In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic (14 page)

 

 

These last few days, there has been no end of squabbling about the kayaks: always the same refrain. The men seem impervious to any form of reasoning, as if they have forgotten that every step brings them closer to the island. There is only a short distance left. It is not the difficulty of the route, the privations, or the hunger that are at the source of their discontent, but simply a kind of mental laziness that is paralyzing their physical efforts. I have again explained my intentions to them, in my calmest tone of voice, and I did not allow myself to be drawn into any sort of discussion. Those who do not wish to accept my decisions are free to go wherever they like.

We set off today with those words ringing in their ears. The route was bearable at first, even if rather heavily crevassed, but later conditions became very rough, with huge ridges of ice barring our path. Despite these countless obstacles, we managed to cover eight miles today, in two stages. This forced march brought us so much closer to the island and now we are filled with the enchanting hope of reaching land tomorrow evening. This prospect brought me peace of mind and contentment, feelings impossible to describe.

What is more, the weather has been superb. The sun was so warm that we had to take off our outer garments and caps. In the deathly silence, we could clearly see the snow melting and hear water gurgling and bubbling, trapped beneath the surface of the ice. The sunlight was so strong that our eyes felt very painful. The island seemed within arm’s reach, bathed in the bright light. No hunting today: There were no open leads, and in any case there were no seals. All we saw was a walrus basking in the sun, but it was immediately frightened off as we approached. We have never managed to take these animals by surprise and that is why I fail to understand Nansen’s story about frequently encountering walruses that were so tame and lazy that he had to poke them with his ski pole to make them move into a position where they could be photographed.

We continued until eleven-thirty at night, resting for two hours in the middle of the day. Our only food was the remains of the dried bear meat, spiced with meat extract. We have only two pounds left. We pitched our tent, hopeful that we would see all our wishes granted the following day.

 

 

Our rosy dreams of imminent salvation suddenly vanished when, on awakening, we were confronted by a desperate situation. One hundred yards ahead of us was the steep frozen wall of a formidable glacier, stretching from west to east as far as the eye could see, roughly ninety feet high, rising almost perpendicular to the sea, of a pure pale blue and as smooth as if it had been sliced through with a knife. Above the wall was the concave, moon-shaped surface that I had noticed long before through my spyglass, and whose enigmatic aspect had always puzzled me.

We had actually reached the western tip of the island on the twenty-third, and only a low-lying cape separated us from it, at a distance of a quarter mile at the most. But an impassable barrier of growlers stopped us short: It was impossible to go on under such conditions. And another problem was the apathy of my companions. The closer we came to the island, the more unbearable their attitude became. They dragged their feet instead of striding bravely forward; they cursed each other constantly and lazed about for long periods on the ground. There was little I could do to rouse them; they remained utterly indifferent to my pleas and seemed to have lost all interest in our future plans. They lay there staring at the sky, and had I not persisted in jolting them out of their immobility they would have been capable of staying twenty-four hours in the same place and in the same state.

The ice that separated us from the island consisted of closely packed floes, but it was very unsafe wherever we looked; we could only proceed slowly and with great caution. The low-lying cape did not have any glaciers. Then suddenly the sea began to heave and the ice started to move. Unfortunately, a fresh southerly wind picked up from the cape and quickly rose into a gale. On vast pack ice there would have been no danger because the wind would have dropped fairly quickly and the ice would have compacted again under the influence of the tides and change in wind direction. But our ice floe was only about twenty-four feet in diameter, and in a matter of seconds the entire situation changed dramatically. A huge gap of at least half a mile suddenly separated us from our companions who were on another floe, and the expanse of water between us grew wider before our very eyes. The gale was driving the ice to the northeast at an alarming speed. As we drifted on the open water now, waves smashed onto our disintegrating ice floe and drenched us with spray. Faced with this imminent danger, we tried to reunite the party by kayaking across the open water, but our efforts were futile. Our kayaks seemed like uncontrollable logs; huge waves swamped them and jagged chunks of ice threatened to pierce their fragile hulls. The cape quickly disappeared from sight and the wave-driven expanse of water grew ever wider from east to west. The wall of the glacier that had only recently been so close had now moved far to the south. We were in a pitiful strait. In our helplessness we could do nothing but wrap ourselves in our sails and seek some comfort in sleep, even though the floe we were crouched on might break up from one moment to the next. We were left to suffer the dark forces of destiny.

Toward evening the gale abated, and at eleven o’clock the tide washed the ice up against the island once again; but we were still eight nautical miles from the low-lying cape. At least our four companions who had been cut off from us previously were able to reach us again. We felt like rats in a trap at that point, besieged by ice floes; the cape, our hope of salvation, had disappeared, and directly in front of us rose the insurmountable wall of the glacier, which not even a monkey could have scaled.

Some biscuits and hot water gave us a modicum of strength after this frightening adventure, but we were all very weak, and no less worried about the depletion of our supplies: All we have left are six pounds of biscuit, half a pound of meat extract, and two pounds of salt. What use will that be to so many people after such a terrible ordeal?

Seals and polar bears have completely disappeared and we cannot bring down any birds, since those scoundrels have deprived us of our only shotgun. This latest complication makes my blood boil. I find myself left to my own devices, for there is nothing to be gained from my comrades. They surrendered long ago!

To crown it all, my health seems to be failing; for several days now I have felt nauseated and am suffering from heart palpitations.

 

 

 

I had to neglect my diary for two full days because I had neither the time nor the peace and quiet I needed to record my many impressions of the last forty-eight hours. I also had more urgent tasks to perform, as all responsibility rests upon my shoulders.

Thank God our situation has clearly improved. I have just reread my notes written on June 25 and relived the desperate predicament we had found ourselves in. Within sight of salvation, our courage had faltered at the last minute; we became incapable of imagining that ahead of us a door would open to safety, and once we crossed its threshold all our fears would fade like a bad dream.

After that critical evening our circumstances improved, although at the time we had not yet perceived the miracle that had been visited on us.

For here we are, all safe and sound, on the solid ground of an island. What a strange sensation to know that we are out of danger, after spending two years on a heaving ice pack, in storms and cold, threatened by countless perils! And all this is real, it is not a mirage; we can see land, stones, moss! We have been able to calm our hunger pangs and feel more than sated. Twenty-seven big, plump eider ducks are dangling from our skis, waiting to go in the pot. Since we made landfall, two days ago, we have eaten more than two hundred eider eggs, and a plentiful supply of them is piled up nearby. Our hunters are out looking for new bounty and fetching more eggs.

Now I shall relate how it all came about.

On the twenty-fifth, as our situation had suddenly grown much worse and we were so close to despair, I no longer dared hope for any improvement. There remained no other alternative than to try to reach the low-lying cape, roughly five nautical miles to the east, and to force a passage with our kayaks through the savagely broken ice—even though I did not think it possible—or to stay put and inevitably starve to death. I gave our dilemma endless thought.

Then suddenly I had another idea about our possible salvation. I began carefully to inspect the steep, icy wall of the glacier, secretly hoping to find a possible route up it, or to discover what actually lay behind it. And indeed, after a long search, I found, not far away, a passage that might save us.

There was a crack in the ice face about two meters wide, from the top to the bottom of the wall; it did not look recent and had drifted full of snow, not unlike a steep gully. I began cutting steps with an ax and then, for handholds, we rammed harpoons into the ice wall. Our undertaking was successful and we were able to reach the top of this daunting obstacle. With great difficulty we managed to bring our sledges and kayaks to the foot of this improvised ladder and drag them slowly up the glacier along with all our worldly possessions. No sooner was our last kayak safely on the top than the floe we had just left broke up and drifted away from the island. It hardly mattered then, of course, but it had been an extremely close call. One can imagine my feelings as I gazed down on the shifting pack ice to which, only a brief moment before, we had been shackled, utterly at the mercy of its whims! For two years we had been inextricably bound to that white wilderness, to such a degree that there were times when we even forgot how frightening it could be. It was that same ice that had been our last link with the
Saint Anna,
currently two hundred miles away, and two and a half months behind us. Now we were leaving the realm of white death behind for good. No longer ruled by fear, when we gazed from the summit of the ice wall over the vast expanse of frozen ocean, we regarded it in an entirely different light. A miracle had delivered us from that icebound prison, and its mysterious power had been stripped of its terror. Already our years on the ice pack were fading from memory, as if they had somehow been a long dream. For now, despite all our misfortune, we were about to step onto the “land of deliverance.”

What a wide horizon was opened to our gaze from the top of the glacier! Near the island one could see open water, but the farther one’s eye ranged the less water was visible. Ice ridges and hummocks were lost in the distance and close-packed ice stretched into the horizon. Out there somewhere my companion Bayev had found his grave, searching for his “easy route.” Farther yet, the
Saint
Anna
lay locked in ice with her thirteen-man crew. The
Saint Anna
would go her way and we would go ours.

On the crest of the glacier wall itself, we prepared a nourishing soup with the rest of our meat extract, ate some biscuits, then hastened toward the cape that emerged from the sea to the west. There was no time to lose, as we had used up all our supplies, and had to rely on the luck of the hunt, something that we could only hope for once we had reached the cape. For on this glacier everything was as dead as on the moon, which in fact it had so closely resembled from afar.

I went ahead on skis with Lunayev, taking only a rifle and some cartridges. I advised the others to follow in our tracks without delay, hauling one kayak and a sledge. I left them with the reminder that any delay would be dangerous, as we had nothing to eat for the following day. But once again they paid little attention to my orders, although there was no way of knowing what unpleasant surprises might still be in store for us.

The surface of the glacier was as smooth as a mirror and covered with snow, permitting the sledge to glide easily across it. I had drawn the men’s attention to the dangerous crevasses that could be hidden beneath the snow, and had advised them to take great care, and to rope themselves together. I did the same with Lunayev, tying myself to him with 120 feet of rope. In order to probe for hidden crevasses, we removed the baskets at the tips of our ski poles. We moved quickly over the fog-covered glacier, crossing numerous crevasses, fortunately not very wide and therefore not dangerous.

The westward incline of the glacier was barely perceptible. A deathly silence hung over the landscape. The air was still and warm. There were no birds, and we saw no animal tracks on our solitary walk; the comparison of the glacier to the moon was perfect. Suddenly the slope grew steeper and soon the solid ground of the cape was at our feet. Greatly excited, as one can imagine, we accelerated our stride and hurried toward the valley. The spit of land protruding from the end of the cape advanced a good way into the sea, like a stone-covered shoal. There was snow in places, and water flowed into the sea in gurgling streams. We had left the glacier behind; terra firma was ours at last!

Our ears were buzzing, our poor eyes stinging. Our senses and our minds, at this unforgettable moment, were assailed by so many impressions that we thought we were living a fairy tale. And yet it was all true, everything was real! We had land beneath our feet, not shifting, drifting ice. Light and sound danced around us; we saw dappled sun-beams, and marvelous melodies fell on our ears. We often stumbled over stones, sank into swampy ground, or trod across soft and luxuriant moss. The silence of the frozen wilderness, occasionally broken by the strident cries of seagulls, had been replaced by a boisterous cacophony that was a joy to hear. Ringing echoes of Nature in all its exuberance resounded in our ears. We heard the calls of countless birds winging their way overhead, but our snow-blinded eyes were not able to see them. It was a profound chorus, the hymn of life and the hymn of existence. The voices of the different birds united in such a melodious symphony that we almost wondered whether this marvelous concert was really coming from such winged animals.