The White South

by Hammond Innes

  “I do not begin it,” he growled. “It is the men who begin it. They are Tönsberg men. Me and Keller, we are from Sandefjord.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll have a word with the men later. In the meantime have the sense to accept orders. If, when this iceberg has passed, there are any of us alive, then I’ll discuss the question of my authority to act as I have done.”

  He stared down at me for a moment and then I saw his eyes drawn to the towering bulk of the iceberg, as though it were a magnet. “All right,” he growled, and turned quickly and went back to Keller who had been standing by the tents watching us.

  I crossed the top of the floe-berg where the stores and boats were lashed down and reached the tent with the flag outside. The flap was drawn back and Judie was bent over a figure lying in a huddle of blankets. There was blood on the trodden snow and the man’s head that showed in the sunlight over Judie’s shoulder was unrecognisable. The blue eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and the lower lip showed red and bloody in the stubble of his beard where the bared teeth had bitten into the flesh with the pain.

  Judie looked up as my shadow fell across her. “Is he conscious?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I was just coming to fetch you,” she said. “He wants to speak to you.” She crawled out of the tent and stood up. “Don’t let him talk for long. He’s very weak.”

  I bent down and sat myself in the doorway of the tent. “Judie says you want to see me,” I said.

  “Craig?” The voice was very faint.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Come nearer, please.” I slithered into the tent, and then I knew he was going to die. The tent smelt of rotting flesh, even with the tent flap pulled back and the cold air circulating. It was gangrene. “You can smell my legs, eh?” There was no fear in his voice and his eyes were quite steady. “Judie has done her best, but it will not be long now.” He said something else, but it was lost in a crash of splintering ice so loud that it seemed just outside the tent. His hand came out from under the blankets and fastened on my shoulder. It was grey and the veins and knotted muscles stood out like cords in the wasted flesh. “You are in command now. You must get them out of the ice. There is not much hope, but—” He gnawed at his lip, fighting the pain. “What are you going to do?” he asked at length.

  “We could start trekking,” I said. “Now the wind has dropped, the westward thrust of the ice seems to be lessening. If we left now, we might be able to keep ahead of this iceberg.”

  He shook his head slowly. “No good,” he said. “If you leave here, how do you live? How do you finally escape without the boats? I hear what you do yesterday. Gerda tell me. You know that there is only hope so long as you have the boats.” For a while he lay still without speaking, staring out through the open tent to the scintillating mass of the berg grinding its way towards us. “If it is only one berg, per’aps south or north. But here it is a line. Also it is not good to retreat. It is not good for morale.” He turned his head towards me and I saw that his eyes were excited. “I think you must advance, eh? That will have better appeal to the men, you know.”

  I suppose my face must have shown that I was mystified, for his grip tightened on my shoulder. “All morning I am lying here with nothing to do but look out of the tent. Look!” He nodded through the open tent flap. “Do you not see something, on the berg to the south? There is a ledge there. It slope up like a ramp. I have look at him through the glasses. If you can transfer the camp to that ledge—”

  “But it’s impossible,” I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It is difficult. But nothing is impossible. As you say, the rate of advance of the iceberg is becoming more slow. Already it is breaking the ice up more gently. Our camp here is a small berg. The icefloes round us will be broken up. We shall be thrown about, but perhaps we do not break entirely. Perhaps we are for a little while close to the ledge. With God’s help we may get there. You are a sensible man. You think to bring forerunners and tackle. I also bring my forerunners. I think we have a chance. It is a very small chance, but it is the only one.” He looked at me quickly. “You agree?”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. I stared at the foot of the iceberg where it ploughed into the floes. It was less than a mile away now. I’d once seen lava engulfing a village—that was when my corvette was in the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius was in eruption. The iceberg was advancing at about the same speed and though it was as cold as the lava had been hot, it had the same slow, ponderous inevitability of destruction about it. It was advancing at the rate of about two hundred yards an hour directly towards us. For a mile or more to right and left of it the ice was in a state of chaos, the floes being splintered, broken up and layered. The outer fringe of this area of chaos was the worst, for there the chaos of one iceberg met the chaos of the next and all was a confusion of up-ended floes and great slabs of ice tossed in the air like snowballs. Nowhere could I see a floe-berg as substantial as the one we were on, and as the chaos was worse at the sides of the iceberg than in front of it, there seemed just the barest chance, for we were in the direct path of its advance. At least the idea of riding the source of the destruction appealed to me in its daring. I nodded. “At any rate it gives us something to try for.”

  “Something to try for.” Larvik nodded slowly. He looked drained of life and I realised that I’d let him exhaust himself. “Something to try for,” he said again, his voice scarcely audible. Then he seemed to rally. He patted my arm. “When you are on his back, he will be your horse and you can laugh when he charge the ice. Perhaps he—break a way out for you.” He closed his eyes. I stayed there beside him for a little longer, then as he still lay motionless with his eyes closed, I began to slide out of the tent. But his hand moved on my arm. “Is Bland there?” he asked. His voice was thick as though his throat were clogged with blood.

  “Yes,” I said. “Do you want to speak to him?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “No. I do not think I am strong enough to say what I should wish.” He coughed and writhed in agony. I held his hand till he was quiet again. “Whatever I may think of Old Bland, he is a man. This pup of his has gone wrong. He is dangerous, Craig. Judie is now the biggest shareholder in the company. Bernt Nordahl leave her everything. I know because I witness the will. Look after her, my friend. And see that Erik Bland does not get out of the ice alive. You understand?” His sunken eyes stared at me. “Promise you—” His voice was too faint for me to hear the rest. His eyes were gazing urgently into mine.

  I knew what he wanted. But I couldn’t promise that, so I slid quietly out of the tent. Judie was waiting for me. “You’ve been a long time,” she said. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s very weak,” I told her.

  Her face looked small and unhappy. “I am afraid he will not last the night.” She crawled into the tent then and I turned and stared at the giant iceberg, searching that ledge. It started right at the base of the berg and sloped gently up till it merged into the cliff of ice that formed the side about fifty feet above the surrounding pack. There was just a chance, I felt. Just the slightest chance. And I prayed that Larvik, who had given us this chance, would live to reach that ledge.

  I got the men together then and told them the plan.

  It appealed to them. Anything positive would have appealed to them and they threw themselves into the work of preparation with an enthusiasm that was derived as much from a desire to blot out the fear that was in them as from any sense of hope. Forerunners were thawed of ice and spliced together in long lines. Anchor stakes were prepared and sliding tackle rigged. Boat slings were fitted. Stores were packed and secured in bundles, for the idea was that boats and stores should be run out to the ledge on the iceberg on the life-line and bos’n’s chair principle. But as the day wore on and the iceberg came nearer and nearer to our camp, I noticed the men glancing over their shoulders at it with a scared look in their faces.

  By evening the work was done. Only the tents
and immediate stores were left unpacked. After the evening meal there was nothing for the men to do. No one felt like sleep and they stood about on the ice in groups, gazing with awe at the towering mass of ice. It loomed over the camp like death in visible form. The noise of the floes being crushed and thrust aside as it advanced was incessant—a grinding rumble, penetrated by sharp, splintering cracks. Wonderful golden bars radiated from the sun’s gleaming centre of light low to the south and from a fabulous mock sun much higher in the sky. The light glistened on crags of ice a hundred feet and more high. In the shadows, the naked ice, sheer in places like a glass wall, was a cold green or colder blue. But where the sun-bars struck it, its surface gleamed like burnished metal, mirroring the prismatic and uncertain lights of the sky.

  Our camp became as cold as death. The men’s eyes shied at the blinding scintillation of the sunny side of the berg and turned more and more often to the green and blue of the shadows where glacial jaws gaped black and the spilling wave-crests of ice were cold and remote. They’d stand and gaze at the shadowed flank for a moment, their mouths agape and their faces awestruck. Then they’d turn with a shiver of cold and slink into the tents for warmth. But no one could sleep and soon they’d be out again to stare, fascinated by the inevitability of the end.

  Bland kept mostly to his tent. Vaksdal and Keller had erected one against some packing cases and he had moved in with them. I suppose I should have discouraged his association with his two mates, but there seemed no point. On the few occasions I saw him outside the tent, he was alone. He seemed to have withdrawn into a sullen, brooding mood so that he scarcely noticed anyone around him. I can’t really recall how much the men knew or had been told about his part in the business. Our own men at any rate must have suspected that he’d rammed us deliberately. In other circumstances they might have killed him. As it was, the iceberg and the approach of death dominated everything. Only once did any incident occur.

  It was in one of the rare moments when Judie wasn’t looking after Larvik. We were sitting together on the edge of one of the boats. Gerda and Howe were standing at the edge of the floe-berg gazing towards the sun. They were holding each other’s hand. As they turned back towards the camp, Bland came out of his tent. Howe stopped at the sight of him. His face was tense. Then he let go Gerda’s hand and went towards Bland.

  He passed right by us. He was crying and there was a strange desperate look of longing on his face. Bland saw his coming and stopped, his eyes narrowing and his body stiffening. Judie’s hand tightened on my arm. Howe looked so puny as he faced Bland. I got up. Howe might have a gun. He might have screwed up his courage to kill him. And if he hadn’t, then I could see him being hurt. Bland could break him as easily as he could snap a twig.

  But as I rose, Gerda ran past me. She caught Howe by the arm and dragged him away from Bland. As she brought him back, leading him by the hand, his face was horribly convulsed and there was an air of bitterness and frustration about him that was quite frightening.

  Judie’s hand slipped into mine. “He is tearing himself apart,” she whispered. “Oh, how I wish they could live!”

  I glanced down at her. “Do you think they would be happy?” I asked.

  “Yes, I think perhaps they might,” she answered. She sighed and gave a little shrug. “Poor Gerda—it’s the maternal instinct with her. With Walter it’s different. He’s in love. I think he’s found happiness for the first time in his life. That’s what is tearing him apart. He wants to live—and kill.” She sighed again and added, “I think it might have worked out very well.”

  “Why the devil doesn’t he just enjoy the fact that he’s alive and Gerda is with him?” I said.

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “If we ever reach that ledge, Duncan, you must have a trial at once. The men must know the truth. I wish you hadn’t—” She stopped short and I said: “Hadn’t what?”

  “No,” she answered. “I must not wish that. But he frightens me.”

  I knew that what she was wishing was that I hadn’t brought Bland back from the Tauer III camp. She wanted her husband dead and I could understand how she felt. I remember thinking: Well, we’ll all be dead soon. It doesn’t matter. I’d no real hope of our getting across that litter of broken ice on to the ledge. The mere sight of it appalled me, knowing that sooner or later I had got to attempt to cross it.

  “But it doesn’t matter now,” Judie said suddenly. “Nothing matters now except that we are together—for a little.”

  Judie had all the realism of her sex. She was not buoyed up by any preposterous illusion of hope. She saw the inevitable and accepted it. She made no attempt to bolster up her courage with the idea that we could cheat the death that stared us in the face from those glass-hard cliffs of ice. Her attitude affected me in a strange way. Instead of being scared, I, too, felt acceptance of the inevitable. And I almost welcomed it. To go like this—loving someone and loved by someone; it was sublime. In that bitter cold there was no suggestion of passion. I can’t explain it quite—but if we have souls then it was the merging of our two souls. In that twilight evening of death our love was out of this world. We were two people wanting to pass over into the beyond together.

  I have often wondered since what Bland’s feelings about Judie really were. The fact that he threatened me through her that time I went across to Tauer III is no indication. And anyway love and hate are never far apart. But I remember one occasion that evening when the man’s feelings blazed through the sullen façade he’d erected as a barrier between himself and the people round him. It does not answer the question, but I think I should record it and the reaction it produced in Judie.

  It was towards midnight and she and I were watching the sun sweep low in the egg-shell pale sky to the south. Standing there I was suddenly conscious of being watched. Judie must have felt it, too, because she turned as I did. Bland was standing outside his tent. He was standing quite still about twenty yards from us. His face was heavy and brooding. There was something in his features, in the way he stood, that reminded me of his father. Our eyes met and I remember I was shocked to see such a violence of hatred. I have never, thank God, had a man look at me like that before or since. It was the look of the lone wolf—the rogue male—barred from the pack and bitter with the thought of what others enjoyed. It was bitterness and frustration turned to hate. But whether it indicated a depth of feeling for Judie that she was unaware of I do not know.

  But I do know that she saw it and recognised it, for her fingers caught at my arm and as we turned back towards the sun her face looked white. “You must be careful,” she said, and her voice trembled. She glanced quickly over her shoulder. Bland had gone back to his tent. “Erik is dangerous,” she added. And then, “I must go and see my patient.” She turned quickly away towards Larvik’s tent.

  The cold became intense that night. A very slight breath of air came out of the west and the thermometer fell as it brought into the camp the chill ice temperature of the berg. The hours passed vaguely as in a dream. The camp was restless and for the first time since we’d abandoned ship the men on watch had company.

  There is a strange fascination about death. No one likes it to catch him unawares. And inside the tents the noise and the quaking of the ice seemed magnified so that one lay in a sort of tense expectancy of fear, the berg growing in one’s imagination to undreamed-of heights and toppling down on the flimsy sepia curtain of canvas. It was a relief then to go out and see the real height of the berg and mark how slowly it ground its way towards us.

  But though it might come slowly when we watched it, when we ignored it for a moment and looked again, we’d realise with horror how swift in terms of the future that advance was. The ledge on the south side gleamed clear and bright like a ramp leading to heaven in some super colossal colour-film monstrosity. But I don’t think any of us had any hope of reaching it. Between us and that ledge was a slowly closing gap of moving ice. There were great crevasses that opened and closed with a snap
, floes that stood on end, all jagged, and then sank slowly beneath the heaving mass, and huge blocks of ice that were spewed up and fell crashing on to the floes. And where the sheer prow of the iceberg crushed its way through the pack there was a moving wave of ice that looked like powdered glass, and along the flanks of the berg ran a black line in which water splashed, catching the sun on its green crests.

  I wasn’t scared. At least it didn’t seem like fear to me then. The scene was so stupendous as to seem remote and unreal. I felt like a spectator. And I knew I should go on feeling like a spectator until the moment when I had to cross the gap and the ice overwhelmed me.

  IX

  MOST OF YOU who read this will have faced death at one time or another. You’ll know how it feels. The car coming at you on the wrong side of the road produces the same reaction as high explosive whistling down at you from the sky. There is the tensing of the nerves, the sudden photographic clarity of vision. But no fear. That comes later when nerves stretched beyond endurance relax, leaving you shivering with the reaction. It is the same, only more prolonged, with the man going into battle. He is tensed up, ready for it—and when it comes he conquers fear. And afterwards he is limp, exhausted. But when death comes slowly and inevitably, then the nervous tension cannot be sustained. That’s when men crack. It’s like battle exhaustion. Men can’t go on facing death indefinitely. If the period is too sustained then the nervous reaction sets in before the moment of impact. Then comes fear—naked, uncontrolled fear.

  That’s what happened at our camp the morning the iceberg reached us.

  Just after six Judie crawled into my tent. Her eyes were very large and dark-ringed. She looked exhausted. “Duncan. Will you come, please. I think he’s gone.”

  I followed her to Larvik’s tent. There was no sun that morning. A grey wrack of cloud had drifted up and the wind was rising out of the sou’west. It was gloomy in the tent and I could hardly see Larvik’s bearded face. His body was cold and when I became accustomed to the gloom I saw that his eyes were glazed. I pulled a blanket over him.