The Broken Lands (29 page)

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Authors: Robert Edric

BOOK: The Broken Lands
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“Not here,” Reid told him, listening intently. “Old ice has melted, but the upper, newer stuff is still intact.”
Around them, others approached the crack, and some began to prod at it cautiously with their staves. Reid warned them to hold off for fear of unsettling the ice upon which they stood.
Before planting his final charge, Goodsir called them all together and listened to their reports.
A quarter of a mile to the west, one man said, there were holes in the surface of the ice through which a fountain of fine spray occasionally rose.
Elsewhere, further submerged channels had been located, none
so obvious, so broad or so deep as the one upon which they were presently working, but all of them running in the same general direction toward the ships.
“A balloon,” Goodsir said unexpectedly. “Just imagine what we might learn if we possessed a balloon for purposes of observation.” He looked up into the pale sky as he spoke, and many around him did the same.
Knowing that little would be achieved by firing his final charge to extend the openings of the first two, he led them all back to a point midway between the first explosion and the ships.
“I intend to conduct an experiment,” he told Gore and Reid. “A considerably larger explosion in much deeper, immovable ice.”
“To what purpose?” Gore asked him.
Goodsir considered his answer. “So that we might not be fooled by our successes so far, and so that we might not be deceived by the apparent ease with which we are about to make our escape.” He spoke in a low voice so that none of the others might hear him.
“Is that wise?” Gore said.
“I believe it is. What have we achieved this morning other than to blast useless cracks into already weakened ice? Cracks which will in all likelihood disappear before we get within a mile of them in the
Erebus.”
Choosing a point on the ice beneath which nothing was visible, Goodsir called for several men to dig out a much deeper hole, and as they did this he explained to the others what he was doing. Some of them responded as Gore had done, complaining that the powder was being used to no practical effect, and Goodsir repeated what he had told Gore, convincing some, but leaving many unhappy at such a wasted and pessimistic conclusion to an otherwise encouraging morning’s work. He reassured them by pointing out that for another month at least the natural dissolution of the ice from the south would continue at a faster rate than they themselves might be able to blast a path through it.
The men digging the hole called to him that they were finished.
This time he packed twenty-four pounds of powder into the space, leaving most of it in its waxed packets, and tipping it loose
from one of their small kegs to ensure that every gap was filled. Others helped him pack the shattered ice over this, only leaving him as he took an augur and drilled a clear passage for the fuse, which he inserted and then withdrew several times until he was satisfied it was properly placed. Having lit it, he warned them about the likely extent of the blast and the weight of ice it would throw up, and they waited with their arms ready to cover their faces.
He counted confidently to thirty, and then more slowly and quietly to forty. When this was passed he added a further ten silent seconds before slapping his hands together and cursing. Around him men rose to their feet. He silenced their inquiries and told those who had started to move forward to stay where they were. Each second which now passed seemed to reaffirm an ill-judged decision, proof that he should not have attempted this last wasted effort.
It was as he was about to address them again that the explosion eventually came, catching them all unawares, throwing some off their feet, buckling the ice upon which they stood, and stinging their exposed faces with its force and with the needles of ice it blasted through them.
Pushing himself up from where he had fallen, Goodsir turned to see the pall of rising smoke, solid and dark as a graveyard yew, rise high into the air above them. This time men ran clear of the cascade of falling ice, abandoning their tools and sledges.
Gore called for them to remain where they were, but few heard him and he did not repeat the command.
They waited for a response from the ice. None came. All the explosion had achieved was to blow a crater twelve feet wide by six feet deep, and leave this half-filled with steaming black water.
Goodsir, Gore and Reid remained standing over this, but the others, having looked briefly into the dirty hole, muttered derogatory comments upon it, and some upon the man who had caused it, and resumed their journey back to the ships.
T
he
Erebus
floated free on the 25th of August. Streaks and patches of open water had appeared throughout the previous week, and during the past few days the surface ice had fractured and broken loose, lubricated by the hidden surges all around them. Most of these new fissures were as narrow and as short as the one which had appeared beneath the
Erebus
’ stern, but some, particularly those in the direction of the plain beyond the encampment, were considerably larger, and in places too wide for a man to leap with any certainty.
Due east of the camp, the ice ruptured in massive blocks and created tremors which shook both ships. It ground together in a confusion of angles and shapes, swallowing new and exposing old ice. Pieces ran in opposing directions, collided and continued to press over one another until they rose in islands of rubble which looked as though they had been cast down from above. Depressions appeared like the one in which the frozen narwhals had been exposed, and in the distance, visible to them only when the sun was low, a succession of pillars and slabs rose into being which looked to them all like the giant standing stones of some ancient circle, abandoned by its heathen priests and worshipers, but confident now in its rebirth of their return.
“The temple of Asgard?” Goodsir remarked, as he, Fitzjames and Reid walked in the direction of this recent creation, not intending to reach it, but to find out for Gore if the conditions were favorable
for him to take a photograph of the unusual features before it collapsed or was shaken down.
“Who was Asgard?” Fitzjames asked.
“I’m not entirely certain if it was a who,” Goodsir said. “Asgard was—is, perhaps—the Norse citadel of warm zephyrs and brilliant light.”
“On the other hand,” Reid said, “it might just as easily be Niflheim.” His back was to them, but Fitzjames could imagine the grin on his face.
“And Niflheim,” Goodsir explained with a flourish of his good hand, “was the name given to the howling wasteland of unending darkness and ice hung over with the stench of death.”
This caused them all to pause for a moment and look toward their distant goal.
“And they believed that both these places existed?” Fitzjames said.
“There are still nonexistent islands on the Admiralty charts less than two hundred miles off our own shore, James. What do
we
believe?”
The dock around the
Erebus
had been fully excavated a week earlier, and work now concentrated on exploring weaknesses in the ice at her prow. She would try to move forward like a mole through the earth, forcing her own path, and keeping around her only as much open water as she needed to remain afloat. It no longer mattered if the water behind her refroze, as long as she was able to continue pressing forward into the weakening pack ahead. Using her engine she made six runs into the ice, the last two of which finally caused the frozen surface to buckle ahead of her.
By the 8th of September they had pushed themselves a hundred yards and were a quarter of a mile distant from the
Terror
. Patchy floes sealed the gap between them and their crippled sister ship, and already she looked abandoned, awaiting only the retribution of the patient ice.
To those watching from the
Terror,
there could be no hope whatsoever of following along that same path.
The next day they made little progress, the ice ahead of them refusing to give way at their assault.
They retreated from this and turned several degrees to port. This proved more successful, and during the evening and night they were able to zig-zag a farther sixty yards toward the southwest, where they finally came within sight of Goodsir’s crater.
On the seventh morning of bulling the ice the
Erebus’
prow was damaged, and shortly afterward a small explosion finally put her over-taxed engine out of service.
They were all aware that soon the divide between summer and autumn would be crossed, and that the ice would then start to consolidate faster than they could dislodge it and pull it clear. Some argued that they had waited too long and should have started their escape attempt earlier in the summer, and some now believed that they ought to abandon it completely and start making preparations for a third winter. Some even proposed a partial disembarkation and a fast march to King William Land and beyond in the hope of making contact with someone who might then be able to return with them and rescue those left behind.
The ice ahead of them was explored on foot, but offered little encouragement. The leads Goodsir had earlier tried to exploit were still tantalizingly out of reach, and the intervening distance remained as solid and as little disturbed as any part of the frozen plain through which they had already come. Their boats might be hauled and eventually launched, but in the face of the approaching winter, the distance yet to travel, and the large number of men left behind, this too was unthinkable.
In the company of several others, Fitzjames returned across the ice to the
Terror
. They walked largely in silence, and were joined by others, small parties and individuals, all of whom had left the scene of their labors to pass on the news of what had happened to those left behind. Signal flares were exchanged and men used firearms to communicate with each other.
With Fitzjames went Goodsir, returning to see Stanley about his thumb, the pain from which had grown steadily worse over the previous
few days, and who was now convinced that there was no alternative but for the remaining infected joints to be amputated.
Midway between the two ships they encountered the walking sick and wounded from the
Terror
, these few men stumbling and crawling toward them like the exhausted survivors of some other, more distant catastrophe, and as the two parties met in the fading light the strong helped the weak and they exchanged their news and then speculated upon this until it was difficult to decide who had suffered the worse—those left behind to watch as they were deserted and committed to their own failing resources, or those who had bloodied and exhausted themselves in trying to get away.
Fitzjames and Goodsir helped up a man who had fallen at their feet and half-carried, half-dragged him until others came forward to share the burden. Relieved of their load, the two men paused to recover their own strength and to look around them at the ships and the camp, and to watch as countless lanterns and torches were one by one extinguished and the darkness became complete.
O
nly Philip Reddington, about to stand down from his dawn-watch duty, was on deck when the ice which abutted the
Terror’
s hull, and which had so far held her firm, began to quake. Even as he ran to give warning, the ice came free in increasingly larger slabs and these then ground against the ship and shifted along her keel. She was rocked and shaken, and everyone still aboard her was either thrown from their beds or knocked off their feet. Before anyone could leave her she tilted forward along her full length, sending everything loose upon the deck spilling forward into a mound; her fore-top and yard were shattered, bringing down her topsail and rigging and leaving this hanging in a tangle of loose rope and canvas. For several minutes all that could be heard was the ship’s groaning at some unseen pressure, and then one by one her scupper pieces were forced up out of their mortices.
All the repair work on her bow was undone in a moment. The block of ice which lay half in and half out of her rose from its foundations and crushed up through her timbers and decking as though they were balsa, taking with it her bowsprit, jib and jib-yard, casting these out on to the ice and then swallowing them completely as a gap appeared beneath the rising block.
Crozier gave the order for her to be abandoned, and for those who had already left her and were running in all directions to go back and help the surgeons take off the sick and the injured. Many were at first reluctant to return, but as the ice gradually subsided a
chain was formed along her port bow and the sick-quarters were evacuated.
Those who could walk were wrapped against the cold and then led away along the line of men. Those who could not were manhandled over the side in makeshift slings and stretchers and then carried to the
Erebus.
This evacuation lasted an hour, during which the
Terror
continued to shake where she sat. Ropes were fastened along her deck to help men move more easily on the tilted and cluttered surface. The last of her boats was released, lowered to the ice and dragged away.
By then it was dusk and several fires were lit using timber from the wreckage. All around them the ice continued to move in the darkness, one minute flowing like the waves of a turning tide, and the next crushing and swallowing its blocks as though an earthquake were taking place directly beneath them.
Once all the men had been rescued an attempt was made to recover their stores. Some of these had already been lost when the
Terror’
s stern had risen, spilling several tons of loose coal into the spaces in the ice, followed by the cases of food from which the sick were being fed.
Seeing how little was being achieved by scrabbling around on the sloping deck for the stores which remained lodged there, Fitzjames called for everyone to concentrate their efforts on rescuing the larger stocks mounded below. By some good fortune, few of these had been lost, the ice beneath them having so far remained stable, but barely an hour later, when less than a third of these had been removed and handed along the chain of men toward the
Erebus
, the ice began to buckle and tilt again. The
Terror’
s bow opened up completely and her doubling and the foremost of her spars were torn out.
Standing at a safe distance from the crushed hull, Fitzjames tried to estimate how much they had lost. He regretted that they had been forced to salvage the stores indiscriminately, throwing from hand to hand everything which came within reach.
He held a lantern, and by its dim light he was able to peer into the
Terror’
s open bow. The foremast base had been exposed, surrounded by fingers of splintered decking. Clothes and furniture lay
spilled all around. A white shirt had caught on a nail and flapped in the darkness like a vigorously waving man.
Another rising groan drew his attention to the
Terror’
s stern, and he watched as she was lifted several feet higher, shaking along her full length as her keel and rudder were exposed. He knew that soon the keel would be weakened and then broken under the pressure of the ice rising beneath it, and that when this happened she would be snapped in half as easily as a toy and lost to them completely.
She hung above the ice for a moment, and then suddenly sagged, coming finally to rest with her deck tilted toward him. He heard her masts and yards straining against their stays and he heard too the distinctive noise made by hemp ropes the thickness of a man’s arm parting as cleanly as though someone had taken a blade to them.
He was joined where he stood and watched all this by Gore and Vesconte.
Gore spoke to him, but he could make out little of what he said above the rising wind and the noise of the ice. They motioned for him to leave with them and return to the safety of the
Erebus
. They too held lanterns and lifted them to look into the broken hull, becoming as mesmerized as he had been by the exposed innards and by the realization of how quickly and easily the reinforced structure had been opened up and then squeezed into a useless mass of timber, good now only for fuel, and the greatest part of that beyond retrieval.
The three men stood together several minutes longer before leaving.
Debris lay in a broad sweep between the two ships, and they followed this back to the
Erebus,
passing the few stragglers who remained out in the open.
 
On November the 3rd James Fairholme, delirious and suffering as acutely as ever, fell from his bed and was racked by his most severe fit yet.
Stanley called for help to restrain him and then diagnosed the violent spasm as an attack of
grand mal.
Goodsir agreed with this, and together they lifted the sedated Fairholme back onto his bed,
where they fastened leather straps across his arms, chest and shins, careful not to bruise any further the skin which already barely covered his bones.
He came round several hours later, rational and calm after his convulsions, and calling for Stanley he told him that he had gone blind as a result of his seizure.
Stanley examined his eyes, and said that he believed the injury was only temporary and that his vision would return.
Fairholme made no objection to the straps which restrained him, but complained that his chest ached where the broadest of them held him down. Stanley adjusted this, noticing as he did so that new weals had appeared along the line of Fairholme’s ribs, suggesting that some had been fractured as a result of his fall. He bathed and dressed these before bandaging his eyes. He knew that Fairholme was aware of his uncertainty regarding his lost sight, and hoped that he did not misinterpret his remarks as a deliberate deceit. To Goodsir, Stanley confided his surprise that Fairholme had endured his injuries and suffering for so long while other men who had suffered for only a fraction of that time had continually complained of their pain and demanded to have it alleviated at every opportunity and by any means available.
Neither man could be certain if Fairholme’s blindness was a direct consequence of his fit, or simply a further stage in the grisly progress of the disease from which he was suffering. He now weighed less than five stone, could not stand unaided, and on some days could barely raise his head to acknowledge whoever had gone in to sit with him and keep him company. Every joint in his body was swollen, and all his hair and most of his teeth had fallen out. It was not uncommon for both Stanley and Goodsir to pause each morning before entering to treat him in the expectation of finding him dead.
He became delirious again two days later, demanding to know why he had been taken out on the ice and why this had been laid in slabs upon him. He demanded to speak to Franklin, and then to know why his eyes had been bound, what it was they were trying to prevent him from seeing.
There was nothing they could do for him except wait for the
rigors of his delirium to subside and protect him from inflicting any further physical harm upon himself.
A week later even his short periods of rationality ceased, and he recognized no one who visited him, railing viciously against them for what was happening to him. He began to bleed uncontrollably from almost every orifice—his ears, nose, mouth and rectum—and the next day, after a further violent seizure during which he called repeatedly for his wife and children, he died, falling suddenly silent, his entire body straining in a painful curve before collapsing and finally settling in a succession of gentle waves which caused his bloody wasted corpse to tremble in its straps.
Goodsir was with him when this happened, and realizing what he was witnessing, he called for Stanley and Fitzjames. Others arrived with them, and upon silently acknowledging that Fairholme was beyond their help, they all assisted in unfastening his body, covering it with a clean sheet and then lifting it from the bed, all of them shocked by the looseness of his bones and the way in which it felt as though they were holding these in their hands without the intervening comfort of flesh or skin or sheet.
“James Walter Fairholme,” Fitzjames said over the shrouded corpse, the rhythm and solidity of the names a solemn litany, enlivened only by the affection with which they were spoken.
They left as Stanley prepared the body for removal onto the ice, knowing that its eventual interment would prove difficult, if not impossible, while the ice remained so unpredictable and uneven all around them.
Goodsir suggested that it should be taken and placed in one of the cabins of the abandoned
Terror
until those final arrangements could be made. They were all agreed upon this, and afterward all their corpses were disposed of in this manner.
 
For six weeks following the loss of the
Terror
, the surrounding plain shook only to the reverberations of distant and largely unseen disturbances, and despite their surprise at this movement so late in the year, they were well prepared for these smaller shocks and able to protect themselves from them.
This peaceful interlude ended on the 14th of December with a sudden tremor which caught them all by surprise, especially the men in Tozer’s camp, where it struck most violently, and particularly those who were out on the ice when it came.
Four men were returning to the shelters from their store when a crevasse opened up directly ahead of them, tilting the ice and knocking them off their feet. Others emerged to see what was happening. The crevasse stopped opening, and the block of ice upon which the men had fallen came to rest at a gentle slope. They rose and continued back to the shelters, jumping over the low steps and ridges which had appeared on the surrounding surface.
As they approached the shelters the ice moved again, this time opening directly beneath them and forcing them back to the ground.
At the first indication of the tremors, men had also come out of the
Erebus,
and all eyes were on the distant figures. Some ran to where the four men had fallen and could no longer be seen.
A second fissure had opened up, its two lips drawing apart as it extended in length. One of its edges had tilted upward, and it was this which hid the men from view. They had fallen into the space created beneath them, but rather than find themselves dropping helplessly into the depths of a widening chasm, their fall was broken only four feet down by a broad ledge, beneath which the fissure was no more than a foot wide. Only the surface layer of ice had been disturbed by the tremors, and that beneath was holding fast.
The first of the men pulled himself free, signaled to those running toward him that he was unhurt, and then knelt to help the second man out of the trench.
The remaining two stood where the buried shelf was at its deepest, ready to edge their way along the platform and await their own turn to be pulled clear. Both were aware that the fissure was still opening up away from them and that it might suddenly become much wider beneath their feet.
By then the first two men had climbed clear and a small group had gathered around them, some with ropes, which they threw across the sloping ice to the others.
As the two men in the ice fastened the ropes around their chests
the opening began to move in on them, and everyone urged them to hurry, directing them along the shelf to where the drop beneath them was less sheer. The men edged sideways, panicked by this resumption of the tremors. As they did so, the ice upon which their rescuers stood fractured into several large pieces. Men ran in all directions, abandoning the ropes as they stumbled clear.
The pieces of broken ice settled back into place, and one of the two trapped men let out a scream. He slipped from his foothold, and although the chasm had still not opened up beneath him, he was now on his knees in the narrowest part of the fissure, its sides against both his shoulders. The other tried to help him up, but it was difficult to maneuver in the confined space, and he shouted for those above to retrieve the ropes and begin pulling them out. Then he too stopped shouting and suddenly screamed.
The men above scrambled over the tilted rim of loose ice to see what had happened. Some took up the ropes and hauled on them, but one of these was now trapped between two pieces of ice, and the other flew out of the crevasse and caused the men pulling on it to fall in a line on the unstable surface.

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