The White South

by Hammond Innes

  Outside the tent I saw that many of the men had come out of their tents. They were watching us furtively and there was an air of tension over the camp. It was as though they had sensed death. “How shall we bury him?” Judie asked.

  “Leave him where he is,” I said.

  “But we must have a service for him.”

  “No,” I answered harshly. She started to argue and I said, “Look at the men. They’re scared enough as it is without knowing that Larvik is dead.”

  She turned and looked round the camp. I could see there were tears in her eyes. “For God’s sake don’t cry,” I said sharply. “They mustn’t know. Do you understand?”

  I saw her bite her lip. Then she looked at me and nodded. “Yes. I understand. I think he will understand, too.”

  I turned away then and shouted for the stewards to get a meal ready.

  That meal was the best they could devise. But the men were silent and tense as they ate in their tents. And when it was finished they were out again in the open, staring at the crumbling ice.

  It is frightful to think that you have had your last meal. The advance of the berg was as inevitable as the hangman’s rope after the final breakfast. There was nothing I could give the men to do. They stood around in little groups staring at the berg, and occasionally their eyes wandered to Larvik’s tent where the Norwegian flag still flew.

  The prow of the iceberg was not three hundred yards from us now. And behind the prow the ice towered up and up in sheer crags of blue and green, cold and still, until it lost itself in the clouds. Losing its top like that in the clouds made it far more terrifying. It added to its stature.

  The noise of the shattering ice was so loud that we had to shout if we wanted to make ourselves heard. The floe-berg was quivering. It was like being on a ship battered by giant seas. We could actually see the ice shaking. The boats rocked and the packing cases tied together rolled over. Our floe was like an island in the midst of chaos. All round us the ice was breaking up now. We were right in the thick of what we had been watching for so long. And in a little while I should be down in that maelstrom, fighting to get a rope across to the ledge. I felt fear gripping at me.

  The moment of panic came when a floe between us and the berg split across with an earsplitting crackle. The half nearest us reared up, turning slowly on to its back. For a moment it seemed poised above us, forty or fifty feet high. Then it came crashing down. Its edge splintered on the forward ledge of our refuge. A piece of ice as large as a barn door knocked one of the Hval 5 men flying. A great chunk was torn off our floe-berg. For a moment the sea boiled black. Then the gap closed, the floes rushing together, grinding and tearing at each other in their effort to get relief from the frightful pressure. It was a stampede of ice.

  No one moved for a moment. We were stunned by the terrible power of the forces at work. Then Hans suddenly screamed. It was a high-pitched, rabbit scream. The boy turned like a hunted hare and began to run. The men watched him for a second, immobile, fascinated. Then one of them also began to run, and in a second half the crews were following the boy.

  I started forward to stop them, but Vaksdal was before me. He caught the first man and knocked him cold with one blow of his huge fist. And he got Hans—scooped the boy up with one hand and turned to face the break. The men stopped. They were breathing heavily. They stood watching him for a moment like cattle that have been headed. Then they turned and shuffled shamefacedly back towards the camp.

  I met them as they came back. I realised that it was now or never. If I waited any longer their morale would be too low to make the effort. I couldn’t talk to them because of the noise of the splintering ice. But I gathered them all round me and knelt down on the ice. They knelt down, all of them, and every man as he knelt turned so that he faced the advance of the berg. And as we knelt there I felt that comforting sense of oneness develop in us—oneness of purpose in adversity. I stared at the two-hundred-yard gap of jagged, surging ice that I’d have to cross, and then I looked at Judie. Her eyes met mine and smiled. And I felt sure of myself again. I could face it, whatever it was to be.

  I got up from the ice and called out to the men that the moment for action had come, that now we were going to attack the berg itself. Judie was close beside me and I heard her say, “Who makes the first attempt?”

  “Vaksdal and I,” I answered.

  I looked at her quickly. She nodded as though she had braced herself for that. I shouted to Kalstad and he brought the ropes. I don’t know whether Bland knelt in prayer with the rest. I don’t remember seeing him. But he was there with the crews as they pressed round me. I remember his eyes were feverishly bright, a brightness that seemed a queer mixture of fear and excitement.

  The ropes were coiled down on the ice at the side of the camp nearest the berg. I took the two ends and shouted for Vaksdal. He came forward sullenly. I handed him the end of one of the ropes. He hesitated. His eyes were angry. For a moment I thought he was going to refuse. “Because of the boats,” I shouted at him. I don’t know whether it was because he recognised the justice of my choice or because he was afraid of being regarded as a coward, but he took the rope and began to tie it round his body. I took the other rope and we went to the edge of the floe where the ice dropped in a steep slide to the quivering pack. Judie came up to me and kissed me. Then she took the rope and began to tie it round my body.

  But as she started to tie it, there was a sudden surge in the crowd and she was swept aside. The rope was whipped away from me and Erik Bland slipped over the edge on to the pack ice below. He held the rope in his hand and I can see him now as he looked up at me with a sort of crazy grin, tying the rope round his waist and calling to Vaksdal to come. I seized hold of the rope to haul him back. Whatever relief I automatically might feel was swallowed in my instant realisation of the danger of such an indisciplined action. But as I reached for the rope, Howe gripped my arm. “Let him go!” he shouted. “Let him go, I tell you!” The scream of his voice was loud in a sudden, unnerving silence. As I hesitated, I saw relief and satisfaction in his eyes. He was convinced that whoever tried to make the crossing would die.

  In that instant of hesitation I lost my one chance of stopping Bland, for as I reached for the rope again I saw it uncoiling steadily. Down on the ice Vaksdal and Bland were going forward together. And then I saw that Bland was wearing crampons. Where he’d got them from I don’t know. But the fact that he was wearing them made it clear that his action wasn’t done on the spur of the moment. This was what he’d planned to do. I looked round at the men. They were watching him intently and in some of their eyes I caught a glint of admiration. McPhee and Kalstad were paying out line. Bonomi was moving excitedly from one position to another taking photographs.

  Down on the pack the two men were moving into the broken ice. Trailing the slender lines, they climbed out on to the edge of a floe that was slowly being tilted. They dropped from view. The floe rose almost vertical, hiding them. Then it broke across and subsided into the ice, showing us Vaksdal leaping in great bounds from one precarious foothold to another. Bland was lying flat, clinging to the edge of a floe which was slowly being ground to powder. I thought for a moment he was injured. But he pulled the rope into a coil beside him, gathered himself together and leapt for a block of ice no bigger than one of our boats. He was up and following Vaksdal now from one foothold to another.

  They got to within twenty feet or so of the ledge and there they paused, facing a gap full of powdered ice in which the sea sometimes showed. Vaksdal coiled his rope and leapt. For a moment I thought he’d made it. But the ice received his weight like a bog. In an instant he was up to his knees. Then he was floundering full length, with only the upper half of his body visible. He was within two yards of the ledge, but it might have been two miles for all the chance he had of reaching it. He was rolled over in the grey stream. His mouth was a dark gap in the blond of his beard as he cried out something or screamed with pain. We could hear nothing but the split
ting and grinding of the ice.

  Bland hesitated, staring at Vaksdal and coiling his rope. Then he backed away and started to run. Judie’s fingers dug into my arm. Whatever she might think of him now, Erik Bland was after all a part of her life. Instead of jumping, he flung himself full length in a beautiful flying tackle. His impetus carried him half across the gap, his body sliding on the surface of the ice. Then he was clawing forward, his arms working like a swimmer doing the crawl. His body didn’t sink, and foot by foot his arms dragged him across.

  Then at last he was standing on the ledge itself and was hauling Vaksdal up after him. The men cheered wildly as the two men stood together on the ledge. They were symbols of renewed hope. They represented Life. Bland looked across at the cheering men. My eyes, weakened by the constant glare of the past few days, couldn’t make out the expression of his face. But it looked as though he were grinning. Well, he’d a right to grin. And the men were right to cheer. He’d done a pretty brave thing. But Howe was screaming in my ear, “He’s laughing at us. He’s on his own now. That’s what he wanted.”

  I brushed him aside, shouting to Dahle, first mate of Hval 5, whom I’d put in charge of loading, to get tools and anchors across. The men tied them to the rope and as they were hauled across the two-hundred-yard gap Howe was pulling at my sleeve and yelling, “He’ll abandon us, I tell you.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” I snapped. “He can’t do anything without boats and stores.”

  “Well, get across yourself with the first batch of men.”

  I shook my head angrily. The loading plan was all arranged—one boat, stores, then a dozen men. The process to be repeated until boats, stores and men had all been transported to the ledge. And now that Bland had done the job of getting the ropes across, as leader I was bound to be the last man to leave the camp.

  Vaksdal and Bland were working like mad to fix the anchors firmly. As soon as this was done and the rope set up, the first boat was run across. Owing to the movement of the berg towards us, the rope sagged and we had to have men constantly swigging on it. About the middle the boat was bumping dangerously on the ice, and just before it reached the ledge one of the two anchors broke out. Fortunately the other anchor held and the boat was got safely to the ledge. But this and the constant slackening of the rope made me realise that more men were required on the ledge at once and that it was there that the major difficulties would be experienced. As the slings were hauled back I gave the order for the first batch of men to go, instead of stores, which were next on the loading table.

  Gerda came across to me as the men were getting into the slings. “I think you should be there, Duncan,” she shouted. “It is important nothing go wrong at that end.”

  I didn’t like the idea of being one of the first across, but I had already reached the conclusion that I should be there. I ordered Dahle to assume command of the rear party and took the place of one of the men in the slings. We also hitched on the two remaining anchors.

  It was a strange experience crossing that surging gap of ice supported only by a single sagging rope. The lines, as I have said, could not be kept sufficiently taut, and when we reached the centre the sag was so great that our feet were dancing on the moving surface of the ice. This would have been all right except that a floe split open as we were crossing it and rose on end so that for a moment it completely overtopped us and looked as though it would carry away the ropes and ourselves with it. However, it slid back under the ice and we made the ledge with nothing worse than sore buttocks where the rope slings had cut into our flesh.

  With the extra personnel and anchors, we soon had both lines set up securely and began to ferry the stores across. I had arranged the order of transhipment very carefully, so that should the ice split the party at any time, each section would have its proper complement of boats and stores.

  It was whilst we were hauling the second boat across that the movement of the old camp on the floe in relation to the iceberg first became really noticeable. We were using both ropes for the boats now, for greater safety. As we started to haul across, these ropes, instead of sagging, seemed to get tauter, till they were stretched like slender threads. We brought the boat over with a rush and slackened off. We were only just in time. Another minute and the lines would have carried away. What had happened was that the floe-berg had been caught in a sort of eddying out-thrust of ice and was moving steadily outwards, away from the berg.

  With the arrival of the next party, I hacked a bollard out of a block of ice nearby and had the ends of the rope run through blocks and round this ice-bollard with men tagging on the ends. It meant a delay, but I was glad I had done it, for when we resumed operations it became clear at once that the floe-berg was beginning to show considerable movement. It was now no longer on the starboard bow of the iceberg, so to speak. It was abeam of the ledge and beginning to feel the bow-wave effect of the ice being thrown about by the berg’s advance. One moment the men on the ropes would be right close to the bollard; the next they would be hauling back up the slope of the ledge. Then again, they’d be coming down and letting out rope. They acted like the accumulators in a catcher, moving back and forth along the slope according to the strain on the lines.

  At length we were hauling in the last boat. As it came in to the ledge the men on the ropes came down with a run, paying out line as fast as they could let it through their hands. We swung the boat down on to the ledge. Somebody shouted to me. A rope-end went trailing over the edge. I glanced quickly across at the huddle of dark figures in the ice. They were standing, staring towards us, quite motionless. All the stores had been cleared. There was just the rearguard—Dahle and five of the Hval 5 crew. The floe on which they stood was being whirled away from us, caught in a gigantic surge of the ice. We flung our weight on the last remaining rope. But it was no good. It was dragged from our hands by forces that were far beyond our puny strength. The end of it trailed over on to the ice and we could do nothing but stand and watch that little group of figures alone in a heaving chaos.

  I put my arm round Judie’s shoulders. She was standing very tense, her face quite white and her whole body trembling. Her lips moved in agitated prayer. The floe-berg on which Dahle and his companions were marooned was turning slowly round and round, as though it were at the very centre of a revolving whirlpool in the ice. Then it seemed to rise up, caught between opposing forces. A moment later it split. The noise was like a battery of heavies firing and was clearly audible above the thunder of sound all round us. One or two of the men abandoned their shattered ice island and began floundering towards us across the churning ice. But their starting point in relation to the iceberg was very different to what it had been when Bland and Vaksdal had made the crossing. They were right in the broken ice now. They hadn’t a chance.

  Through my glasses I could see only three men standing near where our camp had been. One was Dahle. The remains of the floe-berg, now a block no bigger than a large house, began to roll. The three men scrambled and clawed their way across the ice, fighting to keep on the uppermost side.

  It was horrible, standing there watching them go like that, especially as I should have been one of them. The Hval 5 men had volunteered to be in the rear party. But I felt very upset, all the same. Judie must have understood my mood, for her hand gripped my arm as I stood staring out across the ice. “It’s not your fault,” she said.

  “If we’d been quicker,” I answered. “If we’d started on the job a few minutes earlier.” Three or four minutes more would have seen those six men with us on the ledge. I turned away angrily. No good brooding over it. There was work to be done and I set about the task of organising the new camp.

  I detailed a dozen men to cut a way through the jagged ice of the ledge and drag the boats up as far as possible. Then I turned to get the stores secured and the tents pitched. And as I turned Bland came towards me. I hadn’t really noticed him since reaching the ledge. There had been too much to do. But now, as he approached me, he seemed to have
an air of truculence, and there was something about his eyes—a queer sort of confidence, something like a sneer. He was somehow different. He’d lost the dazed look. He came right over to me and stopped in front of me. “I want a word with you, Craig,” he said. There was a sudden authority in his tone that stopped me in my tracks. He had spoken loudly and I saw several of the men stop work to watch us.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “In future you’ll keep away from my wife,” he said.

  “That’s for her to decide,” I answered, trying to keep the anger I felt out of my voice.

  “It’s an order,” he said.

  I stared at him. “The hell it is,” I said. “Get to work on the boats, Bland.”

  He shook his head, grinning. I saw the fever of excitement in his eyes. “You don’t give orders here.” And then in a moment of quiet, he said, “Mister Craig. Please understand that, now that Larvik is dead, I am in command.” He swung round on the men, who were all watching us now. “In the absence of my father I shall, of course, take command here as his deputy. As commander I brought the ropes across. Craig, as second-in-command, should have remained with the rear party as I instructed, but—” He shrugged his shoulders. “As a newcomer to the company,” he said to me, “you will realise that you are too inexperienced to have any sort of command in a situation like this.” He turned abruptly and strode towards the men. There was almost a swagger in the way he walked.

  I just stood there for a moment without moving. I was too amazed by the absurdity of the thing to make a move. I remember thinking: Howe was right. He’s got back his confidence. Nordahl’s death, the ramming—he’s forgotten it all. And I cursed myself for not realising he was dangerous.