Outside the hut, as if in celebratory accord, the heavens put on their celestial crown, and all night long the aurora flashed its golden beams above the smoking crater of Mount Erebus. When I went out to take the meteorological readings, the snow rang to the thud of my footsteps. Beyond the Point the ice cracked as the temperature fell and the water rose.
We all got presents, bought in mid-summer a year ago by mothers, sisters, wives, and long kept hidden in a special box marked ‘festivities’. None of the gifts came labelled; we just dipped in, and there was nothing showy or expensive amongst them. Titus Oates received a whistle, a pop-gun and a sponge, all of which pleased him no end.
I expect the gun came from Mrs Scott, whom I won’t forget waltzing with in New Zealand. It’s all right a chap looking at one fair and square, but it’s damned disconcerting coming from a woman. She knew she’d got me pinned down, because she kept smiling. ‘Lt. Bowers,’ she said, ‘I assure you I won’t eat you.’ I didn’t altogether believe her, yet I admired her tremendously, and later was relieved to notice she looked at inaminate objects – lampshades, vases of flowers – with much the same intensity of gaze. My parcel included a ball of wool and some knitting needles, but I imagine these came from one of my sisters.
Ponting gave a lecture, with slides, of the photographs he’s taken since we arrived; the shore party landing stores, preparing for the depot journey, Osman with his head on Meares’s lap, all of us round the table at the old Discovery hut, faces black with blubber smoke; lastly, an absolutely ripping study of the Terra Nova anchored in McMurdo Sound, the ice waves bunched like burst pillows in the foreground.
His commentary was somewhat flowery. ‘Here we see the assiduous Dr Wilson in the process of making an artistic sketch of the distant view of the fairy slopes of the western mountains … here we observe Captain Scott, our gallant leader, overseeing the landing of the motorised transport.’ It didn’t help that he’d captured the Owner, mouth open in dismay, leaping back in shock as the biggest motor plunged through the ice and sank to the bottom of the Sound.
I’m afraid none of us were in a condition to be appreciative. I took it we were all embarrassed at seeing ourselves through the lens of the camera. I know I was. I can’t fathom why everyone says my headgear makes me look like a pirate; to my eyes I resemble my mother in her gardening hat.
When the table was cleared we attempted to play Snapdragon, but such was the unholy din going on around us, what with the gramophone constantly being rewound, and Teddy Evans and Griff bawling out, ‘Blow, bullies blow, For Californ-i-o’, each verse growing more bawdy than the last, each chorus accompanied by a flurry of blows to the biceps, that we soon gave up.
Some time in the small hours Titus danced the Lancers with Anton, the Russian groom, who put up a wonderful performance, flinging his legs about like a man possessed by demons. Originally, he was only hired by Meares to look after the ponies as far as New Zealand, but he proved such a stalwart little worker, the Owner kept him on. Poor Anton, he didn’t know what he was in for. Uneducated as he is, he’s taken the darkness badly. Not having a grasp of the turning of the earth, he has a superstitious fear the sun has gone doolally for ever. Convinced that the phosphorescent lights which leap up from the sea are evil spirits, he chucked his precious ration of cigarettes into the water to appease them. Oates caught him in the act. His belongings are ready-packed under his bunk for the return of the Terra Nova. All he wants to do, or so he told Titus, is to get back home and marry his one-legged sweetheart.
After this display, Titus went round asking whether any of us were sweating. If we said no, he promptly dabbed our faces with his sponge, now dipped in gravy, and shouted, ‘Well, you are now … by Jove you are!’ Then he rushed about shooting everybody with his pop-gun. We’d toasted the returning sun in milk, but I expect he’d mixed his with something more fiery. Finally, he aimed his gun at Captain Scott and asked, ‘How doth Homer have it? I blew it into the cerulean azure.’ To which Captain Scott replied, ‘You’re a good fellow, Titus. Why not call it a day?’
This was a hint for the company to retire pretty sharpish, and we did, all except Titus who slouched off to the stables, where at intervals he could be heard blowing blasts on his whistle.
Meares, who’s a great traveller, began to whisper us a bloodcurdling story about the Chinese and their war with the Lolas, one of the eighteen tribes on the borders of Tibet. The Chinese took a Lolo hostage, tied him to a bamboo bench, slit his throat and dipped their flag into his blood. Then they cut out the poor devil’s heart and liver and cooked them for supper.
‘What rag?’ asked Gran, and for some reason this made us burst with laughter, or rather we stuffed our faces into our mattresses to drown the roars we made.
Some time after, Titus returned, shook Cherry awake and asked him if he was responsible for his actions, and Cherry called out plaintively, ‘Go away, you shan’t have my liver!’ which set us all off again.
I was just drifting into sleep when Titus tumbled Meares out of his bunk and demanded to know if he was fancy-free. Meares punched him. I was astonished the Owner, a very moderate drinker, didn’t rise up and give them both a roasting.
Five days later, Bill, Cherry and I prepared to leave for the penguin rookery at Cape Crozier. We had two sledges, one tied behind the other, both heaped high with camping equipment, provisions, pick-axes, ropes, repair kits, hurricane lamps, medical supplies, etc., also a case full of scientific gear for pickling and preserving. Their combined weight was enormous – 757 lbs.
I never thought the Owner would let us go, not with the Polar trek only three months off, but somehow Bill managed to talk him round. To reach the rookery, where temperatures often register 100 degrees of frost, it’s necessary to scramble down cliffs exposed to blizzards sweeping ferociously across hundreds of miles of open snow plain. And all this in the dark! Exciting stuff, what?
Since our return to Cape Evans I’ve been putting my fourpence in with the best of them, and I rather imagine the Captain wanted to give me a treat after the appalling events of the breaking up of the sea-ice. At any rate, he raised no objections as far as I was concerned, though he balked at the idea of Cherry floundering about the Crozier cliffs in the depths of winter. I suspect he was thinking of the fate of seaman Vince. He gave in eventually – Bill badgered him so.
Cherry’s terribly bucked at being included. He’s down on the list as assistant zoologist to Uncle Bill, and has come in for a fair amount of ragging, seeing all he studied was the classics. ‘We’re well aware of your qualifications for Antarctic exploration,’ Teddy Evans told him in an unguarded moment during the mid-winter feast. ‘A thousand pounds and an ability to read Latin and Greek.’
We were standing there adjusting the loads when Captain Scott approached; frowning heavily. ‘Bill, why are you taking all this oil?’ he asked, looking at the six tins lashed to the second sledge. Bill muttered something to the effect that it was better to be safe than sorry and that we’d be bringing most of it back, but one could tell the Owner was annoyed. He’s understandably loth to squander provisions on anything other than the southern journey. All the same, as Bill later remarked, we could hardly be expected to embark on such a mission carrying nothing more substantial than a tin of Huntley and Palmer biscuits and a blubber-streaked copy of Bleak House.
I think I know what ails the Owner. He’s absolutely sound as regards what’s right, but he lacks conviction. He simply isn’t stupid enough to be convinced his is the only way. In the circumstances, it’s a dangerous trait.
There was a seal-killing party setting out at the same time, the Owner parading up and down to make sure things were ship-shape. He himself rarely accompanies these forays, and when he does I’ve noticed he’s apt to look in the opposite direction during the actual butchering. I’d thought it was because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood, but Bill says it’s the slaughter that turns his stomach. I must admit it’s a messy business; one has to club them on the no
se before sticking a knife in their hearts, and they have extraordinarily expressive eyes. I can’t help remembering the Temple of the Tooth in Ceylon with its pictures depicting the Buddhist hell. One could only thank God they were fanciful, as most of them went beyond description for fiendish ingenuity, the worst torments being reserved for the killers of animals. In comparison, Dante’s Inferno would seem like a pleasure garden.
A few of the fellows came up to wish us godspeed, all of them wearing expressions pitched between mirth and pity. I don’t doubt they believed us mad as hatters. Bill and I didn’t care. I’ve been five times round the world, and Bill quite as far in his mind, yet we still thought this an awfully big adventure. I’m not so sure about Cherry, but then, he generally looks as though he expects somebody to go for him with the boxing gloves.
At the last moment Ponting wanted to take our photograph. Reluctantly we lined up – Bill with his hand on his hips, Cherry smiling bashfully, myself leaning on a skistick. Caught in the flashlight we froze, three men about to go bird’s-nesting.
Cape Crozier is sixty-seven miles from Cape Evans, and within two days we covered the fifteen miles to Hut Point. It was to be the last time we achieved such distances on our marches. As early as the first day I think both Bill and I began to realise what we’d let ourselves in for. He didn’t smile again, not wholeheartedly. Though his mouth crinkled up, his eyes remained worried.
On the depot-laying journey we’d got into a rhythm of marching, and when we camped we did so as a team, each man having routine duties to perform. While some unlashed the sleeping bags, others put up the tents, fetched snow for water, had the primuses assembled, the food bags undone and so on. But now there were only three of us, and the loads were terribly heavy, and none of us had ever been out in such degrees of cold. Other people had travelled to Cape Crozier before us, including Bill, but never in winter, never in darkness.
Strain as we might we could never get up enough speed to stop our feet from going numb, for the snow clung to the runners in powdered clumps and acted like brakes, and we were forever stopping to scrape them clear. We couldn’t see where we were going, where we were stepping, where the food bags were, or the straps for the sledges, couldn’t read the compass without using three or four boxes to strike one dry match. And when we did find what we wanted, the cords and the straps and the lashings had frozen to the hardness of wire which had to be undone and retied through three thicknesses of gloves. Cherry was foolish enough that first day to bare his hands to unbuckle his harness, and instantly Jack Frost bit all ten of his fingers. The next morning the fluid in the blisters had turned to ice. We were lucky in that the Owner had decided we should conduct a dietary experiment, for this cut down on the amount of bags we had to open, and we carried only pemmican, tea, biscuits and butter. It would be interesting to determine, he had speculated, as we’d sat of an evening round the stove, whether such restricted fare would provide all the fat, proteids and carbohydrates needed for man-hauling in extreme conditions.
We panted like dogs when pulling the loads, and heard our breath crackle as it solidified on the air. We sweated from the effort, and that froze too. If we were quick enough, or had heart enough, we could jump up and down and shake the particles out above our boots, but mostly it sank into the material of our clothing and suited us in armour. Unless I kept my face turned away from the notebook in which I jotted down meteorological readings, a film of ice formed on the paper and rendered my pencil useless. We took hours to make camp and hours to break camp, and in between tottered like children across the immensity of that bleak and hiemal playground.
Quite soon – I think we were approaching the desolate bay that lies between Hut Peninsula and Terror Point – we found we couldn’t shift both sledges together. When the temperature on the Barrier surface reaches a certain low point the runners can’t melt the crystals, and one can only advance by rolling them over and upon one other. I suppose it’s a bit like ploughing. We were forced to relay, which meant that for every three painful miles we covered we only went one mile forward. That first night there was no wind and we trudged back by candlelight and Jupiter.
It was a measure of Bill’s flexibility that he quickly abandoned the notion of night and day, for in truth there was nothing to mark the difference. The cold never lessened, and apart from an hour at what passed for midday, when a dim and ghostly twilight stained the horizon, the blackness was absolute. Often we went without lunch because it was simply too painful to go through that whole wretched rigmarole of unpacking and repacking. We marched until we could go no further, or until Bill imagined Cherry’s feet were in danger. He never gave a thought to his own. The onset of frostbite is interesting, in that the warning symptoms, mainly a tingling of the affected parts, are similar to those of the thawing-out process.
We made no attempt to attend to our frozen extremities until we’d eaten. The effect of hot food was nothing short of miraculous, as though it by-passed the usual channels of ingestion and entered straight into the bloodstream. As Bill rightly said, it was like putting a hot-water bottle to one’s heart. Then, it was easier to unwind our puttees, lever off our frozen finneskö and socks and begin to nurse our feet back to feeling.
We even managed to laugh at the spectacle we made, Cherry leaning back with his toes paddling for warmth beneath Bill’s wind jacket and undervest, Bill doubled forward, his hands tucked into Cherry’s armpits, me with my nose held over the pan steaming on the cooker. If Ponting had been with us he’d have had a field day with his camera, though Lord knows what others would have construed from the images.
I don’t understand by what magic I’ve been spared, but I was undoubtedly less affected by the cold than either Bill or Cherry. Never once since we made landfall have my feet become frozen. Oates, Meares, Atkinson, the Owner, even Gran, they’ve all been caught pretty badly at one time or another. Perhaps it has something to do with my height, or rather the lack of it, in that being closer to the ground my blood has less far to circulate. Whatever the reason, I can stand low temperatures better than the other fellows, a fact Bill finds strange, seeing I’ve spent most of my life in the tropics. It’s only my nose that ever gets nipped, it being so damnably prominent.
That isn’t to say I got away entirely scot-free, for I had fearsome stomach cramps from our diet. Bill was on extra fat, Cherry had been persuaded to go for carbohydrates – he was usually doubled up with heartburn – and I was experimenting with proteids. I found I couldn’t eat all my pemmican ration, Bill balked at his quantity of butter, while Cherry complained of hunger and a craving for sweet things. He said he had a picture sitting in his head of a tin of peaches in thick syrup. In my opinion, the Huntley and Palmer biscuits made up from a secret recipe of Bill’s in consultation with a chemist, provided all the sugar we needed. There were two sorts, one called ‘Antarctic’, and the other ‘Emergency’, but as either label seemed to furnish a correct description of the pickle we were in, we ate both and never noticed the difference. I thought a lot about wedges of freshly baked bread, and boiled potatoes sprinkled with salt.
On the sixth night – we were now into July and that day had slogged ten miles to gain three – Bill suggested we turn back.
‘Rather not,’ said Cherry. He was crouching over the cooker, pricking his blisters with a knife and blissfully wincing.
‘What do you think, Birdie?’ asked Bill. I knew he was wanting advice rather than an heroic, gung-ho affirmative.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s no denying conditions are far worse than we could have imagined, and I expect they’ll get worse.’
‘Dear God,’ he interjected.
‘But,’ I continued, ‘we have sufficient food, are in pretty rude health, and it strikes me that collecting these eggs is a jolly worthy enterprise. I happen to believe we can stick it.’
I was speaking no more than the truth, having always found that willpower overcomes all adversities. One just has to believe that it’s within one’s spiritual d
omain to conquer difficulties. That is not to say that I don’t recognise there has to be a time to submit, possibly a time to die, merely that I’ve never yet been taken to the brink
Aware of this lack of experience, I added, ‘It’s your decision, Uncle Bill, but speaking for myself, I say we go on.’ At which Cherry nodded vigorously.
Bill cheered up after this and waxed on about the penguins. I must say they lead terrible lives, in that their undoubted maternal instinct leads more to infanticide than nurturing.
‘In their desire to further the existence of the species,’ Bill informed us, ‘they often trample their young to death. It’s a matter of too many mothers in charge of too few eggs.’
‘Smothering love,’ exclaimed Cherry.
‘If one of them should leave their egg unattended for a moment,’ Bill said, ‘another rushes up and instantly makes off with it, with the result they often get broken. The bereft bird sometimes goes to the lengths of fashioning an egg out of a lump of ice … it’s quite pathetic to watch the way they carry it around in the expectation of it hatching.’
He and Cherry usually went on talking for an hour or more, by which time I was in the land of dreams. We were all troubled by nightmares on the winter journey, but whereas I drifted back into sleep Bill and Cherry apparently tossed and turned until the shivering dawn. Bill was hounded awake by images of that silver bird he’d glimpsed from the crow’s nest of the Terra Nova, and dear old Cherry was chased by a flood of treacle which threatened to engulf him. I could never remember what visions disturbed me. Bill used to say it gave him immense pleasure to lie there listening to my oblivious snores.
That first, awful week we thought conditions had got about as bad as we could possibly encounter, and we were wrong. After rounding Cape Mackay we ran into a series of blizzards of such icy ferocity that our minds threatened to become as numbed as our bodies. We were almost worse off in the tent than out of it, for our breath and the steam from the cooker deposited a rim of hoar frost on the inner lining which, if we left the cooker burning long enough, gradually melted and dripped mercilessly down upon us. Our sleeping bags were daily turned into frozen boards, and in trying to prise them open one had to be careful lest the leather broke like glass. And then, of course, once they had thawed sufficiently for us to force our way into them, it was like lying in a damp ditch until, the cooker extinguished and the temperature plummeting, the outer covering began to stiffen all over again.
The Birthday Boys Page 12
