We had all cut our own teams out and trained them back at Arkham, using sleds with wheels to roll along the dusty summer roads, but there were other dogs along for insurance, you might say, in case one of the team dogs got sick or came up lame or got tore up in a fight so bad it couldn’t pull.
There was still a lot of fights, even though by this time each dog knew its place in the pack. Sergeant put most of them down for us. He was top dog and when he bared his teeth and gave that rumbling snarl of his, the other dogs minded him, but we handlers still had to keep a sharp eye out for trouble. Them dogs was only half domestic and sometimes the wolf came out strong in them.
They had to be exercised regular on the deck of the ship every day or they would of gone raving mad in that dark hold. That’s when the fights happened—while we was taking them out of their crates and letting them stretch their legs. I’ve got a nasty scar on the back of my left hand as a reminder not to get careless. It’s almost healed now, just a crooked white line on my skin.
I was happy when the wind across the Pacific started to get cold and we saw our first iceberg. Big, flat table of ice, it was. My constitution is made for winter—I can’t stand the heat of July and August. What I wouldn’t give for some of that warmth now! Sometimes I can’t even remember what heat feels like.
That first view we had of the Great Barrier as we sailed into McMurdo Sound almost makes everything that happened later worthwhile. It was a sight worth dying for, and that’s the truth. The noon sun was low in a cloudless sky at our backs, and the barrier, all two hundred vertical feet of it, was lit up and glowing the most astonishing blues and greens and pinks you never did see in Massachusetts, not even in the middle of winter.
The ice was all transparent-like, so that the sunlight seemed to shine deep into it and light it up from the inside. The ice glowed mostly pale blue, and the clear water of the cold sea glowed a shade of green, and the sky such a clear deep blue without a puff of cloud. I could see birds soar above the towering ice, so small they looked like the specks of soot that came out of the stack when the steam engine was running.
On the horizon rose a huge mountain like a big, dark cone. I asked Captain Thorfinnssen what the name of it was, and he called it the Erebus. A trail of black smoke came up out of the crown of it. It’s a volcano, if you can believe such a thing—a volcano amid all that ice. There was another big mountain in the background that Thorfinnssen called the Terror. Nice name for a mountain, but it ain’t near as impressive as the Erebus to my way of thinking, even if it is taller.
The dogs could smell the land. You should have heard them bark to get out of that hold. We handlers were no less eager to set foot on land, or I should say on ice, because you couldn’t see no land except for a few ridges of rock. The leader of the expedition, Professor William Dyer, didn’t waste any time. He held a conference with Douglas, who was captain of the Arkham, and along with Thorfinnssen they decided how they was to get all the dogs and machines and food and other supplies from the ships up on the top of the ice.
First they unloaded everything onto Ross Island and took an inventory of how well the drills and planes and dogs had made it through the voyage. When all the men and cargo was out of the whalers, they set about getting it up on top of the Great Barrier.
There’s no equal to Yankee seamen for moving cargo, even if it is an Englishman what says it. They did the work with ropes and pulleys, and it was almost like magic to see crate after crate winched up to the top of that greenly glowing cliff. The dogs howled in their harnesses like damned souls as they hung near two hundred feet, all four legs dangling and kicking in the frozen air, but we didn’t lose even one of them.
The biggest challenge was the parts for the five planes that had to be fitted together once they was on top of the Barrier. Some of those, such as the engines, weighed tons. Without the planes we could never have pressed so far south so quick—the dog sleds was for what you might call local transportation, but it was the planes that took us from camp to camp.
The organization of the Barrier Camp, as it came to be called, would have done the army proud. The mechanics put them planes together so neat, you’d never have knowed they was ever in pieces. Huge things they was, each with four great engines and props taller than a man.
They was rigged with special heaters to keep the engines and fuel lines from freezing. As Professor Pabodie said to me, it was more important to keep the engines from freezing than to keep the members of the expedition from freezing. He was always joking to try and keep up everyone’s spirits, but he didn’t even smile when he said it. I’m sorry I won’t never see him again, he was a good man.
I found time to walk some way apart from the camp and look around. There was nothing but ice as far as the eye could see to east and west, and here and there a few black ridges of rock, and in the distance to the south the mountains we had to fly across to get to the interior of the continent.
The wind cut me to the bone. It wasn’t the chill of it—the temperature was no lower than twenty degrees or so, and we was all dressed in these Eskimo rigs what were made of sealskins—it was where it come from, and what it crossed to get there. Not a tree, not a plant, not a blade of grass, not a patch of moss, nothing but ice and more ice, and some puny bits of rock that looked as though they was drowning in ice.
And don’t think the ice was like the ice on the surface of a frozen lake back in Arkham. Nothing of it—the ice was all broken and slanted and tumbled together. Some patches was covered with drifted snow, and they was flat enough for the sleds to run on, even if they was treacherous with voids underneath, but some of it was so rough it was all we could do to drag the steel runners of the sleds over it by hand even with the dogs straining along with us.
We had them in harness and practicing that first day to get them into shape after their long sea voyage. How they loved pulling across that ice! They didn’t care that it was Antarctica, they only knew that they was free to run again, and did they ever run.
When I put Sergeant into harness for the first time, he was so excited and happy, his entire body shook with it. He turned back his brown eyes to me in gratitude and let out a long howl that was enough to chill your blood, and all the other dogs took it up after him, so that they sounded like a pack of wolves. Maybe it was childish of us, but we handlers let out hoots and howls ourselves, we was so glad to be off that ship.
The greater part of the expedition set up tents on top of the Barrier, and the crews of the whalers stayed with the ships, which was anchored at the base of the ice. Professor Lake, who taught biology back at Miskatonic, had a wireless set up in the camp, and there was another on each of the planes. The Arkham had a great antenna strung from its mainmast that was big enough to send messages all the way back to the university. In this way the expedition was never out of contact with New England, though scant good that did us when the trouble started.
2
AT FIRST, EVERYTHING WENT NICE AND SMOOTH. THAT SHOULD have made me nervous, but I let myself get lulled into smugness by all those experts. Nearly everyone on this expedition was an expert. Most of the graduate students could fly the planes and work the wirelesses. The mechanics kept the planes and boring machines running like Swiss clocks. The dogs was well behaved and didn’t get sick. I should have seen that everything was too good to be true, but I wanted it to go well so I didn’t listen to that little whisper of warning at the back of my mind that told me to watch out.
On the twenty-first of November, we loaded four of the big planes with forty-five dogs and all but one of the five sleds, the drills, crates of dynamite, tents and other supplies, and flew south for near seven hundred miles. We left one plane and one dog sled at Barrier Camp for emergency use, on the old principle that it tempts fate to carry all your eggs in one basket.
Mooney was the dogman who stayed behind with his team. At the time I pitied him, but now I wish I could trade places with him—no, that’s not true, I wouldn’t wish what I’ve got on anyone.
Mooney is a good man, he deserved to be the one to stay behind. Only I wish it had been Henry Lake on account of he was so young, with all his life ahead of him.
Professor Dyer stayed behind until we had Southern Camp established. Even then, we could all see that there was storm clouds gathering between Professor Dyer and Professor Lake. Dyer might have been the official leader of the expedition, but Lake wanted to go his own way and wouldn’t be told what to do. There was more than a few short words between them, even before we left Dyer behind at Barrier Camp.
My own thinking is that Dyer wasn’t the right man to lead the expedition. He had the knowledge to lead, that’s true enough, but he didn’t have the will to set his foot down when somebody challenged his orders. He was always saying, “Well, well, let’s put our heads together and work it out then,” in that quiet voice of his. That may be fine for the university, but it won’t do for the Antarctic, and it didn’t.
There was no room in the planes for regular seats, so we sat on benches along the sides, with the cargo piled up under nets wherever there was a place for it. It was funny to watch young Lake and his father, sitting side by side, as we flew across those endless miles of broken ice and jagged outcroppings of black rock. They acted like they barely knew each other, they was so formal and polite, as if they’d just met a week ago. Lake didn’t want to show favoritism toward his son, and young Henry didn’t want to seem like he was asking for any favors, so they just nodded and mumbled at each other with their eyes turned away.
Weather was good. We set up a permanent camp just south of the Beardmore Glacier, not too far from Mt. Nansen. There was a lot of larking about in those early days. In mid-December Professor Pabodie, who was an amateur mountaineer as well as an engineer, climbed Mt. Nansen with two graduate students, Gedney and Carroll, and planted an American flag at the summit.
A few weeks later Professor Dyer, who came up from Barrier Camp by plane with some of the supplies, decided to take two of the planes and fly over the South Pole. Lake and Pabodie went with him, along with all seven graduate students. I didn’t go, because I wasn’t asked. Glory and fame are for the leaders, not for carpenters who handle sled dogs. Young Henry Lake went with them, though. Dyer made up some reason why he should be on the plane, and Professor Lake didn’t object to it, but you could tell it made him uneasy. I think for his part, Henry would have been happy to stay with the dogs, but he had no say in the matter.
All this time, Professor Lake was in a giddy state over the fossils he was finding when he used his heaters to melt the ice and Pabodie’s boring machines to drill into the ridges of rock beneath. He could only drill in a few spots where the rock thrust up in peaks near the surface of the ice—the ice was just too thick to bore all the way to the bottom. Even so, he found some things that stood his hair straight on end. I admit, that wasn’t hard to do—if you’ve seen photographs of Professor Lake, you know that his hair stands almost straight up even after it’s been combed—but you know what I mean.
The professors kept us on the hop with the sleds, running back and forth with specimens of fern fossils and funny little shellfish. I brought back the flat rocks that got Lake all wound up and keen on going westward, instead of east like Dyer had planned. It was in pieces from the dynamite blast, but Lake put it together like a jigsaw puzzle. I didn’t know, then, why he was so excited about it—it was just some lines, like the markings you might get if you presses a palm leaf down in the mud. Professor Dyer didn’t think much of it, either, but Lake was almost out of his head with excitement.
Lake started pushing our sleds further and further into the northwest all through the middle part of January. He was like a wild man and wouldn’t listen to words of caution. It was treacherous going over that snow. The ice under it had these wide cracks what Professor Pabodie called crevasses that went down forever, but the snow drifted over them on the wind, which blew a gale every day, so that we couldn’t tell where them crevasses was until we was on top of them and heard the snow begin to crunch and fall in under our feet.
Funny thing though, when the accident happened it wasn’t a crevasse but one of those ridges where the ice is pushed up that caused it. Me and Henry Lake was racing from the camp to where Pabodie and two of the grads had a hole dug in the rock. They wanted us to get the fossils gathered up so they could move on, so it was rush-rush. I should have known better, it was me that was at fault. Henry was just a boy and should not be held to account for it.
He was trying to get ahead of my team by cutting across some rough ice sheets that was tilted up and uneven where the edges met. I had the sense to go around and thought he did as well. He couldn’t have beat Sergeant and my other dogs in a fair race and he knew it. Well, he hit a huge slab of ice about half the size of a football field and couldn’t see that there was a drop on the other side.
His sled went over the edge. Young Henry jumped off and away at the last moment and didn’t go with them. Two of the dogs was badly hurt in the fall onto the sharp edges of ice below. One died after about ten minutes, but I had to cut the throat of the other, a sweet blue-eyed husky bitch, to put her out of her misery. Henry couldn’t do it—he started to shed tears and they froze to his cheeks and eyelashes in the wind, so that he couldn’t see.
We was able to get on to the dig site with his five remaining dogs, but it was a nasty business. Looking back on it, I see it as an omen of what was to come, but at the time I wasn’t worried about the future, only about whether Henry would buck up and do his duty like a man. When you’re on an expedition like that, there’s no such thing as calling it quits in the middle—you have to see it through to the end, no matter what.
Professor Dyer and Professor Lake barely said anything about the loss of the two dogs. I guess they expected to lose dogs, which is why they had brought along replacements. When Henry and me got back to camp, they were head to head arguing about whether to go east or west. Dyer wanted to go east, but Lake wouldn’t hear of it. He demanded that the planes be flown west, into a part of Antarctica that had never been mapped or explored. Lake claimed that the fossils was leading him west and that he had to follow their trail.
Professor Lake had a will of iron when he wanted something. Dyer couldn’t stand up to him. They argued for hours, but in the end it was agreed that Lake should take the four planes westward with the drilling machines and most of the dogs and men. Lake asked Dyer to come with him, on account of Dyer was the geologist, but Dyer refused. We could all see that his feelings was bruised. He decided to stay in Southern Camp with Professor Pabodie and five men. One of the men was Zulinski—Dyer wanted a dog sled with him, in case he was cut off from the planes by the weather or mechanical problems.
We left Southern Camp, flying westward over the mountains, on the twenty-second of January. Lake was in high spirits. He had got his own way, and he was convinced that we would find fossils that would make us all famous for life. Maybe he was right, but I’ll never know about that. It was the last time I saw Professor Dyer and the others.
3
AFTER A FEW HOURS IN THE AIR, WE LANDED SO THAT LAKE COULD drill and blast for samples. We found more of those queer palm-leaf kind of fossils that got Professor Lake so excited. After about eight hours, we took off again. There was no reason to stop and set up a camp—the sun was above the horizon all day and all night. It never got very high in the sky and it never quite set, unless it was behind a nearby mountain. The sky never got dark.
It was funny, trying to sleep when there was no night. I found myself staying awake for twenty, twenty-two, sometimes more than twenty-four hours at a time, and then sleeping for ten or eleven. I was tired all the time. Everyone else was the same. We got on each other’s nerves and stopped talking except when we had something that needed to be said.
After flying another seven hours or so, we came into sight of a great mountain range not marked on any maps. We’d never seen such mountains before. No one had. They say the Himalayas is the highest mountains in the world, bu
t I know better now.
The Lord alone can guess what Professor Lake might have done if fate hadn’t taken a hand in things. He talked to the graduate student, Danforth, who was flying our plane. They had their heads close together—none of us in the back could hear what they was saying, but I think Lake was trying to convince Danforth to fly over the mountains. That would have been madness. Them jagged black peaks was like a sheer fence of stone clear up to the sky. They was so high, there was no snow on them. But as I say, fate took a hand.
The plane flown by the graduate student Moulton developed a misfire in one of her cylinders, and Moulton decided to land and sort out the problem. He set down on a flat expanse of ice and snow just below the foothills of the mountains. Lake decided to build our camp there, since we had to land. We set up the tents and made a temporary snow corral for the dogs.
The wind was kicking up something fierce. I’ve never felt such cold in my life. If you left the scarf off your face for ten seconds, your nose and cheeks was froze, that’s how bad it was. We had goggles, but they kept getting fogged up and iced over so that we could hardly see to work.
There was a kind of weird whistling noise in the wind that the dogs didn’t like at all. My lead dog, Sergeant, took to standing with his head into the wind and his ears perked up, his eyes narrowed and his lips drawn back from his teeth in a kind of snarl. When I went over to talk to him and give him a pat or two to comfort him, he’d whine and look at me kind of in apology like, wagging his bushy tail like a dust mop, but when I went back to work, he’d do the same thing all over again.
It was an eerie sound. Me and Henry Lake looked at each other more than once, listening to it, but we didn’t say anything about it. There was no good came from talking about things like that. It was just the wind. We couldn’t make it stop, so we pretended not to hear it.
The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 Page 30