling an exhibition of photographs that I might have viewed many years ago.
I can remember clearly the ice, seen from my prone position, glimmering in the light, and thinking that I was lying upon a field of diamonds. I recall the shadows of the dogs, fleeing across the horizon ahead, silent and sleek under the dying moon.
And there is one memory – one moment, which I cannot place as either dream or reality, but which I can still recall with absolute clarity – I remember looking up into the face of the Ice Man, as he stood over me.
His clothes and face were filthy with black soot, which made him unrecognisable as anybody I knew. I can picture him standing over Lawson and me,
curled in our snow nest, and smiling, just for a second, his teeth a white gleam against the darkness.
And then it was dawn and the long pink scar of sunrise stained the icy, north-eastern horizon for several hours until finally, at God knows what time, the sun itself burst into the sky and I heard an odd whimpering sound which I listened to with mild curiosity for several minutes, before being shocked to realise that it was coming from my own mouth.
Sometime in the middle of the morning – I have no idea when, exactly – Doctor Dalby and Alex, in blatant defiance of Mr Rourke’s orders, left the ship and crossed the fifty-yard perimeter, searching until they located Lawson and me, almost comatose upon the ice. They then fetched a sledge from the ship and the Doctor ordered several men to assist in our immediate recovery. I’m told that when Rourke discovered this, he flew into a rage and threatened to return us both to the ice, and Alex and the doctor as well. In response, George Dalby calmly informed the Leader that if another single man was evicted from the ship, he would completely withhold all medical attention for Rourke himself, as well as any other men involved for the foreseeable future.
In the face of such an ultimatum, Mr Rourke backed down.
Now, I grow tired. My hands, especially my left, are somewhat frostbitten, and writing all this down has been an effort which has cost me dearly, I suspect.
* * *
Into White Silence Page 29