At last, the winter storms that made it impossible for the Eskimos to venture even as far from their igloos as the box house set in. We no longer had visitors, were no longer able to go outside to do our exercises in the darkness.
Lying there in my warm sleeping bag, I felt ridiculously unsuited for a polar expedition, deserving of being left behind. Dr. Cook, I was convinced, had detected in me some fundamental weakness, some crucial flaw, some remnant of the Stead boy, all traces of whom I thought I had shed long ago.
All day and all night long, there was no sound from outside but the roaring of the wind and, occasionally, that of the Eskimo dogs, which, having picked up the scent of the pemmican, came down from the hill, climbed up onto the roof and tried relentlessly to claw their way through the turf, pummelling in silence, as if they believed that if they did not bark we would not notice them. When Dr. Cook threw what meat he thought we could spare outside, they went away for a while. Soon, it was simply to make him throw out some meat that they clawed at the roof, making a few perfunctory scratches at the turf, then jumping down to wait outside the door for their reward.
I felt a constant weariness, a chronic urge to sleep that I saw no reason to resist, it being warm and safe inside my sleeping bag, which I left less and less often, despite the urging of Dr. Cook. Other days, after sleepless nights, I could neither get to sleep nor summon up the will to leave my sleeping bag. I lay in my bunk with my eyes closed, my mind racing as if energy was being diverted to it from my body. Sometimes, with Franke’s help, Dr. Cook would stand me up, so that the sleeping bag fell about my feet. Then they would walk me around the box house until I was fully awake and Dr. Cook would assign me some task, like planing the runners of the sled he was making or keeping the stove supplied with coal.
But the length of our confinement took its toll on Dr. Cook and Franke as well, and soon they were making only token efforts to keep me from sleeping all the time.
In early December, when there was a lull in the weather, Dr. Cook decided to take a journey in the darkness to test the sledges and snowshoes he had made. He told us he would be back in two weeks. Several days after he left, I fell into a fever from which I did not fully emerge until long after he returned.
I dreamed that I was back in the Dakota; that Dr. Cook had not taken me with him on this expedition; that I was waiting for him to come back from the Arctic, waiting to hear if he was still alive, waiting for a letter from him. I felt as I had years ago, when, because he was on some expedition, it had been months since his last letter and there was no telling when or if the next one would arrive.
I dreamed that he had written to me from Etah just as he had written to Mrs. Cook, explaining why it had been necessary to mislead me. Here I was, once again, being written to by this man with no way to write him back, no way to ask him what the real meaning of his words might be. I had no doubt that when I next heard from him, it would be by letter.
I awoke momentarily from the fever to find Dr. Cook taking my pulse, his hand holding my wrist. “When did you get back?” I said. He smiled at me but either did not speak or said things I could not hear. The next time I came to, I was sitting up. Franke had his hands on my shoulders, holding me in place, while Dr. Cook moved his stethoscope about my bare back.
I returned to lucidity for good on Boxing Day. “The midnight of winter passed two days ago, Devlin,” said Dr. Cook. “The sun is on its way back.”
The worst of the storms had passed. We were able to go outside again. I knew we would leave for the pole in February, which meant that I had a little more than a month to recover from my illness.
I tried so hard to make myself a model expeditionary, performing more than my share of tasks, continuing my calisthenics long after Franke and Dr. Cook had finished theirs, that Dr. Cook warned me I was risking a relapse.
We saw, for a few minutes each morning in the east, a Milky Way–like cloud of light that Dr. Cook said was the first sign of the sun.
“There will not be sufficient food for three of us,” Dr. Cook said. I had been expecting him to say some such thing for weeks. I felt fully recovered from my illness, but I knew that, having seen me reduced to such a state so early in the expedition, Dr. Cook had to have grave doubts about my ability to survive a bid for the pole. At the very best, he had to think I would impede his progress and ensure the failure of the expedition.
He smiled at me—smiled, I thought, as if to say that he knew what a disappointment it would be for me to be left behind, but he hoped I would understand why it was necessary that he and Franke proceed without me, and he believed that I would receive the bad news gracefully, such was my nature. I prepared myself.
“Franke will not be going with us to the pole,” he said.
I threw my arms around him and hugged him and danced about in imitation of the Eskimos.
Dr. Cook told me that he had known from the moment he invited him to stay behind with us at Etah that he would send Rudolph Franke back long before we had reached our goal or turned back ourselves.
“We needed his help to build the box house, and I knew we would be grateful for the company of an extra man, a man from Brooklyn, during the Arctic night. That might sound ruthless, but I told him from the start that at some point I might send him back.”
Dr. Cook told Franke of his decision after the sun returned. They spoke to each other in German, Franke gesticulating at me, clearly saying that it was unfair of Dr. Cook to send him back and take instead the illness-prone man both of them had been tending to all winter.
After arguing for days with Dr. Cook—who never raised his voice but simply told him that someone needed to stay behind to guard the box house and its contents—Franke finally relented.
• CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE •
WE LOADED THE ELEVEN SLEDGES, PILING THEM WITH GUNS, ammunition, pemmican, furs, three alcohol field stoves, spare snowshoes and the tent.
Dr. Cook chose, from the many volunteers, twelve Eskimos to go with us. Only two of them, he said,—and which two, he had not yet decided—would go with us to the pole. The Eskimos who were not chosen offered Dr. Cook some of their dogs. We had 103 of them by the day we left, enough so that we could alternate dogs, letting groups of them take their turn running unharnessed beside the others.
The sun was rising halfway, both preceded and followed by long intervals of twilight, by the time the caravan of sleds and dogs and men left Etah. Those who were staying behind merely raised their hands to us, for the Eskimos, Dr. Cook said, seemed to have no word for goodbye. Franke, though he had politely bade us both goodbye that morning, stayed in the box house. I felt sorry for him, and sorry for the thoughts I had harboured against him throughout the polar night.
We set out with our Eskimo guides across Ellesmere Land. Despite its arduousness, sledge travel was much easier to endure than the monotonous gloom of the Arctic night. For the first time in my life, I had a beard, though as there were no mirrors, I could only feel it with my hands.
My illness had been more psychological than physical, so I was not as debilitated as I had feared. Every now and then, during the first week or so, I became so fatigued that I had to sit on one of the sledges for a while and let myself be pulled along, a useless passenger, a burden to the dogs, mere dead weight to the expedition.
But I was soon able to match the pace of the others, soon learned from them the knack of half running on my snowshoes and taking my turn behind a sled on the smooth terrains. Dr. Cook unloaded the fourth and smallest of the sleds from the largest one, of which he was the driver, piled some of his equipment and supplies on it and entrusted it to me. I swiftly learned the knack of “driving” it, the main secret of which was to trust the dogs to know where they were going. Dr. Cook gave me a pair of amber-tinted goggles like those he wore to prevent snow-blindness. The sight of me goggled like Dr. Cook so amused the Eskimos that they could not look at me without bursting into grins.
Once we were clear of the ice blocks on the shore, the ice
was fairly smooth. But we soon began to encounter the usual polar obstacles. Pressure ridges that took days to cross, open water, leads that forced us to detour from our route. If no way could be found around pressure ridges, we chopped our way through them with our ice axes, which we could not have done had there not been so many of us—fourteen men hacking away at the ice like miners at a vein of ore, our purpose being not to chop a passage straight through the ridge, but only to fashion a kind of road on which the sledges could be dragged or pushed uphill.
One day, encountering nothing but flat ice, we travelled twenty-nine miles in fourteen hours. Another day, we made no forward progress at all, only chopped our way through a ridge that we did not cross until the next day.
At Bay Fjord, the temperature was −83 °F. We found muskoxen there, enough to provide us with supplies for the polar bid and for caches that we laid out at intervals for our return journey.
Upon our arrival at prominently marked locations on his map, Dr. Cook announced their names. Eureka Sound, Nansen Sound, Svartevoeg—the last aptly named, for the cliffs there were jet black. Then the utmost north of Axel Heiberg Land, from which both Dr. Cook and I saw the polar sea for the first time.
There we left all but the barest essentials, sending back six of the Eskimos. When we were just short of losing sight of land, Dr. Cook sent back four more Eskimos. Dr. Cook chose to accompany us to the pole two men named Etukishuk and Ahwelah. He chose them, he said, not because they were the best or strongest guides, but because they were young, impressionable and credulous. They would do what he told them to. They would not defy him.
Each day left everyone so exhausted that it was hard to believe we had ever found it difficult to fall asleep. I slept as I had never slept in my life, straight through the night, without dreams, without moving, waking up in the same posture I had assumed upon crawling into my sleeping bag. I lay down my head and, the next instant, felt Dr. Cook’s hand on my shoulder and heard him say, “Morning.” He always sounded as if he had come in from outside to wake me. He never seemed to sleep. He said it was the dogs, which at the first sign of the sun began to bark, that woke him, but no amount of barking would have woken me. Sometimes I woke up to see him scribbling in his notebooks as if he had been doing so all night.
We would be underway for barely half an hour when the dogs would stop barking, so caught up were they in the rhythm of the march. There was no need to urge them on, no need for us to speak to one another. Dr. Cook consulted his compass in mid-stride, and all the other sleds simply followed his. Only when a sextant reading was required did we stop, and even then we did not speak. The only sound heard while Dr. Cook consulted his instruments was the laboured breathing of the men and the dogs. I realized that we always breathed this way, but that the sound of it was drowned out by the stamp and shuffle of our feet, the jostling tumult of the dog teams in their traces, the rasping screech of the wooden runners on the snow.
We otherwise stopped only to light an alcohol stove, to melt snow in a teapot, to stare at that little miracle of flame, to huddle round it to keep it from being blown out by the wind. It seemed that all that remained in the world of the element of fire was that blue flame.
Our two pleasures were hot tea and sleep. We ate the pemmican without relish, for it was nothing more than fuel, as brittle as taffy.
Soon, we were travelling where the Eskimos had never been. They had even less knowledge of the use of the compass and the sextant than I did. We were out of sight of all land, all landmarks. There was nothing by which the rest of us could gauge our progress, nothing in the distance to which Dr. Cook could point and tell us how long it would take us to reach it, for everything ahead of us, behind us and around us was moving, imperceptibly in flux. If we were to take exactly the same route back, nautically speaking, Dr. Cook said, we would come across nothing that looked familiar. We would find no trace of the igloos in which we slept. Had we laid down a trail of paint behind us, we would look in vain for it when we returned, even if, in the interval, not a flake of snow had fallen. The ice of which our “route” was composed would long have been dispersed, for its location and shape were changing constantly.
This was something on which it was best not to dwell, for it gave rise to the sense that, more than moving, we were being moved, all but floating, helplessly and aimlessly caught up in some illusion on this seemingly fixed and solid surface. We could not look behind us at the start of every day and see where we had come from, for what lay behind us looked nothing like it had when we stopped the night before. For that matter, what lay ahead of us looked nothing like it had when we stopped the night before.
Through all of this our only guide was Dr. Cook. He alone knew where we were, was charting our progress on his maps. He would point to a place on a map, and we had no choice but to take his word for it that we were there, though we did not understand how he had calculated our position.
With his instruments, he kept track of the weather and the ice conditions, calculated the ocean currents, kept a daylight log, noted the lengths of our shadows at different times of the day. I envied him his ability to read those instruments and apply the data that he gathered from them to the maps, to locate himself in this non-coordinated sea of white.
The Eskimos, who had never been out of sight of land before, were terrified. They were unused to trusting someone else to navigate. Unable to understand even the concept of a map on which no land appeared, they probably suspected that we were lost, that Dr. Cook mistakenly believed he knew the way and that none of us would ever see our homes or families again.
The two showed no animosity towards Dr. Cook, but once the day’s march was done, they whispered between themselves, shaking their heads sadly as if our fates had already been decided.
Occasionally, Dr. Cook took photographs and tried to develop them inside the tent, but we could not make it quite dark enough and nothing appeared on the paper but a faint spot of light.
Man-wide cracks formed in the ice during the calm that followed every storm, cracks caused by the sudden drop in temperature. One night, as we slept in our tent, a fault-line opened right beneath us. When we awoke, the tent was slipping into it from both sides. We barely scrambled out in time to avoid dropping straight into the water, or being caught in the trench and crushed when the fault-line closed again.
The polar sea was unlike the sea between South America and Antarctica, Dr. Cook said. The ice, though it moved ceaselessly, was older, denser, thicker, more compressed. To reach the South Pole, which lay at the heart of a continent, one would have to cross more land than sea. And just knowing that beneath the ice, beneath one’s feet, lay land made the place seem less alien. As you walked on the polar sea, you could not feel the movement of the ice beneath your feet. I sometimes fancied that there was no water under it, that the ice went on forever, as though a million years ago, it was thrust up like white lava from the centre of the earth.
But then we would come upon a steaming lead of open water that seemed like an apparition. The ice had so recently parted that the water had just begun to freeze. And at fifty, sixty, seventy below, we could see it freeze. First, crystals formed and proliferated like flowers until a veined scale of ice extended from side to side. Through this new but porous ice, vapours rose like steam, only to freeze instantly to a kind of dust-like frost that fell back to the ice and gathered there until the ice became opaque. Dr. Cook took algae samples, though often there was not even algae, only sterile water.
To escape a storm coming from the west we were forced to cross one such lead, sleds and all, before it had finished freezing. The ice gave and sagged and cracked beneath our feet like half-shattered glass. Dr. Cook told us to spread our snowshoes as wide as possible to disperse our weight. Somehow we made it across.
Sometimes we thought the dogs that we released had scented game, only to find, upon catching up with them, that all of them were sniffing the long-abandoned blowhole of a seal or a polar bear. Eventually, we were so far fro
m land that there was not even the possibility that we would encounter other forms of life.
The days grew longer, until the time of least light was a prolonged dusk and then a near sunset, a midnight sun. The ice looked like a field of fire—orange, blue, purple—an unfuelled fire that, without consuming anything, would burn forever. During the time of the midnight sun, we travelled at night, when the sun was lowest, to escape the blinding glare from which not even our goggles could protect us. We slept by day, though it seemed a foolish waste to do so, to simulate night inside the igloos or the tent while outside there was so much light. What we had longed for during the polar night, we now had more of than we could use.
We woke up sometimes to find the igloos buried in snow, snow driven by winds that, as we lay inside our sleeping bags at night, we pretended not to hear. We knew that day had come only because light came very faintly through the walls.
What an effort it took, every morning, to leave the warmth of my sleeping bag. How tempted we all were to remain inside our bags, to never leave them, for they lent us such an illusion of safety, tempting us to forget that all that warmed us was the heat of our own bodies. We kicked each other awake, each hoping one of the other three would be the first to rise, the first to venture out and disinter the dogs, of which all that showed on such mornings was their rime-encrusted snouts.
In the sleeping bag, I marvelled in the warmth of my own skin. I would withdraw one hand and wait till it was cold, then bring it back inside and touch my face with it. How warm it made me feel, that singular shock of cold.
There came a time when the polar sea always had the same twilight tint of blue about it, as if we were caught in a late-winter afternoon, a day that was forever ending yet never ended, as though time had stalled at this melancholy hour of reflection that back home had always seemed so fleeting, so precious.
The Navigator of New York Page 40
