Next we rode round the third and small pyramid, where Mycerinus the Holy, who still lives in songs and hymns, was laid by a grateful people: he was the third of that unlucky dynasty. We have his body and the cover of his sarcophagus in England: there is a beautiful prayer on our lid. Beyond this are three little pyramids, half ruined, where the second Mycerinus and his wife and daughter were laid. Nitocris, the heroine of all the romance of Egypt, finished the third pyramid, in which she lies. She is the original of “Cinderella”, of Herodotus’ story of “Rhodopis”, the “rosy checked”, of Strabo’s fable of “Naucratis”,—her name means Neith the Victorious. She is still seen by the Arabs, a beautiful shade, wandering round her Pyramid. She maintained the throne six years in the name of her murdered husband (2973 B.C. sixth dynasty), finished her Pyramid, invited the murderers to the consecration, when she avenged her husband and then perished by her own hand. But her sarcophagus had disappeared.
Here you can see plainly the two causeways which led from the Pyramids to the river, a rounded head of rock forming one side of something like a great entrance, and near it the Sphynx. People ought to have some conscience; as to the expression of the Sphynx, you might as well talk about the expression of our High Tor. You can make out much more perfect faces there. Well, some people have imaginations, and some have not. Go to. I hope when my portrait is exposed in the same condition as this of Thothmosis IV of blessed memory, people will discover as many marks of profound intellect, great sweetness and propriety of conduct, united with perfection of feature. A wonderful gift is “Einbildungskraft” certainly. May a “portion for seven, and also for eight” thereof be mine before I visit the Sphynx again. It is the more abominable, because Thothmosis IV, being so late as 1509 B.C. has no right to be so defaced. I cannot help it. He is said to be inside; but some may say the Sphynx only contained the outlet for the workmen, who closed the entrance to the great Pyramid. Well, let them all rest in peace, and let me rest too.
As we rode away we saw the tombs hewn in the rock, and another causeway, leading to the Libyan hills. We found our boat, stretching out its motherly arms to us, off the Nilometer at Roda, and dropped down directly to the lower end of the island (where we lay the first night we went on board). There we found Mr. ____, who came on board directly with his charming daughter, a black, and a great friend of mine; and the only pretty picture I had had in my mind all day, she gave me. Years ago she used to sir with her father and his gun in the moonlight on the side of the Pyramid, a few courses up, watching the jackals and wolves run by. Fancy the old white-headed man, the little black dab of a child (the ugliness of the scene softened by the moonlight), watching the troop of jackals whistling by like a rushing wind in the deep shadow.
THE AMUNDSEN-ELLSWORTH POLAR FLIGHT
LINCOLN ELLSWORTH
So long as the human ear can hark back to the breaking of waves over deep seas; so long as the human eye can follow the gleam of the Northern Lights over the silent snow fields; then so long, no doubt, will the lure of the unknown draw restless souls into those great Arctic wastes.
I sit here about to set down a brief record of our late Polar experience, and I stop to try to recall when it was that my imagination was first captured by the lure of the Arctic. I must have been very young, because I cannot now recall when first it was. Doubtless somewhere in my ancestry there was a restless wanderer with an unappeasable desire to attain the furthest north. And, not attaining it, he passed it on with other sins and virtues to torment his descendants.
The large blank spaces surrounding the North Pole have been a challenge to the daring since charts first were made. For nearly four generations that mysterious plain has been the ultimate quest of numberless adventurers.
Before this adventure of our explorers had depended upon ships and dogs. Andrée and Wellman planned to reach the Pole with balloons, but theirs were hardly more than plans. Andrée met with disaster soon after leaving Spitzbergen. Wellman’s expedition never left the ground.
What days they were—those ship and dog days! What small returns came to those men for their vast spending of energy and toil and gold! I am filled with admiration for the courage and the hardihood of the men who cut adrift from civilization and set out with dogs or on foot over the tractless ice fields of the Far North. All honor to them! Yet now what utter neglect it seems of the resources of modern science!
No doubt the men who have been through it best realize what a hopeless, heart-breaking quest it was, Peary’s land base at Camp Columbia was only 413 miles from the Pole; yet it took him twenty-three years to traverse that 413 miles.
Curiously enough, Peary was the first man with whom I ever discussed the matter of using an airplane for polar work. That was shortly before his death, and he was enthusiastic about the project. Eight years later, in 1924, Captain Amundsen arrived in New York. He had already announced his belief that the Polar Sea could be crossed in a plane, and for those eight years my mind had not freed itself of the idea. We had a long talk and, as the result, I brought Amundsen and my father together. My father, too, became enthusiastic and agreed to buy us two flying boats. Thus the adventure began.
The island of Spitzbergen, lying just halfway between Norway and the North Pole, is ideally situated to serve as a base for Polar exploration. Besides its nearness to the Pole—ten degrees, or 600 nautical miles—a warm current, an offshoot of the Gulf Stream, follows along the western and northern coasts of the island, and has the effect of producing ice-free waters at the highest latitude in the world. These were the principal reasons which prompted Captain Amundsen and myself to choose Spitzbergen as a base for our aeroplane flight to the Pole.
We wanted to be on the ground early in the spring and to make our flight before the summer fogs should enshroud the Polar pack and hide from view any possible landing place beneath us, for it was our intention to descend at the Pole for observations. From April 19th to August 24th (127 days) the sun never sets in the latitude of King’s Bay. Spitzbergen, where we had established our base. Here one may find growing during the long summer days 110 distinct species of flowering plants and grasses. But from October 26th to February 17th is another story; the long Arctic winter is at hand and the sun never shows above the horizon. Many houses have been built along the Spitzbergen coast during the last twenty years by mining companies who annually ship about 300,000 tons of coal, and King’s Bay boasts of being the most northerly habitation in the world.
May 21st, 1925, was the day we had long awaited, when, with our two Dornier-Wal flying boats we are ready to take off from the ice at King’s Bay to start into the Unknown. We are carrying 7,800 pounds of dead weight in each plane. As this is 1,200 pounds above the estimated maximum lift, we are compelled to leave behind our radio equipment, which would mean an additional 300 pounds. Our provisions are sufficient to last one month, at the rate of two pounds per day per man. The daily ration list per man is:
Pemmican............................................. 400 gr.
Milk Chocolate..................................... 250 ”
Oatmeal Biscuits................................... 125 ”
Powdered Milk ..................................... 100 ”
Malted Milk Tablets ............................. 125 ”
At 4:15 p.m. all is ready for the start. The 450 H. P. Rolls-Royce motors are turned over for warming up. At five o’clock the full horse power is turned on. We move. The N 25 has Captain Amundsen as navigator. Riiser-Larsen is his pilot, and Feucht mechanic. I am navigator of N 24, with Dietrichson for pilot, and Omdal my mechanic. Six men in all.
The first two hours of our flight, after leaving Amsterdam Islands, we ran into a heavy bank of fog and rose 1,000 meters to clear it. This ascent was glorified by as beautiful a natural phenomenon as I have ever seen. Looking down into the mist, we saw a double halo in the middle of which the sun cast a perfect shadow of our plane. Evanescent and phantom-like, these two multicolored halos beckoned us enticingly into the Un
known. I recalled the ancient legend which says that the rainbow is a token that man shall not perish by water. The fog lasted until midway between latitudes eighty-two and eighty-three. Through rifts in the mist we caught glimpses of the open sea. This lasted for an hour; then, after another hour, the ocean showed, strewn with small ice floes, which indicated the fringe of the Polar pack. Then, to quote Captain Amundsen, “suddenly the mist disappeared and the entire panorama of Polar ice stretched away before our eyes—the most spectacular sheet of snow and ice ever seen by man from an aerial perspective.” From our altitude we could overlook sixty or seventy miles in any direction. The farflung expanse was strikingly beautiful in its simplicity. There was nothing to break the deadly monotony of snow and ice but a network of narrow cracks, or “leads,” which scarred this white surface and was the only indication to an aerial observer of the ceaseless movement of the Polar pack. We had crossed the threshold into the Unknown! I was thrilled at the thought that never before had man lost himself with such speed—75 miles per hour—into unknown space. The silence of ages was now being broken for the first time by the roar of our motors.
We were but gnats in an immense void. We had lost all contacts with civilization. Time and distance suddenly seemed to count for nothing. What lay ahead was all that mattered now.
“Something hidden. Go and find it.
Go and look behind the Ranges—
Something lost behind the Ranges,
Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
On we sped for eight hours, till the sun had shifted from the west to a point directly ahead of us. By all rights we should now be at the Pole, for our dead reckoning shows that we have traveled just one thousand kilometers (six hundred miles), at seventy-five miles per hour, but shortly after leaving Amsterdam Islands we had run into a heavy northeast wind, which had been steadily driving us westward. Our fuel supply was now about half exhausted, and at this juncture, strangely enough, just ahead of us was the first open lead of water that was large enough for an aeroplane to land in that we had encountered on our whole journey north. There was nothing left now but to descend for observations to learn where we were. As Captain Amundsen’s plane started to circle for a landing, his rear motor backfired and stopped, so that he finally disappeared among a lot of ice hummocks, with only one motor going.
This was at 1 a.m. on the morning of May 22nd. The lead ran east and west, meeting our course at right angles. It was an awful-looking hole. We circled for about ten minutes, looking for enough open water to land in. The lead was choked up with a chaotic mass of floating ice floes, and it looked as if some one had started to dynamite the ice pack. Ice blocks standing on edge or piled high on top of one another, hummocks and pressure-ridges, was all that greeted our eyes. It was like trying to land in the Grand Canyon.
We came down in a little lagoon among the ice-floes, taxied over to a huge ice-cake, and anchoring our plane to it, jumped out with our sextant and artificial horizon to find out where we were. Not knowing what to expect, I carried my rifle, but after our long flight I was a bit unsteady on my legs, tumbled down into the deep snow, and chocked up the barrel. Our eyes were bloodshot and we were almost stone-deaf after listening to the unceasing roar of our motors for eight hours, and the stillness seemed intensified.
Looking around on landing, I had the feeling that nothing but death could be at home in this part of the world and that there could not possibly be any life in such an environment, when I was surprised to see a seal pop up his head beside the plane. I am sure he was as surprised as we were, for he raised himself half out of the water to inspect us and seemed not at all afraid to approach, as he came almost up to us. We had no thought of taking his life, for we expected to be off and on our ways again towards the Pole after our observation. His curiosity satisfied, he disappeared, and we never saw another sign of life in those waters during our entire stay in the ice.
Our observations showed that we had come down in Lat. 87° 44′ N., Long. 10° 20′ West. As our flight meridian was 12° East, where we landed was, therefore, 22° 20′ off our course. This westerly drift had cost us nearly a degree in latitude and enough extra fuel to have carried us to the Pole. As it was, we were just 136 nautical miles from it. At the altitude at which we had been flying just before descending, our visible horizon was forty-six miles; which means that we had been able to see ahead as far as Lat. 88° 30′ N., or to within just ninety miles of the North Pole. We had left civilization, and eight hours later we were able to view the earth within ninety miles of the goal that it had taken Peary twenty-three years to reach. Truly “the efforts of one generation may become the commonplace of the next.”
When we had finished taking our observation, we began to wonder where N 25 was. We crawled up on all the high hummocks near by and with our fieldglasses searched the horizon. Dietrichson remarked that perhaps Amundsen had gone on to the Pole. “It would be just like him,” he said. It was not until noon, however, of the 22nd that we spotted them from an especially high hill of ice. The N 25 lay with her nose pointing into the air at an angle of fortyfive degrees, among a lot of rough hummocks and against a huge cake of old blue Arctic ice about forty feet thick, three miles away. It was a rough-looking country, and the position of the N 25 was terrible to behold. To us it looked as though she had crashed into this ice.
We of the N 24 were not in too good shape where we were. We had torn the nails loose on the bottom of our plane, when we took off from King’s Bay, so that she was leaking badly; in fact, the water was now above the bottom of the petrol tanks. Also, our forward motor was disabled. In short, we were badly wrecked. Things looked so hopeless to us at that moment that it seemed as though the impossible would have to happen ever to get us out. No words so well express our mental attitude at that time as the following lines of Swinburne’s:
“From hopes cut down across a world of fears,
We gaze with eyes too passionate for tears,
Where Faith abides, though Hope be put to flight.”
That first day, while Dietrichson and I had tried to reach the N 25, Omdal had been trying to repair the motor. We dragged our canvas canoe up over hummocks and tumbled into icy crevasses until we were thoroughly exhausted. The snow was over two to three feet deep all over the ice, and we floundered through it, never knowing what we were going to step on next. Twice Dietrichson went down between the floes and only by handing onto the canoe was he able to save himself from sinking. After half a mile of this we were forced to give up and return.
We pitched our tent on top of the ice floe, moved all our equipment out of the plane into it, and tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. But there was no sleep for us and very little rest during the next five days. Omdal was continually working on the motor, while Dietrichson and I took turns at the pump. Only by the most incessant pumping were we able to keep the water down below the gasoline tanks.
Although we had located the N 25, they did not see us till the afternoon of the second day, which was May 23rd. We had taken the small inflated balloons, which the meteorologist had given us with which to obtain data regarding the upper air strata, and after tying pieces of flannel to them set them loose. We hoped that the wind would drift them over to N 25 and so indicate to them in which direction to look for us. But the wind blew them in the wrong direction, or else they drifted too low and got tangled up in the rough ice.
Through all that first day the wind was blowing from the north and we could see quite a few patches of open water. On the second day the wind shifted to the south and the ice began to close in on us. It was as though we were in the grasp of a gigantic claw that was slowly but surely contracting. We had a feeling that soon we would be crushed.
On the third day, May 24th, the temperature was—11.5°c., and we had trouble with our pump freezing. The two planes were now slowly drifting together, and we established a line of communication, so that we knew each other’s positions pretty well. It is tedious work, semaphoring, for it requires two
men: one with the flag, and the other with a pair of field-glasses to read the signals. It took us a whole hour merely to signal our positions, after which we must wait for their return signals and then reply to them.
On this day, after an exchange of signals, we decided to try to reach Amundsen. We packed our canvas canoe, put it on our sledge, and started across what looked to us like mountainous hummocks. After only going a few hundred yards we had to give up. The labor was too exhausting. With no sleep for three days, and only liquid food, our strength was not what it should have been. Leaving our canvas canoe, we now made up our packs of fifty pounds each, and pushed on. We may or we may not return to our plane again.
According to my diary we traveled the first two miles in two hours and fifteen minutes, when we came upon a large lead that separated us from the N 25 and which we could see no way to cross. We talked to them by signal and they advised our returning. So, after a seven-hour trip, we returned to our sinking plane, having covered perhaps five and one half miles in about the same length of time it had taken us to fly from Spitzbergen to Lat. 87.44. Arriving at our plane, we pitched camp again and cooked a heavy pemmican soup over our Primus stove. Dietrichson gave us a surprise by producing a small tin of George Washington coffee. We took some of the pure alcohol carried for the Primus stove and put it into the coffee, and with pipes lighted felt more or less happy.
As we smoked in silence, each with his own thoughts, Dietrichson suddenly clasped his hands to his eyes, exclaiming: “Something is the matter with my eyes!” He was snow-blind, but never having experienced this before, did not know what had happened to him. We had been careful to wear our snowglasses during most of the journey, but perhaps not quite careful enough. After bandaging Dietrichson’s eyes, Omdal and I put him to bed and then continued with our smoking and thoughts. It seems strange, when I think back now, that during those days nothing that happened greatly surprised us. Everything that happened was accepted as part of the day’s work. This is an interesting sidelight on man’s adaptability to his environment.
The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told Page 31
