Black Ice (34 page)

By this process they reached the gully Sean and Lauren had remembered from the first time, a kilometre-long ice chute leading in an almost straight line down to the glacier. Here Sean checked his watch and called Lauren over.

‘We're too slow,' he told her. ‘We'll never get down onto the glacier before dark. You think we can glissade down this?'

Lauren looked down the smooth expanse of ice. ‘It looks OK here, but what about the bottom end? What if it ends up in a crevasse?'

‘It doesn't,' Sean said with certainty. ‘We took this whole section at about twenty miles an hour when we came down on the snowcats. The bottom runs off gently onto the glacier.'

Now Lauren recalled. ‘You know, I think you're right. I think we could try it. Like Shackleton on South Georgia.'

‘He did the same?'

‘When he crossed the interior. 1916. There were three of them, with few supplies and just a short length of rope. They had to cross the mountains to get to the whaling station at Grytviken. If I remember rightly, they ended up glissading down a huge glacier—it saved them half a day.'

‘If it's good enough for Shackleton…' Sean said, with a smile. ‘I think we should try it. It's about fifteen hundred feet from here to the glacier. We'll never get there by dark if we carry on at this pace.'

‘What about Frank?'

‘He can stay on the sledge. I'll sit on the back and steer it with my feet.'

Once they understood the principle, most of the team were prepared to throw themselves down the slope; anything was preferable to the pain of trying to descend on blistered feet. They followed Lauren's example, sliding on their backsides, using their feet to brake by jamming their heels into the compacted surface when they felt themselves going too fast.

After six days at walking pace the sensation of speed was breathtaking, the wind-polished walls of the gully shooting past at a tremendous rate. The sledge was fastest; bearing the heaviest load, it shot past the others at breakneck speed, Sean whooping with excitement on the back, Frank white-faced and looking anything but happy at the front.

Less than five minutes of exhilarating slide put the team at the foot of the gully, where they were spat out onto the flat surface of the glacier. Lauren ended up in a deep bank of drifted snow, the powder penetrating every gap in her clothing.

They regrouped, smiling foolishly at each other after the excitement of the glissade, a quick head count confirming that everyone had made it down safely.

‘Let's get the tents up,' Lauren told them. ‘We're running out of light.'

With just minutes to spare, they had the tents erected and the stoves lit. It was Sean's turn to cook, but no sooner had he got the first of the pre-packed food sachets lowered into the boiling water than Lauren was calling him from outside, her voice hissing at him through the tent fabric.

Sean poked his head out of the front flap.

‘What is it?'

‘I think I saw a light.' Lauren was pointing up to the high col, faintly visible in the moonlight as a looming mass of snow way above them.

‘You serious?' Sean was out of the tent in a moment.

‘Yes … at least I thought I did…' Now Lauren was uncertain.

‘What was it?'

‘Could have been a headtorch. It was only a flicker, nothing more.'

Then they both saw it, the briefest pinprick of artificial light, glimmering in the darkness.

‘You were right,' Sean whistled. ‘That's Fitzgerald, he's camping up on the col. How the hell did he get on our trail?'

Lauren turned to him, her face drained of all blood.

‘He didn't fall for the false note. He knows we're heading for the plane.'

‘Shit.'

‘My thoughts exactly.'

‘We've got to stop him,' Sean said. ‘If he gets to that second depot before we do, we're as good as dead.'

‘But how, Sean, when he's so much faster than us?'

‘Let me sleep on it,' Sean told her. ‘If I come up with something, I'll let you know.'

‘Don't tell the others,' Lauren begged him. ‘They've got enough problems as it is.'

74

The moment came just past nine a.m. on the tenth of September—the eleventh morning of the trek. They stood there together, watching the yellow blaze of light breach the horizon for the first time in six months.

‘Hallelujah!' Sean cried. ‘Where've you been all my life?'

The grey ice of the glacier—the half-lit world they had become so used to—was suddenly alive with colour, the ice dancing with blues and radiant whites as the rays painted light and shade. Suddenly, there was texture and depth where previously there had been monotone uniformity, the bright colours of their clothing picked out in brilliant detail.

It made them smile, turning their faces to bask in the sun's rays, even though there was no perceptible heat to be felt.

‘I always wondered about the guys who built Stonehenge,' Mel said. ‘I mean, I never thought of the sun as such a big deal. But I won't take it for granted again.'

All too soon, the sun sank beneath the horizon once more, returning the glacier to the dusk-light of winter. But—Lauren and her team knew—tomorrow it would be back for longer, then the day after it would appear for longer still.

The arrival of the sun, even if it was only for a quarter of an hour or so, was the final confirmation that winter was drawing to an end. But it still wasn't fast enough for Lauren's liking. The lack of full daylight was still a serious handicap, and by three o'clock each afternoon they were stumbling in the dark.

On the easier terrain, where no crevasses threatened them, the team could continue for a few hours with the occasional use of a headtorch or by using the faint light of the stars. On more dangerous ground, there was nothing to do but pitch the tents, a big frustration on the days when the team was going well and might have continued for a couple more hours.

The long black nights created a problem of their own: the tedium and depression of fifteen hours spent in total darkness with little or no torchlight to relieve the gloom. On a good night, eight or ten of those hours could be spent in sleep, but that still left plenty of down time, most of which was spent in silent contemplation of their miserable situation, bodies throbbing from the demands of each daily trek, minds struggling to cope with the uncertainty of their fate.

‘We have to talk,' Lauren begged Sean and Frank, ‘distract ourselves, or we'll go crazy here in the dark.'

‘Fairy tales?' Frank said quietly.

‘Anything.'

‘Only one type of story I want to hear,' Sean said, ‘and that's stories about people who were in more shit than we are … and lived to retire to a life of obscene comfort on some beach somewhere.'

Lauren thought for a while. ‘How about Franklin?' she offered. ‘The man who ate his boots.'

‘I like him already. He sounds like my sort of person. What's his story?'

‘We're talking about the early part of the nineteenth century, the 1820s more or less. His mission was to fill in some of the gaps in the Arctic. Like, for example, how did Canada end up in the far north.'

‘And don't tell me … he'd never been anywhere cold before?'

‘Good guess. In fact, on paper he was totally unqualified.'

Sean gave an amused cough. ‘I like that about the British. How come you guys always choose such
duffers
for these gnarly trips?'

‘National characteristic, I suppose, but I wouldn't call Franklin a duffer … more a big softy, a sort of wholesome, mild-mannered giant if you like.'

‘Cut to the drama,' Frank told her. ‘Where did it all start to go wrong?'

‘Oh God, it's years since I read the book, but if I remember rightly it actually started going pear-shaped right from the start. They had about seventeen hundred miles to complete across the wilds of Arctic Canada, but as bad luck would have it the weather was dead against them.'

Sean sucked in his breath in mock sympathy. ‘Weather against them, eh? Who would have thought that in Arctic Canada … I'd have taken my Bermudas myself.'

Lauren ignored his sarcasm. ‘Their plan wasn't that bad … to hire native Indians as guides and to hunt food.'

‘And don't tell me … no one checked if the native Indians actually
wanted
to do this?'

‘Right. In fact, most of them mutinied. By that time, they were skin and bone. Their supplies ran out and they were down to eating lichen from the rocks to try and get some sustenance.'

‘
Lichen
,' Frank whistled. ‘That's a bit rough. Couldn't they shoot anything?'

‘I think they got the occasional deer, but I seem to remember most of their protein in the winter months came from a couple of wolf carcasses they found.'

‘Great stuff! Sucking the marrow out of a wolf carcass. Those guys were pretty macho, I guess.'

‘I suppose they were. But they were literally starving to death. At one point they were squeezing the maggots out of infested animal hides and eating them like grapes.'

‘So how did it wind up? Did they get to eating each other?'

‘Strangely enough, there's some evidence to suggest they did, at least some of the corpses showed signs of having been chopped about. There's no doubt that at least a couple of them went stark raving mad … they were shooting each other in the end.'

‘And Franklin? He survived?'

‘He survived the first expedition … that was the one where he ate his boots. When he got back he was a national hero, his book a bestseller, made for life. That was despite the fact that eleven of his expedition wound up dead.'

‘Wait a moment…' Sean was laughing in the dark. ‘I get the strangest feeling about this, but would I be right in thinking that after surviving that disaster by the skin of his boots, your jolly Mr Franklin went
back
to the Arctic and did it all over again?'

‘Uncannily, you're right,' Lauren confirmed, laughing herself now at Sean's infectious humour. ‘He did exactly that.'

‘Lauren?' Sean asked.

‘Uh-huh.'

‘How come all your national heroes screwed up? I haven't heard about a single one that didn't get themselves in all sorts of shit. Have you got one that, like, went out, completed the expedition and didn't have to eat his boots to survive?'

Lauren thought about this for a while, amused to realise as she sorted through her mental list of childhood heroes that Sean was pretty well right—the people the British admired the most
were
the ones who had got themselves into desperate predicaments.

‘It's not the getting into trouble I admire,' she told him after some thought, ‘it's the getting out of it.'

‘Amen to that,' Sean told her. ‘You get us out of this one, you can put your own name on the list.'

All was silent for a long while as they listened to Frank's unsteady breathing. He had fallen asleep near the end of the story.

‘You think I can do it?' Lauren whispered.

‘I reckon, but promise me one thing. If we get to the boot-eating stage, don't make me eat my own. Those babies stink like a couple of skunks crawled in there and died.'

75

‘You know what we should try?' Sean was sitting next to Lauren during one of the breaks. The team was shattered, spread around the ice, lifeless and despondent on this, the fourteenth day of the trek. Progress that day had been grotesquely slow, their pulling power reduced to just a few hundred metres before they were forced to rest.

‘No. Surprise me.'

‘We should rig up one of the flysheets and try to sail the sledge. This wind is running about twenty knots from the south, right? And this surface is the best we've seen … look at it, it's like marble here, we haven't crossed a crevasse or a sastrugi for miles.'

Lauren scrutinised the surface, shielding her eyes to look ahead, checking for the telltale wrinkles in the glacier surface which would indicate turbulence below.

‘Like Scott?' Lauren recalled the photographs from
Scott's Last Journey
, in which the British explorers had rigged a sail to help them manhaul.

‘Like almost everyone,' Sean told her. ‘Messner, Fiennes, they all made big gains using sails when the conditions were right.'

‘You think the flysheet can take it? We can't afford to rip one.'

‘I've been thinking about it,' Sean reassured her. ‘Those flysheets are guaranteed by the manufacturers to withstand a wind up to force ten or beyond. It's a brand-new tent without much wear and tear. Plus we can rig it in a way that will minimise the strain.'

‘What would you use for a mast?'

‘We don't need one. We'd attach it at two points to the front of the sledge and use it like a spinnaker.'

‘I'm warming to the idea,' Lauren told him. ‘Let's take a look at the fly.'

They unpacked the tent from the sledge and brought out the flysheet. Lauren ran the fabric through her fingers, trying to assess its strength.

‘If there's a danger point, it's at these attachments,' Sean pointed out, ‘but look how well it's been done. This is a thousand-dollar tent; it can take a lot of punishment.'

‘Will it have the pulling power to drag the sledge?'

‘Let's try it and see.'

Sean handed two of the guy ropes to Lauren and took the other two himself. He opened the flysheet to the wind, seeing with satisfaction that it plumped out smoothly in the air.

The pull was surprisingly strong, strong enough in fact that the two of them were immediately dragged forward several metres until Sean could collapse it again.

‘It can pull all right.' Lauren was astounded by the power the simple sail had exhibited. ‘But it could still break,' she worried. ‘How can we justify the risk?'