During one break Sophia sat heavily on her sledge and spoke quietly to Kylie who had pulled up next to her. I couldn’t hear what was being said but from their body language I could tell something was wrong. When I skied over to them, Sophia waved away my concerns. ‘My chest feels tight,’ she explained. ‘It’s like a panic attack.’
‘I think it might be the altitude,’ Kylie suggested.
Our seemingly endless climb through sastrugi land had brought us to an altitude of just under 3,000 metres. This isn’t very much in mountaineering terms but it is possible to feel the effects of altitude at anything over 2,000 metres. We had gained height so gradually over the last month that I hadn’t expected us to be affected but I’d noticed that recently I found myself out of breath as we skied. It was difficult to be sure whether this was just general exhaustion or something more until I had woken up in the night with a feeling of being short of breath. I’d gasped in panic, gripped by a fear of not being able to breathe. It was a sensation I’d felt before at altitude, and it seemed that Sophia was having a similar problem. Kylie had spent more time than anyone else in the team at altitude and advised us all to concentrate on breathing out if we felt short of breath, rather than just focusing on inhaling.
As we continued to climb the air wasn’t our only problem. On our map we could see that we were approaching the polar plateau, a vast expanse of high ground at the centre of the Antarctic continent that surrounds the South Pole. Our arrival on the plateau was marked by a noticeable drop in temperature and a strong wind from the south that seemed to cut straight through our clothing as if it wasn’t there. The change caught us by surprise and we suddenly felt very vulnerable. The calm, relatively warm weather of the past month had allowed us to get away with sloppy habits. The new weather sought out our weaknesses and exploited them mercilessly. Steph had become used to unzipping her trousers up to the thigh for ventilation so that the skin beneath was covered by just her thin thermal leggings but now she found itchy red lumps appearing on her legs. The blood vessels in her skin had frozen in the exposure to the cold air to form nasty chilblains. Era found an angry red mark on her face where the cold wind had found a narrow gap between her goggles and mask. It was a reminder to all of us to double-check our face-coverings as we used to at the outset of the expedition. I noticed I found it particularly difficult to keep my nose warm and so fashioned some extra padding on the inside of my mask from some fleece scraps in our repair kit. Everyone found that the cold headwind exacerbated the difficulties with our goggles. The slightest moisture would freeze instantly until thick wedges of ice sat in the well of the lenses beneath our eyes and slowly crawled up the inside. We became used to seeing the world through a distorting film of ice crystals.
Our face masks too became instruments of slow torture. Frozen breath built up on the inside so that ice sat uncomfortably next to our skin and threatened us with frostbite. Unable to spare my hands as we clambered unsteadily over sastrugi I became adept at pushing frozen material away from my face with my tongue or making strange grimaces behind my mask to ensure my cheeks didn’t freeze. Kylie mentioned that she did the same and soon the whole team were swapping techniques. Reena described how she blew hot air upwards, puffing like a steam engine, in an attempt to warm the tip of her nose or melt a small peep hole into the ice covering her goggles. I realised things had become desperate when I caught Steph using a shovel one evening to chip inch-thick blocks of ice from the inside of her face mask. ‘I didn’t want to bring it inside like that,’ she explained. ‘It would drip all over the place.’
The cold air seemed to freeze the clouds, too, so that they dropped out of the sky, filling the air with tiny flecks of crystal. Like fireflies, the diamond dust was impossible to look at directly but created an optical white noise around the edges of our vision. We had become used to sun dogs and haloes but this was new. ‘It’s like blessings falling from the sky,’ said Reena. I loved the description; somehow it seemed comforting. However, later that day it appeared that our blessings had run out.
I sat in the tent with my knees pulled into my chest to keep them out of the way as my three tent-mates moved about preparing for bed. Above the noise of the stove I heard footsteps approach. Kylie called through the tent, ‘Felicity, have you got a minute?’
I recognised her tone all too well: something was wrong. Outside Kylie had the hood of her jacket pulled tightly around her face with a hat on underneath. Her cheeks and nose were red with cold and her fingers were folded into the palm of her hands. It looked as if she had been outside in the cold for a while.
‘Don’t panic,’ she started, ‘but I’ve had a fuel leak in my sledge.’ I took a slow intake of breath but followed her advice not to panic. Kylie led me over to her tent where the contents of her sledge were laid out on the snow. ‘I’ve been through everything and it seems that the fuel has got into the ration bags but only affected the noodles. So I’ve taken all the noodles out and repacked the rest of the food and made sure nothing else was contaminated.’ Kylie looked at me, waiting for a response. I wasn’t sure what to say.
The fuel cans all had special tape stuck to the thread of the caps to prevent leaks and were wrapped in individual plastic bags as well as being placed together in a second strengthened plastic sack. The food was also in its own separate plastic sack and was divided into sealed plastic day bags. Therefore there were four or five separate layers of protection that should, theoretically, have prevented any cross-contamination. In a tent group of four, no one carried both food and fuel in their sledge but as Kylie was part of a tent group of three she was, unusually, carrying both. Only a few days before I had asked the team to check their fuel can every morning after Era had noticed that hers was dripping slightly. ‘I did check it,’ Kylie replied defensively. ‘I swear it was fine this morning.’ I reflected that we had crossed a lot of big sastrugi that day. It was quite possible that the cap on the fuel can had worked its way free as the sledge was bumped and bashed over repeated sastrugi and that the leaked fuel had then run between all the different layers of protective wrapping to contaminate the food.
‘It’s lucky that the main meals are in their own sealed foil packets,’ I thought aloud. Kylie grimaced. ‘Helen has been mixing a handful of noodles into her meals,’ she said. ‘So she got a belly full of fuel.’
‘It was disgusting,’ called Helen from inside the tent. I hadn’t been aware Helen and Reena were listening. I lifted one of the bags of noodles and stuck my nose into the bag. The smell of fuel was unmistakable. ‘Every bag is the same, except two,’ said Kylie. The noodles had always been an optional extra in our rations, added after the resupply to give our bodies an extra boost of carbohydrates. It was unfortunate that Reena, Kylie and Helen would lose this extra input of energy, but we could share the noodles from the other tent to lessen the impact. The loss wasn’t ideal but neither was it critical.
‘Well, it looks like you’ve done what you can for now,’ I said indicating all the bags sorted out on the snow. ‘You’re not going to run out of food as long as we get to the South Pole on time. It just puts a little more pressure on us, that’s all.’ I smiled flatly at her through pursed lips.
Leaving Kylie to repack her sledge I retired to my habitual corner of the tent and took out the team notebook to look at my mileage calculations. Despite the lack of noodles, we still had enough food to keep us on full rations until Day 38. If we maintained the mileage we’d been covering over the last week and stopped for one rest day, I calculated that it left us without much margin for error, but it would be enough. As I counted out the days for a final time, scribbling numbers into the margins as I worked, some sixth sense fell over me like a shadow. I had the abrupt conviction that something was wrong with the figures.
Sacrificing a clean sheet from the notebook I started afresh, using the GPS to double-check exactly how far we were from the South Pole. Adding up our target miles I looked at the final total in horror. Forcing down the panic already tingl
ing in my fingertips, I added up the target mileage again and went through the sheet day by day to make sure there were no mistakes. I put down the notebook and ran my hands through my hair in frustration. There was no denying it, we had a whole 11 extra nautical miles to go to the South Pole than I had accounted for. Eleven miles doesn’t seem like much but it was the equivalent of a whole day skiing. I couldn’t understand how the miles had been dropped but here they were. On top of the lost breakfast bags and the contaminated food, this extra day of skiing squeezed our already tight schedule even tighter.
The next day I pondered our options as we skied. In order to make the South Pole before we ran out of food we would either need to cover more miles each day, reduce our rations and save the excess to create an extra day of food, or sacrifice the rest day we had planned for 25 December and use it to regain the additional 11 nautical miles. None of these options appealed. Although we had been skiing for more than a month, the team were still struggling to finish their rations every day, but I was keen for them to continue getting a full intake of nutrients for as long as possible. Already Era was showing signs of tiring and I was worried that Helen and Sophia would soon follow. I was also reluctant to abandon our rest day. It was a question of morale as much as our physical need for a rest. I knew that everyone was already counting down the days until our ‘holiday’ on Christmas Day. More than anything it was the idea of having a lie-in, a day when we didn’t have to force ourselves from our warm sleeping bags into the subzero temperatures and frozen torments of our average day. I wasn’t sure what the mental effects might be of taking away the carrot that dangled so tantalisingly ahead of us. That left the option of skiing just a little further each day. We had covered some 200 nautical miles since the resupply and the distance was beginning to show in our bodies. I didn’t want to push too hard now that we were so close to the final stages. We’d all heard the stories of teams in years past being rescued from the 88th degree or beyond, less than 100 nautical miles from the pole and yet unable to go on. It was a spectre I kept close to remind myself not to get complacent or overzealous.
Around me what had started as a gloomy day of flat bluish light split open to let rays of sunshine illuminate the landscape like spotlights on a theatre stage. As the cracks in the cloud grew larger to reveal the indigo blue of the sky, a halo emerged around the sun, glowing with particular ferocity where it coincided with sun dogs. It reminded me of the glare of the sun reflected from glass buildings. At these brighter points, mirror images of the halo branched outwards like smiles in all four directions, meeting each other with a touch as light as a kiss. I was entranced and as I glanced down the line strung out in front of me I noticed that everybody’s eyes were transfixed on this shimmering display. Once again diamond dust hung suspended in the air around us. I looked directly upwards through a tunnel of sparkles and noticed a new addition to our solar display. All the sun dogs and haloes we had seen until now had been split into prismatic colours but now a circle of white light stretched in a horizontal plane from the sun, as if the sun were the diamond in a colourless ring. I gazed in amazement at this completion of our light show and noticed that the horizontal halo was studded with pale globes of white light, like echoes of our star. I wasn’t sure if perhaps I had looked at the sun for too long and that these were echoes in my retina rather than in the sky but as the team stopped for a break I asked Reena, ‘Can you see that?’
She nodded enthusiastically. ‘It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,’ she said in awe.
That evening, with the whole team squeezed into one tent, I baldly outlined the problem of the missing miles and our options. ‘I need you all to be absolutely honest with me, and yourselves, about how you are feeling and what our goals should be. We’ve come this far so it would be a shame to blow it now after a month of effort. It feels like we are close but there is still plenty of time for things to wrong.’
There was silence in the tent. Era looked around to see if anyone else was about to speak before taking the floor.
‘I’ve actually been thinking that it would be wrong of me to celebrate Christmas with you. It is a Christian festival and I am a Muslim. So please everyone, do not give me presents or wish me Happy Christmas or give me special food.’
I frowned, taken by surprise. ‘Era, we’re not going to have a party in one tent and leave you alone in the other.’ The idea appalled me.
‘I’ve thought about that. I thought if I have the video camera I can film you. That means I have a reason to be in the tent but it is clear that I am not there to celebrate Christmas.’
I sighed. I didn’t like the idea; it seemed divisive but I didn’t feel I could argue. The discussion continued and seemed to boil down to whether or not to have a rest day.
‘I just want to get on with it,’ said Reena. ‘A rest day seems like an unnecessary delay. I feel strong enough to continue without a day off.’ As each team member in turn expressed their opinion, most seemed to agree with Reena.
Finally, I turned to Sophia. In many ways the expedition had been harder on her than on anyone else and I respected her judgement. She thought for a moment, eyes lowered. ‘I think we keep going,’ she said.
The conversation continued but I mentally withdrew, taking the opportunity to mull over what had been said. The eagerness of the team to abandon the rest day had surprised me. I was aware that it was my turn to speak.
‘OK, this is what we’ll do. We’ll carry on without a rest day but if I think we need a break I will simply call a halt for the following day. Is that OK with everyone?’ I looked at each in turn and waited for their nod of agreement. ‘I want to be clear that we are in no hurry. We have plenty of food as long as we continue as planned. There is no rush and our primary concern, as always, is making sure we are all fit and healthy.’ I looked at Era for a moment. ‘And regarding Christmas, I don’t think it is right to celebrate if not all of us can do so. I think Christmas should just be a normal day for us. We can eat together but it will be a celebration of reaching 89 degrees, or whatever, rather than Christmas so that Era can join in. Is that OK, Era?’
She seemed reluctant but nodded, ‘OK.’
While the others chatted I took the opportunity to leave the tent with my Louis Poo-uitton. It felt good to stand up straight after the last few hours hunched inside the tent. I squinted, the combination of glare from the snow and the cold wind blowing in my face making my eyes water instantly. I glanced at the sun but the spectacular haloes I’d enjoyed all day had disappeared. The sun was alone in the sky, marooned in the endless blue just as we were alone on the polar plateau, marooned in the endless white.
Chapter Twelve
The Last Degree
Still lying prone in my sleeping bag I gradually became aware of my surroundings and silently listened to Era and Sophia moving around in the tent.
‘Happy Christmas, Sophia,’ I called out eventually.
‘Happy Christmas!’ she replied.
‘Happy eighty-ninth parallel, Era’ I added, careful to make the point that I was not wishing her any unwanted Christian greetings. She laughed, appreciating the distinction. ‘Happy eighty-ninth parallel, Felicity.’
‘Happy Christmas, Sophia and Felicity,’ croaked Steph, barely audible through the layers of her sleeping bag. We all laughed. By now we were used to the fact that Steph was not her best in the mornings. The tent was filled with a bright orange light, a sure sign that it was a sunny day outside. Taking a deep breath I flung the top of my sleeping bag aside and exposed myself to the cold air. It wasn’t as bad as I had expected, much milder than we had become used to since we had arrived on the polar plateau. There was a crescendo of crunching footfalls outside the tent. ‘We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!’ three familiar voices half sang, half shouted through the still air.
Kylie’s red cheeks framed with blonde plaits grinned through the vent at the end of the tent above th
e kitchen. ‘It’s already late Christmas Day in New Zealand now, so is it OK if I make my call home this morning rather than waiting until tonight?’ she asked. Having agreed that Christmas was not going to be a rest day, the one seasonal gift we had decided to allow ourselves was a phone call home. Steph placed the satellite phone into Kylie’s hand which appeared through the front vent. The hand and the phone disappeared, and Kylie’s footsteps crunched in the snow as she retreated to her tent to make the precious call.
I glanced at my watch and worked out that my own family would be gathering in the narrow kitchen at Crofton for a late Christmas brunch. I could picture the scene, repeated exactly, year after year. There would be Handel drifting through from the front room accompanied by noisy complaints from my brother and sister, eager to play their own choice of music. My dad would be busy at the far end of the kitchen checking on the huge bird that had been slow roasting since the early hours while my mother, already elegantly dressed in something sparkly, would be flittering around the house lighting sweet-scented candles and dressing the large wooden dining table for lunch. I longed to be home with them. At that moment the simple pleasures of warmth and comfort and family appeared, unquestionably, to be the greatest aspirations in life. Our quest for the South Pole seemed, in comparison, to be an empty and worthless vanity.
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