Into White Silence

by Anthony Eaton

  In the end, though, there was little the Doctor could discern; the lad had suffered a blow to the head, most certainly, but this could easily have been the result of a fall on the ice, after which he’d lost consciousness and been buried in the snow. Or it could have happened some distance from the ship and dazed him enough to make it impossible to get back home again. Or it could have occurred through more sinister means. Likewise, the doctor couldn’t say how long the body had been dead – the ice had frozen and preserved it as fresh as the moment it had fallen.

  In the end, there was nothing for it but to dig another grave alongside that of Per, and to stand once again in the afternoon twilight while, in the absence of Captain McLaren, the melancholy words of the service for the dead were read aloud by George Smythe-Davis.

  14th May, 1922

  A strange evening, last night. Almost completely at odds with the last several weeks. After burying Piotre, an odd sense of relief seemed to sweep through the ship, and by 1900, with the sun well and truly down, a party of sorts had started in the ’tween deck. Our new supply of timber has had several benefits, not the least of which is the capacity to thaw our supplies in larger capacity, and Cook knocked together a jolly good meal, making a hash of tinned beef and canned vegetables, followed by chocolate and, most importantly of all, not a morsel of seal meat in sight!

  Even Mr Rourke seemed in fine spirits and, after dinner was ended, knocked the top off two of his precious bottles of whisky; these were shared out to grateful shouts by most aboard.

  Only a few men did not participate. Lawson, whom the Doctor suspects may have contracted pneumonia as a result of our night on the ice, sat silently in his usual corner, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and observed the festivities with an inscrutable face. Likewise, Doctor Dalby seemed disinclined to join in the celebration, and also Greg Shannon-Stacey, who retired to his bunk almost immediately after the meal was finished.

  For myself, from the moment that we laid poor Piotre’s body in its cold grave, a great exhaustion came over me and so, while the stories and merrymaking continued, I was content to sit at the table amid the revelry and let it wash around me. By 2200, fatigue and the Scotch overcame most of the men and people began to drift to their bunks or hammocks. I decided to do the same. As I rose from my place at the table I realised that Lawson was still sitting silently in his corner. Catching my eye, he nodded sharply in the direction of the companionway, and taking his meaning, I followed him up onto the deck.

  It was a magnificent evening – one of those nights that can, for a moment or two at least, take your breath away to the extent that you forget all the hardships; the cold, the hunger; the pain in your hands and joints. To the south, a spectacular aurora fell in silent splendour across the horizon and above us every single star was twinkling with such vigour that they seemed alive against the black night sky.

  Lawson led the way forward and we perched ourselves in the forepeak, side by side. After just a couple of moments, and despite the relative mildness of the evening, he was trembling violently. When he spoke, it was through chattering teeth.

  ‘Do you know, old chap, I think I have completely forgotten what it is to be warm?’

  Despite his attempt to sound like his old self, something in his manner conveyed a sense of terrible weariness. Uncertain what response he had hoped for, I muttered some platitude that things should improve now that we had a reasonable supply of wood for the next little while.

  ‘And when that’s gone? Then we chop down the foremast. Then start pulling up the deck. And then what?’ Lawson shook his head, and all effort to sound lighthearted vanished from his voice. ‘I need you to do me a favour, Will,’ he told me, and I replied that I’d be happy to do whatever was within my powers.

  ‘There’s a woman in Melbourne, an actress, Mary Flannagan. You’ll be able to find her. If by some miracle you manage to get back there and I don’t, I want you to …’ he hesitated here, for just the briefest of moments, before concluding, ‘… just find her, make certain she’s all right, and tell her what happened to me. Will you do that?’

  Naturally, I said that I would be pleased to do so, though it was my considered opinion that he’d be able to find her himself. At this, Lawson laughed, a cynical chuckle which quickly dissolved into a hacking cough.

  When he’d recovered his breath enough to speak again, he said to me, ‘Save that twaddle for Alex, Downes. He needs to hear it far more than I do.’

  At that, we rose and he bid me goodnight and then proceeded back below decks. I lingered a few moments longer, soaking up the silent beauty of the evening. Somewhere out on the ice to the south a faint movement in the corner of my vision caught my attention. When I turned to look, I was at first startled to see what I thought to be the figure of a man, sitting atop an ice hummock near the weather screens. I stared at the shape for some time and it moved not a twitch so, once I was satisfied that the night and my eyes were playing tricks on me, I followed Lawson’s example and headed below.

  When we woke this morning, Lawson had gone.

  16th May, 1922

  … and despite Mr Rourke’s words, which to my ears reeked of insincerity, there has been little other effort made in the search for Lawson, which was declared over before lunchtime today, despite the protests of several men, including me.

  While our conversation the other night suggests that certain inferences can be drawn as to his state of mind, it is still difficult to accept that the man would willingly sacrifice himself so quietly and in such a manner – vanishing into the night without so much as a whisper doesn’t strike me as particularly Lawson-like behaviour. Indeed, he’d been heard to declare previously that, when his time came, he intended to go out ‘with a bloody great bang and not a whimper, and preferably pressed between the naked bodies of three or four young and willing dancing girls, old chap!’

  Still, it seems that there is little hope of finding him now, and as the sun faded this afternoon – an event which is now occurring at around 1500 hours – I stood with Alex on the foredeck, in almost exactly the same spot where I had my final conversation with Lawson the other night, and we smoked the last dregs of our tobacco, which both of us have been eking out for some weeks now, as a kind of silent memorial.

  I am worried for Alex’s state of mind, now. With Lawson gone in such circumstances, it concerns me greatly that Alex, who has always been so susceptible to surrendering to hopelessness, will take it upon himself to do something similar. When I tentatively enquired after his mood, though, he gave no indication that this was the case. In fact, he seemed almost relaxed, despite the melancholy aspect of the afternoon.

  He is not the only one to be demonstrating such behaviour at the moment. The lessening of tension among the group that followed Piotre’s burial has continued, and most of the men seem far more at ease than just a few days ago.

  This I can only attribute to the notion that we have, with the discovery of Piotre’s body, managed to bury the Ice Man who had become a source of some fear among the group, however irrational such an assumption might seem. Certainly in the days before that last blizzard, the Ice Man had become the scapegoat for every misfortune, however large or small, that overtook us.

  While I personally cannot for a moment believe that a fifteen-year-old boy was somehow managing to survive out there and was wreaking his revenge upon us, perhaps his death has allowed us to overcome some fundamental and primal fear within ourselves. Now we have at least a fighting chance of pulling together through the months ahead. If this is poor Piotre’s legacy, then I suppose it is a small blessing.

  * * *

  TWENTY-THREE

  HOPE. MEMORIES. THE PROBLEM WITH GHOSTS. A STRANGER ABOARD. DISAPPEARANCES.

  And so, by degrees, we approach the endgame of this tale; the pieces now all in place, and the options of the defensive side narrowing with each passing moment. Imagine them – trapped, entombed, haunted and suffering the physical deprivations of cold and hunger. How fr
ightened must Downes and his companions have been? And what slender threads of hope kept them going in the face of such an apparently calamitous future?

  In his next entry, dated 17th May, Downes falls into an oddly reminiscent tone, and writes at length, and in a strangely disjointed fashion, a rambling account of his life, beginning thus:

  It is hard now to recall the taste of dust, dry at the back of my throat at the end of a day in the saddle. Back at home the dams should be full and the fields green right now, but for the life of me I cannot imagine anything but white. When I close my eyes and concentrate, all I can see is white. I dream in white. I wake to white. I breathe white.

  But still, occasionally there are moments which, at the strangest intervals, leap unbidden into my mind and for a minute or a second I can recall to the smallest detail what it is to be sitting on the porch with Dad, the floor boards below the front room window creaking under the weight of his chair and a fading sun casting the house paddock all into blue shadow.

  The air heavy with impending rain, the smell of scones from the kitchen. The day I first laid eyes upon Elsie. My God! I must have been only fourteen or fifteen, and her just thirteen or so, both of us awkward with youth when my mother sent me into town to fetch some cloth to make a dress for Vi. There she was in the shop and while I’d certainly seen her before, that was the day I noticed her for the first time.

  Nights during January and February Archie and I used to ride out to the five-mile fence and camp. Under the old gums there by the back creek we’d laugh about nothing and he’d send up the old man better than I ever could, but never when Dad was around, as that would have earned him a thrashing. One time we were out there and the air was all of a sudden heavy with smoke and by the time we’d bolted for home, the fire was already tearing through the back blocks so fast you could see the plume from seven miles away …

  The entry continues in this vein for some time, several pages full of disconnected, incomplete fragments of a life, most less cogent than those above. Downes touches upon the war, upon his first time in battle, even briefly upon that fateful night in Bullecourt when he made the decision that eventually proved to be both his making and his undoing:

  … and suddenly the Captain was on the ground bleeding and screaming bloody murder for us to ‘keep moving, lads, or I’ll shoot the lot of you myself!’ and I roared at the others to ‘press on’ while I grabbed the Captain and bolted for the nearest crater, him cursing me for a disobedient bastard all the way …

  And so on, until finally Downes concludes with the observation that:

  … all of this I’ve done. Managed full and complete and if the memories are fading into the white, I can still sleep at night knowing that if, God help me, I can pull through this winter, then perhaps I’ll manage it all again, and next time I won’t be so damned keen to let it all go.

  What to make of all this?

  Hope.

  Tim Bowden, in the introduction to The Silence Calling, his seminal work on the history of Australians in Antarctica, makes the observation that: ‘Humans do not belong in Antarctica …’

  In this, he is utterly correct. For most people who find themselves marooned on those white and hostile shores, home and hope are the same thing – two sides of the same coin – and they cling to both with equal fervour. The same was true for Downes, and no doubt for every other man trapped aboard the ship with him.

  Hope comes in many forms, and judging from Downes’ entries, one of the few hopeful events for the men of the Raven was the verification of the death of Piotre Dimitri Petrokoff. ‘We have … managed to bury the Ice Man …’ Downes observed. And, while I am certainly no psychologist, and have no special knowledge of the stresses and ways of men in such situations, it is not unreasonable to presume, I think, that Downes is largely correct in this shrewd assessment. For while thoughts of home and future are all very well, they are a long way distant and perhaps something more … immediate … was also needed. At Piotre’s funeral, they had buried their imagined ghost, and with it at least a portion of their fears.

  But, of course, the problem with ghosts is that they’re very hard to kill.

  * * *

  From the Journal of Lieutenant William Downes

  18th May, 1922

  Polar Exploration Vessel Raven

  Position Unknown

  A terrible set-to in the middle of the night last night, when all hands were roused by Doug King and Dave Lacey, who were on watch when they encountered a man emerging from the forward deckhouse companionway. At first they assumed it to be one of us, perhaps coming up for a little air or to answer the call of nature, but then they noticed the figure moving strangely and lugging with him a large hessian sack.

  Deciding to ascertain both who he was and what he was doing, Doug and Dave called out and started down from the poop deck but, the moment he became aware of them, the man dropped the sack and leapt for the rail, vaulting over into the snow drifts piled along the starboard side of the ship and then vanishing with great haste off towards the north-east.

  In the discarded bag we discovered tins of meat and vegetables from our stores, a bottle of brandy plus a small supply of wood salvaged from a sledge which we had bashed apart with a small hatchet several days ago, prior to cutting down the mast, and which was being saved for emergency purposes. There was also a hurricane lamp and a flagon of kerosene, but no matches.

  Of the man himself, Doug and Dave caught only the briefest of glimpses and were able to describe only his clothing, which was the same as all of ours only far more filthy and worn. Pressed, they claimed that they didn’t recognise him as any of our vanished crewmates, but his hood was drawn tight and in the darkness they were unable to catch even a glimpse of his face.

  Immediately, a party was organised to follow the man’s tracks while they were still fresh, but after just twenty minutes they ran out, vanishing into a hard, broken field of pressure ridges and sastrugi into which it would have been foolhardy to venture without at least some indication of the mysterious intruder’s general direction.

  By dawn, a fresh wind was picking up from the south-west and a light snow had begun to fall, so the search party returned to the ship empty-handed.

  Naturally, this intrusion has put everyone’s nerves on edge again, though it is my feeling that, whoever the poor devil is, he is harmless enough and must by this time be desperate for the basics of life, if he is prepared to undertake such a risky trespass. I suggested that we leave the sack, with its contents, out on the ice some distance from the ship but Mr Rourke overruled this notion.

  He declared that those who’d left had ‘made their choices and can bloody well live with them. If any of them want to come back aboard all they have to do is come out in the open and ask, like civilised men, and we’ll happily consider their cases, but we will not have them skulking around out there on the ice thinking they can sneak off with our supplies any time they wish.’

  I then suggested that we post a notice to this effect, perhaps by the foot of the gangplank, but this suggestion was also discounted.

  After the return of the party, all hands gathered in the wardroom and Mr Rourke reiterated his directions, ordering that nobody even think of assisting the Ice Man, even though he is undoubtedly one of our former companions. He also ordered that all food and fuel stores be shifted out of the forepeak and locked below, that the forward companionway be nailed shut, leaving the chartroom as the only point of entry and egress to the interior of the ship, and that night-watches now be doubled and armed. The rest of the morning and much of the early afternoon was spent carrying out these directives and now our ship feels more like a fortified trench than a home.

  I have endeavoured to assure the men that there is little to be concerned about – the man must be either Mike Burke, Tom Irvine, Ernie Tockson, Captain McLaren, Charles Weymouth or Randolph Lawson. Whoever it is has sailed alongside us, and has shared this journey and all its deprivations, and we should pity him in his desperatio
n, rather than fearing him.

  For the most part, though, my words seem to have fallen upon deaf ears, and there is even some talk that whichever of the above men is in fact the Ice Man might well be responsible for the disappearances of all the others.

  As I write this, it is 1520 hours. Outside, the last vestiges of sunset are fading from the north-western horizon. Up on deck four men are standing guard, two at the top of the gangplank and two on patrol on the ice around the ship. Both groups are armed with rifles and ordered to shoot on sight anybody or anything who approaches the Raven without first making their peaceful intentions clear.

  Somewhere to the south a dog is howling, but over the course of the last week even that haunting sound has become increasingly sporadic, perhaps because the animals have moved further afield, or perhaps because they are finally succumbing to the conditions and lack of food.

  21st May, 1922

  Stood my hour last night with Alex, Greg and also Peter Grace. As on the last two nights, the four of us agreed to leave what meagre supplies we could pilfer from the stores out on the other side of the perimeter markers and, as previously, the sack was empty by the time we came off watch.

  If Mr Rourke discovers our activities he will be severely displeased, but we all agree that the course we have chosen is the only one which will allow us to look in the mirror in good conscience should we, by some miracle, ever see home again.

  23rd May, 1922

  … after which Greg took the bag out to the perimeter line at 0330, right in the middle of our watch. It was a remarkably dark night, with cloud blocking all ambient light from the stars and aurora and, when he hadn’t returned to the ship by 0340, Alex and I became concerned and set out to check upon him, leaving Pete at the head of the gangplank with orders to wake all hands if we were not back by the change of watch.