Antarctica (28 page)

She jumped across the narrow gap and hit the wall of ice with crampon tips and two ice axes, and stuck like a fly. Like Spiderwoman, yes! Then up, one move at a time, always three points stuck in the ice, axe axe, toe toe, axe axe, and quickly up and over the top, onto thin hard snow. Quickly she pounded in a long snow stake, which left her free to walk about and pound in a couple more. Despite her admonitions to the clients, she was sweating. She unzipped her parka and took it off, and
as she was now standing in a windless bowl of ice like a big reflecting solar cooker, she took off her sweater and shirt as well, right down to a sky-blue jogging top. The insectile stares of the clients below seemed to convey notions that she was indulging in some Antarctic cold macho; no doubt they were still cold; but they wouldlearn. Now Jack was clipped to the line and jumping across and climbing up, making it look like a lark—as indeed it was, with the rope top-belaying him.

Against her bare sweaty skin the air was frigid, but she didn’t stay wet for long. She could actually feel the sweat wafting away. Against that evaporative cooling the radiant heat of the sun was a palpable hit, as from an open fire, so distinct that she turned to get the sunlight on her back as well, doing a little rotisserie. The side of her exposed to the sun was hot, the side in the shade of her own body was cold; it felt like there was about sixty degrees difference between the two.

She got the clients up and over the wall one by one. Then they all pulled the sledge up to them through a jumar, which allowed the rope up but would not let it slip back down—“one, two, three, haul!” After that they sat beside the sledge; everyone was now following Val’s example with the thermostatting, and it looked like beach blanket south, for a few minutes anyway. But they were only ten meters higher, and twenty farther on, with several crevasses to go before they could simply slog uphill again. “It’s going to take all day to go the next hundred yards!” Jorge exclaimed.

“Oh it shouldn’t take quite that long,” Val said cheerfully. “But I guess we’d better get to it.”

“Oh God.”

“Not again.”

“You slavedriver.”

“Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.” Val put on the sledge harness, then her sungloves. “Come on, let’s go.”

So they did. Up here the ice proved to be broken in a series of broad ledges, like a giant’s steps. The crevasses were frequent, and the tortured ice gleamed in the wild shear zones walling them in on left and right. The work was unrelenting, and it took careful thermostatting to keep from sweating, then to keep from getting over-chilled after the hot spots. The view changed slowly. While waiting for the others Val looked back and down and out—two thousand feet down, thirty or forty miles out—over the jumbled frozen surface of the Ross Sea, in this month all white all the way to the horizon, the big icebergs scattered like a great fleet of torpedoed aircraft carriers. Mount Betty was now below them; the rest of the Herbert Range still loomed to their right, with a spur running off the range blocking the way ahead of them. To get to that spur they had to cross the bowl at the head of the Sargent Glacier, a little glacier high in its own basin, falling down to the Axel Heiberg on their left.

On they climbed. The sun wheeled around in the blue-black sky, until when Val looked back the glare off the sea ice was blinding. She checked her watch: though it was still sunny midafternoon, it was nine
P.M
. She had wanted to reach the saddle in the spur ahead of them, to give them a view of the Axel Heiberg below, but it was too late to continue. “Time to camp.”

So they pitched the dining tent and their little sleeping domes, and then in the nylon blue incandescence of the diner they got three pots of ice on the stove. In the violent blue light of the team tent everyone tended to look like morgue photos of themselves, but Jack did not seem to mind this effect, as he kept glancing at Val while they wolfed down the hors d’oeuvres: taste of
smoked oysters, sip of tea, glance at Val, three little taste treats, repeated over and over. And a bit of a come-on too. But Val had had a lifetime’s experience ignoring such looks, she could ignore men across a whole broadband of registers, from outrageous flirtation to demure appreciation to neutral obliviousness to cold warning to gross insult. Back in the world she would have ignored him in a really dismissive way, the back of her hand to him; but as he was a client, she kept it oblivious.

Besides, it was hers and Ta Shu’s night to cook, and cooking made one generous. The two of them sat by the stove tending the rehydrating spaghetti sauce, cooking the pasta, frying hard bread in garlic butter, and passing out cup after cup of hot tea. Val did not always enjoy cooking for even as small a group as this, but Ta Shu with his fractured English and his unusual ideas about food (he wanted to put ginger in the spaghetti sauce) made it entertaining. It was a pleasant couple of hours, one of the unsung attractions of mountain expeditions: getting off one’s tired feet, getting warmed up, getting food in the stomach, food which because of the extreme states of hunger involved often tasted wildly delicious even if it was very plain fare; and all the while lounging around on soft sleeping bags in colorful silky clothes like Oriental pashas, and talking a mile a minute. In these conditions cooking for others was a solicitous, avuncular activity; taking care of people; which meant that the cooks got a little taste of how the guide felt all the time. Even Jack was not as much of a jerk on the nights when he and Jim cooked.

On this night, however, he was not cooking, and so free to look, and to talk. And the day’s exertions had made all of them talkative, to tell the truth.

“That was so hard!”

“I can’t believe they got fifty-two dogs up that!”

“Three thousand vertical feet, and a lot of it gnarly indeed.”

“And then to find out it was all wasted effort!”

“And with the big icefalls still to come!”

But the Norwegians hadn’t known that, Val thought. Perhaps not knowing what lay ahead had made them less apprehensive rather than more. Ignorance was bliss. At least sometimes. “It’s a good thing we came this way,” she said. “It’s nice to see what they saw.”

Jack nodded complacently. “That’s what it’s all about.”

After more food intake Jorge said, “You know, it gives you an interesting new angle on the myth of Scott as total bungler and Amundsen as hyperefficient genius. I mean unless you’ve done today you don’t realize what huge risks Amundsen took. There were sections today that were worse than when we went up the Khumbu Icefall.”

To the same kind of goal, Val thought—Everest, the South Pole—the tallest, the bottommost; something only had to be the mostest and suddenly it was the holy grail, worth taking fatal risks for. For a certain type of person.

“But the Norwegians were good on ice,” Jack told Jorge. “They were experienced polar travelers.”

“Yes,” Jorge said, “but that wouldn’t have helped if a snowbridge had collapsed at the wrong time, or if a serac had fallen on them. That easily could have happened.”

“You can imagine them disappearing without a trace,” Elspeth added. “Then Scott’s group would have gotten there first, and had the extra psychological push to make it back home, and the whole story would have been reversed.”

“The rash presumptuous Norwegians,” Jorge declaimed, “and the amateur but tough steady Brits. It’s the story everyone wants, really.”

“Not me,” Jack said. “Scott was an idiot. If it had turned out that way it would be the genius punished and the idiot rewarded.”

“Very realistic,” Val murmured, but no one heard her, as Elspeth was crying “Oh come on!” and waving a finger at Jack. “Scott was
not
an idiot!”

“But he was!” Jim said. “He did everything wrong!”

“Everything,”
Jack said, with a knowing smile at Val.

And then he and Jim were off and running, playing riffs they had obviously played many times before, variations on the theme “Scott and His Stupidities.” He had become a torpedo lieutenant in the late Victorian Royal Navy, a ridiculously dead-end post in a ridiculously moribund service. He had gotten the polar assignment through personal connections even though he had no knowledge of polar regions. He had not bothered to learn a thing from previous polar explorers, nor had he bothered to study the Arctic indigenous peoples—perish the thought. In fact he took exactly the wrong lessons from those who had gone before, disdaining Eskimo furs in favor of naval canvas clothing, disdaining dogsled travel in favor of manhauling. Actually he tried to use dogs, as well as ponies, motor tractors, and skis; but as he and his men could not manage to master any of these modes of transport over snow, they had had to fall back on walking as a last resort. Only at that point had Scott proclaimed to the world that manhauling was really the only honest and noble way to go.

“It wasn’t a matter of style,” Jim said, “or consideration for animals. They killed their ponies and dogs too, only without ever admitting they were going to
have to do it, so that sometimes they didn’t have pistols there for the job. Wilson had to knife some of them to death, while Scott sat in the tent wringing his hands about how bad he felt. It was sheer incompetence.”

He had also been a bad judge of character, Jack added. He had been the sycophantic disciple of bad men; he had chosen bad men to work for him; he had led them badly. He had had bad friends.

“Oh come on,” Elspeth objected. “Wilson cannot be called a bad friend. He was a wonderful man.”

“He was too good to be good,” Jack said, which cracked Jim up. “A passive Christlike martyr in the making. And the rest of them were buffoons.”

Except for the ones who had ripped Scott privately in their diaries, of course, who all turned out to have been wise men. But the rest—buffoons.

“He also seems to have gotten in trouble with a girl in America,” Jack said, with another suggestive glance at Val. “And his marriage …”

He had married a woman too beautiful for him, it seemed, too ambitious and smart. An Edwardian Lady Macbeth, who had pushed him south “and then had an affair with Nansen at the very same time Scott was dying on the ice,” Jack said, shaking his head woefully.

He had been a scientific dilettante as well, Jim went on, only using the sciences as a cover for his desire to get to the Pole. He had had sulks and depressions lasting up to a month. He had sent Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard into needless danger and exhaustion on the Winter Journey, while the rest of his men sat around the hut writing a newspaper and putting on skits, rather than learning to ski or control their dogs. As for ponies, he had obtained glue-factory nags from Siberia in the first place, then killed half of them during pointless excursions
during the winter, little trips which read like rehearsals for a Keystone Kops Ice Capades.

Then during the trek south he had overworked his men, demanding that they keep up with his unhealthily strong strength. He had gotten into a race mentality with the second sledge team, thus breaking Lieutenant Evans. He had seriously underestimated the provisions needed to feed four people to the Pole and back; then at the last depot he had decided to take five people instead of four, sealing their fate.

“Now that was a mistake,” Val admitted in her murmur at the stove. She had heard all this before, of course. It was a frequent topic of conversation on these expeditions, naturally. Everyone who joined a Footsteps expedition was an expert; it only took a half-dozen books to fill you in on the entire history of Antarctica, and after that everyone had an opinion. Including her. But she had learned to stay out of the discussions, having become tired of the faintly condescending responses she got if she joined, responses all the more irritating because even though these were outdoor people, they still seemed to share the desk-jockey notion that anyone doing physical work for a living must have had all thoughts fly forever out of their head. She knew this was only the defensiveness of the couch potato, but it still bugged her. And it was always the same discussion anyway.

Jim and Jack were by no means finished with the litany of Scott’s mistakes. Jim focused on technical errors of competence, Val noted, Jack on moral turpitude. Jim pointed out that Scott had failed to notice that the cannisters they were using allowed their stove fuel to evaporate out of the cap screws. He had also ignored all signs of scurvy. He had hiked facing into the sun on the return from the Pole, when they could just as well have
reversed their schedule and hiked with the sun to their backs, as Amundsen had done. Jack took over and insinuated that Scott had probably pressured Oates into committing suicide, and then probably invented Oates’s famous last words, “I am just stepping outside and may be some time.” It was certain that he had altered other diary entries when publishing them in his books. (“Oh heaven forbid,” Elspeth interjected.) In general he had been too good a writer; and in the end he had written his way out of responsibility for the fiasco—out of responsibility and into legend. In fact, Jack said, he had probably preferred to die heroically, rather than return to England as the second man to the Pole. And so he had no doubt coerced Bowers and Wilson into staying in their final campsite, rather than brave a storm to try to reach their next supply cache only ten miles away, a storm that Amundsen would have waltzed through with barely a note for it in his journal, except perhaps “some wind today.”

No. Scott was an idiot. He had read Tennyson; he had
believed
Tennyson; he had been the disastrous end product of a decaying empire, whose subjects had told themselves any number of comforting delusional stories about amateurs muddling through to glory, as at Waterloo or in the Crimea. This was the crux, even Jim maintained it: Scott had believed in bad stories. J. M. Barrie, the author of
Peter Pan
, had been one of his best friends. And so he and his men had never grown up. They had been Peter Pans, they had been Slaves to Duty like Frederick in
The Pirates of Penzance;
they had not had the sense to notice that
The Pirates of Penzance
was a satire. No, it was Browning and Tennyson and G. A. Henty and the
Boy’s Own Weekly
for them, all the stupidities of the Victorian age turned into cast-iron virtues by the stories the boys were told. Into the valley
of death rode the six hundred; onto the plateau of death manhauled the five.