The White South

by Hammond Innes

  “It was out of action for a little while.”

  “So. Now you think. Was Bland near the radio when it go out of action?”

  Vaksdal looked surprised. “Yes, but—”

  “And when did the radio work again?” she cut in. “Not till Bland go down to the wireless room, I bet.” She suddenly stepped right up to him. “Was Bland alone on the bridge when he rammed us?”

  “When the accident happen—”

  “Was he alone—just tell me that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you go back and ask him why he send the helmsman below at that moment. You go back and make a few enquiries before you bring your anger over to us. I think you find much to be angry about over there. Now go. And see you do not have trouble with your men. It is bad to have trouble with the men on the ice. They are from Tönsberg. And if you do not make enquiries, they will.”

  He turned away then, a baffled look on his face. It was clear he resented being out-faced by a woman. But it was clearer still that he was puzzled about something. “Just a minute, Vaksdal,” I said. “Have you got your radio ashore?”

  He half turned and shook his head. “The fire has consume everything. But we have send a message to the Syd Korset.”

  “With our position?”

  “Ja.”

  “And it was acknowledged?”

  “Ja.”

  “One more question,” I said as he turned again. “Is Bland still on Tauer III?”

  “Nei. The ship, she is on fire all over. Everyone is on the ice. Kaptein Bland is very sad man. He feel he is responsible for the accident.”

  “Accident!” Howe screamed. “It wasn’t an accident. He rammed us. He rammed us deliberately.” He was moving forward impetuously, his skinny neck thrust out, his arms sawing the air in his excitement. “Take me across to Bland. Take me to him. I said I’d kill him—and by God I will.”

  “You have done enough, I think, already,” Vaksdal said.

  “Enough? Do you realise what he’s done? He’s murdered us all. We’ll never get out of this ice alive. Nor will Larvik or any of the people on Hval 5. He’s killed us all as surely as if he’d mowed us down with a machine-gun.”

  Howe’s voice had risen to a high-pitched cry as he ran forward, flailing the air, mouthing threats about what he’d do to Bland. Vaksdal watched him come up. “I think you sinnsvak,” he said.

  “I’m not crazy,” Howe shrieked. “Take me across to Bland. Take me over to him.”

  Vaksdal flung him back and turned on his heel. “You will hear some more about this,” he said over his shoulder.

  Howe, sprawling in the slush of wet ice, watched the big mate step into the boat. He was trying to speak, but he couldn’t. His whole body was shuddering in his effort to speak. The boat pushed off and the oar blades dipped into the ice green sea. Beyond it a great tongue of flame licked up from the bowels of the corvette, a red glare against the dark water sky to the west. Gerda ran forward and pulled Howe to his feet and they stood there, in silhouette against the flames, watching the boat row back to the dark huddle of men on the ice about a mile away.

  VII

  THAT NIGHT THE sleet turned to snow. It was bitterly cold now that we no longer had the protection of our ship. Out there on the ice we were exposed to the full force of the wind. It seemed to blow right through our makeshift tents. Our food was cold almost before we had time to swallow the first mouthful. Even with the whole party huddled together in two small tents the temperature inside was well below freezing. And a few hundred yards away the blazing wreck of Tauer III consumed as much stored-up heat in an hour as would have kept us warm for a whole year. We turned in about eight. Everyone was very tired and I wanted them to be fresh should the weather improve. The boat was moored to the floe by an anchor dug into the ice. Watches were of two hours’ duration with two men on duty.

  When I turned in the wind had backed to the sou’west and it was sleeting. Gerda and I had the radio between us and for a while we lay smoking and listening to the monotonous calling of the Southern Cross. Her operator would call Hval 5, then us, then finally Tauer III. There would be a five-minute pause. Then he’d start calling all over again. At length I switched off, not wishing to waste the battery. With my blankets wrapped tightly round me I tried to work up the warmth necessary to sleep. But the ground was wet and the wind blew under the canvas in an icy draught. The grinding of the floes seemed to run right through my body. Every tremor of the ice communicated itself to us as we lay in our tents.

  When I did finally get to sleep I was roused almost instantly by loud shouts and the grinding clash of floes. I scrambled out of the tent to find myself in a grey-white world of driven snow in which men appeared like ghostly shadows leaning against the bitter wind. A voice shouted out of the void: “Her! Kvikk! Til baaten.” I staggered towards the voice. The grinding of the floes was very loud. The ice shook under my feet as though it were being battered by a huge steam hammer. And then in the half light I saw the reason for the lookout’s cry. The open water where we’d anchored the boat was gone. There was only a narrow gap and this was fast closing as another floe swung in on us. I got out my whistle and blew on it till the men came stumbling towards me out of the murk of snow. We hauled on the painter and lifted the bows of the boat on to the ice. One man missed his footing and would have slithered into the sea but for Gerda, who caught hold of him by his collar. As it was he got wet to the waist. We dragged the boat clear of the water and right on up to our camp. When I went back to see that nothing had been left behind, I was just in time to see the gap close with a snap, the edges of the two floes grinding like a giant gnashing his teeth. I began to realise then how watchful we should have to be if we were to come alive out of this hell of ice.

  As I turned back to the camp the snow slackened. The orange glow of the blazing ship showed for an instant in the weird light and was gone again. Before turning in I gave my whistle to one of the men on watch. It was a sharper and more penetrating warning than the human voice. I think the exertion in the middle of the night made us all very hungry. I know that I felt so ravenous that I could hardly sleep. But I also felt warm and I think I soon dozed off. I awoke stiff with cold, the shrill blast of the whistle sounding urgently in my ears and the floes clashing together like thunderclaps. When I went out the snow had stopped and the wind was dropping. For a moment I stood there, dazed, staring at the man blowing frantically on the whistle. The floe was covered in a white carpet of snow. But it had stopped falling. The camp with its tents and the men staggering sleepily out of them looked clear-cut and black against the snow. I saw no reason for the alarm. Then there was a splintering crash. The ice trembled under my feet and the man with the whistle pointed behind the tents. A dark line ran zigzagging through the snow. It broadened and then closed with the snap of a shark biting. Another crash, more trembling, and the line opened again. And this time it stayed open—a widening crevasse that wavered right across the floe.

  There was no more rest for us that night. The boat was on one side of the crack, the camp on the other. We got the boat across the gap just in time. It widened out under the pressure of the other floes until we could see the sea. It became a sort of creek and widened till it was a river with sheer, ice-green banks. Tents and stores were right on the edge of it and everything had to be moved back to the middle of what was now quite a small floe. We were being battered by the ice from all sides. We huddled in the re-erected tents, drinking hot tea laced with rum, and waiting for the floe to crack again.

  Gerda said suddenly, “I wonder what sort of a night it is for the men of Tauer III?”

  “I’m more concerned about Hval 5,” I said. I was thinking of Judie.

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “I understand,” she said. “But you must not be angry with the men of Tauer III, Duncan. They are from Tönsberg. I know them all. They are good men. It is not their fault this happen.”

  “What’s more to the point,” Howe said, “what is Bl
and up to?”

  “Bland?” I remembered the dazed look on his face as he stood there alone on the bridge whilst the men worked at unloading. “I don’t think Bland will bother us any more. His men will have realised the truth by now. He’s finished, whatever happens. Either he dies out here on the ice or he faces a charge of murder.”

  “That’s what makes him dangerous.”

  “No,” I said. “He’s shot his bolt this time. You didn’t see the dazed look on his face. I had a look at him through my glasses when he was alone on the bridge. He was numb with the shock of what had happened.”

  “The numbness will wear off,” Howe said. “And when it does he’ll realise he’s still got a chance. If he can get out alone—if he’s the sole survivor and all the rest of us die, then he’s achieved his purpose.”

  “He still wouldn’t control the company,” I reminded him.

  “He doesn’t know that,” Howe’s voice replied out of the darkness. “And anyway, if Bernt Nordahl’s estate passes to Judie and Judie dies, the probability is he’ll inherit it.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “the thing’s impossible. He couldn’t hope to get out on his own. That harpoon of yours finished him. He’s hoist with his own petard and—”

  “What is petard?” Gerda asked.

  I spent some time trying to explain the quotation to Gerda and eventually we drowsed off.

  The shuddering and grinding of the ice had gradually lessened. Sometime in the night it must have ceased altogether, for when I went out at five everything was quite still. The air was clear and frosty and the light from the new-fallen snow was blinding. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen. The sun had huge circles of light round it with lines of gold radiating from the centre. At one part of the circle the light was intensified to produce a mock-sun of gold shot with prismatic colours. All about us the ice had a faint sheen of colour and towards the south and west columns of black smoke rose—frost-smoke caused by warm air from the sea lanes rising into the frozen atmosphere. It was breathtakingly beautiful and for a moment I just stood there, seeing the scene as a panorama without absorbing the detail. Then I saw the burnt-out hulk of Tauer III that had blazed at me so startlingly in the night. There were no flames now and only a thin column of smoke rose straight up into the incredible sky. Mast, funnel, bridge—everything except the hull—were gone. She was completely gutted. Her crew were moving about on the ice, handling stores. Several floes had layered near them and it was clear that they, too, had experienced trouble from the movement of the ice during the night.

  Our own situation might have been worse. The gap that had opened during the night had closed again. There were narrow sea lanes to the south and west of us, dividing us from the Tauer III camp. But to the northeast the ice seemed solid—a jagged, broken plain, with small, lumpy hills like rock outcrops, covered with snow, and broken edges where floes had been up-ended. The horizon was a trembling blur, constantly moving as though I were looking at it through water. There were some big icebergs there as far as I could see, but they were for ever changing shape in the distorting mirror of the atmosphere.

  On the face of it we looked secure. But the snow covered all the flaws and a thing that worried me was the grumbling thunder of ice movement to the east. It hadn’t been there the previous day. And now I got the impression of a tremendous weight of ice thrusting towards us from the heart of the pack.

  My main object was to link up with the survivors of Hval 5. Amongst the things Gerda had brought off the catcher were skis belonging to herself and her father. After breakfast I took Kalstad, one of the hands who was reckoned the best skier, and roped together with one of the harpoon forerunners, we made for a floe-berg that stood up about a quarter of a mile to the north of us. The snow was crisp and the going quite good. We were glad of the rope, however, for in several places the ice was so honeycombed by the summer thaw as to be rotten and only our skis saved us from going right down into the water. It took us an hour to do that quarter of a mile, and with the sun getting stronger every minute it was warm work.

  The floe-berg was perhaps twenty feet high. I imagine it was originally pack ice that had layered. From the top of it we could look across to the black blob of Hval 5. It was very difficult to see it clearly through the glasses because of the shimmering of the light off the snow. The vessel was lying almost on its side, jammed up against a small floe-berg by a whole series of layered floes. There were figures moving about on the ice and some form of shelter or a dump of stores had been set on a ledge of the berg. Between us and the ship was nearly a mile of ice thrust up in ridges and giant creases as though it had been compressed. Even as I stared at the scene through the glasses I saw movement in the ice. At first I thought it was a trick of the light that made the white mass beyond the ship heave and writhe. Then I saw great blocks of ice as big as houses being thrown into the air as they were ejected between the jaws of grinding floes. Faintly through the still air came the rumble and crack of the pressure ridges building up towards the table-topped iceberg beyond.

  I got a mirror out of my pocket that I had borrowed from Gerda, and after experimenting with Kalstad, managed to focus the sun glare roughly on the ship. For about a quarter of an hour I endeavoured to make contact by this primitive heliograph with no result. I was just putting the mirror back in my pocket when I caught the glint of an answering flash. It was intermittent and I could make nothing of their morse. Probably neither I nor they had succeeded in focusing the flash accurately. For some time we tried ineffectually to get a message across. In the end I gave it up. Before turning back to our camp I made a close examination of the ice between us and Hval 5. But without actually reconnoitring, it was impossible to decide whether we could link up.

  The return journey took much longer and was much more hazardous. The snow was beginning to thaw and the going was sticky. More and more often our skis broke through the surface on rotten ice. We kept to the ridges as much as possible. When not actually on a ridge our field of vision was reduced to a few yards. It gave one the sensation of being hemmed in by a forest of ice. We made camp in the end, wet to the waist and actually sweating with heat. Gerda met me with a serious face. “The pressure, she is increasing,” she said. “Also there are several icebergs coming up from the south-west which I do not like.”

  I stood by the camp, listening to the groaning and rumbling away to the east. It certainly seemed louder. And there was a faint and almost constant trembling of the ice under us. Occasionally the low artillery rumble would be broken by a nearer and sharper sound like a signal gun where a section of the pack had suddenly split across. She took my arm and pointed to the sou’west. Clouds of white vapour lay along the horizon. They had no form, but were constantly changing like jets of steam in a gusty wind. They would flatten out into layers, then plume upwards, blossoming like atomic explosions. Once they looked like castles of ice upside down in the sky. “Icebergs,” she said. “I see them this morning. Now I think they are nearer.”

  I nodded and cocked my ear again to the growl of the ice to the east. “I don’t like it,” I said.

  “There is a storm there,” Gerda said. “It is driving the ice down on us. But I think there is an eastward drift and that is what bring the icebergs up.”

  “Suppose the two meet?” I asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders and grinned with a slight down-dragging of the corners of her mouth. “Then I think it is not very nice. We must find stronger ice.”

  I looked back to the floe-berg from which Kalstad and I had tried to signal to Hval 5. It looked solid enough. But then I thought of the way the ice had heaved and thrown up huge blocks over towards the table-topped iceberg. I felt suddenly as though there was no future in struggling against the giant forces that faced us. “Any news from the Southern Cross?”

  “Ja. She has dispatched Tauer I in answer to Tauer Ill’s SOS. Larsen, her kaptein, say he is approaching several icebergs about twenty miles from the position given by Tauer III.”


  “Twenty miles!” I glanced back to the south-west. There was no open water visible at all. Perhaps there were leads and we couldn’t see them. But the burnt-out hulk of Tauer III was entirely beset with floes and the ice ran uninterrupted to the horizon. A corvette wouldn’t have a chance of breaking through. “If only we had our R/T,” I murmured. “It’s useless sending one of the towing vessels.”

  “Per’aps.” Gerda shrugged her shoulders again. “But it is all we will get. They will not risk the Southern Cross.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “It is too much—too much value, too many lives—for the sake of even three of the catcher fleet. We must be content with a towing boat, or at best the tanker.”

  “A corvette won’t get through,” I said. “And I doubt whether the tanker could.” I suddenly made up my mind. “Better start trying to shift camp to that floe-berg. Divide the stores into two equal lots. We’ll shift one lot today.”

  We knocked up two makeshift sledges out of packing cases. Then we split into two watches—one watch to rest and look after the camp whilst the other made the journey to the floe-berg. I took the starboard watch out on the first run, blazing the trail ahead of them on ski. It was back-breaking work. Where I could travel on skis, the men very often sank to their waists in rotten ice. Several times the leading sledge broke through. The snow was wet, and the going was very heavy. It took three hours to reach our goal. We had a half-hour rest and then went back, following almost the same route. The return journey took us an hour and a half. Gerda, who was in charge of the other watch, came out to meet us on skis. She was excited. I could see it in the reckless way she swooped towards us across the treacherous ice. She brought up in front of me with a jump Christi that sent the wet snow spattering over us. “The Southern Cross is coming herself,” she cried.

  “Coming into the ice?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “That I cannot say. But just after you have left Kaptein Larsen come on the radio. He say he is held up by the ice and can find no way through. Eide tell him to try again. But he fail. He say there is no way. Colonel Bland speak with him then. He tell him he damn well got to find a way. But an hour later he come on again to say the pack is too close. He has patrolled it for ten miles, trying every lead, but it is no good. So then Bland say he come up with the Southern Cross. Maybe the Southern Cross try to break through, eh?” Her voice trailed away uncertainly.