The Worst Journey in the World (45 page)

To do seven miles in a day, a distance which had taken us nearly a week
in the past, was very heartening. The temperature was between -20° and
-30° all day, and that was good too. When crossing the undulations which
ran down out of the mountain into the true pressure ridges on our right
we found that the wind which came down off the mountain struck along the
top of the undulation, and flowing each way, caused a N.E. breeze on one
side and a N.W. breeze on the other. There seemed to be wind in the sky,
and the blizzard had not cleared as far away as we should have wished.

During the time through which we had come it was by burning more oil than
is usually allowed for cooking that we kept going at all. After each meal
was cooked we allowed the primus to burn on for a while and thus warmed
up the tent. Then we could nurse back our frozen feet and do any
necessary little odd jobs. More often we just sat and nodded for a few
minutes, keeping one another from going too deeply to sleep. But it was
running away with the oil. We started with 6 one-gallon tins (those tins
Scott had criticized), and we had now used four of them. At first we said
we must have at least two one-gallon tins with which to go back; but by
now our estimate had come down to one full gallon tin, and two full
primus lamps. Our sleeping-bags were awful. It took me, even as early in
the journey as this, an hour of pushing and thumping and cramp every
night to thaw out enough of mine to get into it at all. Even that was not
so bad as lying in them when we got there.

Only -35° but "a very bad night" according to my diary. We got away in
good time, but it was a ghastly day and my nerves were quivering at the
end, for we could not find that straight and narrow way which led between
the crevasses on either hand. Time after time we found we were out of our
course by the sudden fall of the ground beneath our feet—in we went and
then—"are we too far right?"—nobody knows—"well let's try nearer in to
the mountain," and so forth! "By hard slogging 2¾ miles this
morning—then on in thick gloom which suddenly lifted and we found
ourselves under a huge great mountain of pressure ridge looking black in
shadow. We went on, bending to the left, when Bill fell and put his arm
into a crevasse. We went over this and another, and some time after got
somewhere up to the left, and both Bill and I put a foot into a crevasse.
We sounded all about and everywhere was hollow, and so we ran the sledge
down over it and all was well."
^[145]
Once we got right into the pressure
and took a longish time to get out again. Bill lengthened his trace out
with the Alpine rope now and often afterwards so he found the crevasses
well ahead of us and the sledge: nice for us but not so nice for Bill.
Crevasses in the dark
do
put your nerves on edge.

When we started next morning (July 15) we could see on our left front and
more or less on top of us the Knoll, which is a big hill whose
precipitous cliffs to seaward form Cape Crozier. The sides of it sloped
down towards us, and pressing against its ice-cliffs on ahead were miles
and miles of great pressure ridges, along which we had travelled, and
which hemmed us in. Mount Terror rose ten thousand feet high on our left,
and was connected with the Knoll by a great cup-like drift of
wind-polished snow. The slope of this in one place runs gently out on to
the corridor along which we had sledged, and here we turned and started
to pull our sledges up. There were no crevasses, only the great drift of
snow, so hard that we used our crampons just as though we had been on
ice, and as polished as the china sides of a giant cup which it
resembled. For three miles we slogged up, until we were only 150 yards
from the moraine shelf where we were going to build our hut of rocks and
snow. This moraine was above us on our left, the twin peaks of the Knoll
were across the cup on our right; and here, 800 feet up the mountain
side, we pitched our last camp.

We had arrived.

What should we call our hut? How soon could we get our clothes and bags
dry? How would the blubber stove work? Would the penguins be there? "It
seems too good to be true, 19 days out. Surely seldom has any one been so
wet; our bags hardly possible to get into, our wind-clothes just frozen
boxes. Birdie's patent balaclava is like iron—it is wonderful how our
cares have vanished."
^[146]

It was evening, but we were so keen to begin that we went straight up to
the ridge above our camp, where the rock cropped out from the snow. We
found that most of it was
in situ
but that there were plenty of
boulders, some gravel, and of course any amount of the icy snow which
fell away below us down to our tent, and the great pressure about a mile
beyond. Between us and that pressure, as we were to find out afterwards,
was a great ice-cliff. The pressure ridges, and the Great Ice Barrier
beyond, were at our feet; the Ross Sea edge but some four miles away. The
Emperors must be somewhere round that shoulder of the Knoll which hides
Cape Crozier itself from our view.

Our scheme was to build an igloo with rock walls, banked up with snow,
using a nine-foot sledge as a ridge beam, and a large sheet of green
Willesden canvas as a roof. We had also brought a board to form a lintel
over the door. Here with the stove, which was to be fed with blubber from
the penguins, we were to have a comfortable warm home whence we would
make excursions to the rookery perhaps four miles away. Perhaps we would
manage to get our tent down to the rookery itself and do our scientific
work there on the spot, leaving our nice hut for a night or more. That is
how we planned it.

That same night "we started to dig in under a great boulder on the top of
the hill, hoping to make this a large part of one of the walls of the
hut, but the rock came close underneath and stopped us. We then chose a
moderately level piece of moraine about twelve feet away, and just under
the level of the top of the hill, hoping that here in the lee of the
ridge we might escape a good deal of the tremendous winds which we knew
were common. Birdie gathered rocks from over the hill, nothing was too
big for him; Bill did the banking up outside while I built the wall with
the boulders. The rocks were good, the snow, however, was blown so hard
as to be practically ice; a pick made little impression upon it, and the
only way was to chip out big blocks gradually with the small shovel. The
gravel was scanty, but good when there was any. Altogether things looked
very hopeful when we turned in to the tent some 150 yards down the slope,
having done about half one of the long walls."
^[147]

The view from eight hundred feet up the mountain was magnificent and I
got my spectacles out and cleared the ice away time after time to look.
To the east a great field of pressure ridges below, looking in the
moonlight as if giants had been ploughing with ploughs which made furrows
fifty or sixty feet deep: these ran right up to the Barrier edge, and
beyond was the frozen Ross Sea, lying flat, white and peaceful as though
such things as blizzards were unknown. To the north and north-east the
Knoll. Behind us Mount Terror on which we stood, and over all the grey
limitless Barrier seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague,
ponderous, a breeding-place of wind and drift and darkness. God! What a
place!

"There was now little moonlight or daylight, but for the next forty-eight
hours we used both to their utmost, being up at all times by day and
night, and often working on when there was great difficulty in seeing
anything; digging by the light of the hurricane lamp. By the end of two
days we had the walls built, and banked up to one or two feet from the
top; we were to fit the roof cloth close before banking up the rest. The
great difficulty in banking was the hardness of the snow, it being
impossible to fill in the cracks between the blocks which were more like
paving-stones than anything else. The door was in, being a triangular
tent doorway, with flaps which we built close in to the walls, cementing
it with snow and rocks. The top folded over a plank and the bottom was
dug into the ground."
^[148]

Birdie was very disappointed that we could not finish the whole thing
that day: he was nearly angry about it, but there was a lot to do yet and
we were tired out. We turned out early the next morning (Tuesday 18th) to
try and finish the igloo, but it was blowing too hard. When we got to
the top we did some digging but it was quite impossible to get the roof
on, and we had to leave it. We realized that day that it blew much harder
at the top of the slope than where our tent was. It was bitterly cold up
there that morning with a wind force 4-5 and a minus thirty temperature.

The oil question was worrying us quite a lot. We were now well in to the
fifth of our six tins, and economizing as much as possible, often having
only two hot meals a day. We had to get down to the Emperor penguins
somehow and get some blubber to run the stove which had been made for us
in the hut. The 19th being a calm fine day we started at 9.30, with an
empty sledge, two ice-axes, Alpine rope, harnesses and skinning tools.

Wilson had made this journey through the Cape Crozier pressure ridges
several times in the Discovery days. But then they had daylight, and they
had found a practicable way close under the cliffs which at the present
moment were between us and the ridges.

As we neared the bottom of the mountain slope, farther to the north than
we had previously gone, we had to be careful about crevasses, but we soon
hit off the edge of the cliff and skirted along it until it petered out
on the same level as the Barrier. Turning left handed we headed towards
the sea-ice, knowing that there were some two miles of pressure between
us and Cape Crozier itself. For about half a mile it was fair going,
rounding big knobs of pressure but always managing to keep more or less
on the flat and near the ice-cliff which soon rose to a very great height
on our left. Bill's idea was to try and keep close under this cliff,
along that same Discovery way which I have mentioned above. They never
arrived there early enough for the eggs in those days; the chicks were
hatched. Whether we should now find any Emperors, and if so whether they
would have any eggs, was by no means certain.

However, we soon began to get into trouble, meeting several crevasses
every few yards, and I have no doubt crossing scores of others of which
we had no knowledge. Though we hugged the cliffs as close as possible we
found ourselves on the top of the first pressure ridge, separated by a
deep gulf from the ice-slope which we wished to reach. Then we were in a
great valley between the first and second ridges: we got into huge heaps
of ice pressed up in every shape on every side, crevassed in every
direction: we slithered over snow-slopes and crawled along drift ridges,
trying to get in towards the cliffs. And always we came up against
impossible places and had to crawl back. Bill led on a length of Alpine
rope fastened to the toggle of the sledge; Birdie was in his harness also
fastened to the toggle, and I was in my harness fastened to the rear of
the sledge, which was of great use to us both as a bridge and a ladder.

Two or three times we tried to get down the ice-slopes to the
comparatively level road under the cliff, but it was always too great a
drop. In that dim light every proportion was distorted; some of the
places we actually did manage to negotiate with ice-axes and Alpine rope
looked absolute precipices, and there were always crevasses at the bottom
if you slipped. On the way back I did slip into one of these and was
hauled out by the other two standing on the wall above me.

We then worked our way down into the hollow between the first and second
large pressure ridges, and I believe on to the top of the second. The
crests here rose fifty or sixty feet. After this I don't know where we
went. Our best landmarks were patches of crevasses, sometimes three or
four in a few footsteps. The temperatures were lowish (-37°), it was
impossible for me to wear spectacles, and this was a tremendous
difficulty to me and handicap to the party: Bill would find a crevasse
and point it out; Birdie would cross; and then time after time, in trying
to step over or climb over on the sledge, I put my feet right into the
middle of the cracks. This day I went well in at least six times; once,
when we were close to the sea, rolling into and out of one and then down
a steep slope until brought up by Birdie and Bill on the rope.

We blundered along until we got into a great cul-de-sac which probably
formed the end of the two ridges, where they butted on to the sea-ice. On
all sides rose great walls of battered ice with steep snow-slopes in
the middle, where we slithered about and blundered into crevasses. To the
left rose the huge cliff of Cape Crozier, but we could not tell whether
there were not two or three pressure ridges between us and it, and though
we tried at least four ways, there was no possibility of getting forward.

And then we heard the Emperors calling.

Their cries came to us from the sea-ice we could not see, but which must
have been a chaotic quarter of a mile away. They came echoing back from
the cliffs, as we stood helpless and tantalized. We listened and realized
that there was nothing for it but to return, for the little light which
now came in the middle of the day was going fast, and to be caught in
absolute darkness there was a horrible idea. We started back on our
tracks and almost immediately I lost my footing and rolled down a slope
into a crevasse. Birdie and Bill kept their balance and I clambered back
to them. The tracks were very faint and we soon began to lose them.
Birdie was the best man at following tracks that I have ever known, and
he found them time after time. But at last even he lost them altogether
and we settled we must just go ahead. As a matter of fact, we picked them
up again, and by then were out of the worst: but we were glad to see the
tent.