Antarctica (29 page)

“P. G. Wodehouse made fun of that stuff all the time,” Jim mentioned as they started dessert, which consisted of immense chocolate bars and brandy. “That’s why he was so funny.”

“They were Woosters!” Jack exclaimed. “They were a bunch of Bertie Woosters on ice, without their Jeeves along to help them out.”

“It’s worse than that,” Jim said. “The Jeeveses were right there at hand being ignored—men like Bowers, or Crean, or Lashly—the able seamen from the working classes. Those guys were very very tough, and they almost managed to haul the toffs out of there despite everything. In fact that’s what Crean and Lashly did with Lieutenant Evans, on their retreat from the last depot.”

After Scott had taken five men to the Pole, as Jim now reminded them, there had only been three to return from the last depot, and for these three it had been a very close thing indeed. Lieutenant Evans had collapsed, a victim of scurvy, and seamen Crean and Lashly had had to haul him on their sledge five hundred miles back to Cape Evans, an ordeal that included emotional moments such as sticking the lieutenant’s frozen feet onto their exposed stomachs, right through clothing and the membrane of class itself, to save him from a fatal frostbite. Finally Crean, at the end of four months of a manhauling regime so intense that it killed everyone else who tried it except Lashly, hurried ahead for help, covering forty miles of the ice shelf and getting down its edge to Hut Point, in a push of thirty-four straight hours of walking.

“And in the end Bowers almost managed to do the
same for Wilson and Scott,” Jim added, “like he did for Wilson and Cherry-Garrard on the Winter Journey.”

Little Birdie Bowers, Val thought, remembering the spring trip to Cape Crozier. Henry Robert Bowers—never cold, never tired, never discouraged. But even he hadn’t been able to Jeeves his way out of that last trip. Worked into the ground like the poor knackered ponies, until he had died in his traces.

“No,” Jim insisted. “Bertie Woosters. And Scott the worst of them—the one who killed them. He’s the one who had the authority. He could have studied the problem, and figured out solutions. It’s not like the solutions weren’t there, because they were. But he couldn’t be bothered. And so he tipped the balance, from life to death.”

All through this conversation, this dissing duet, everyone had been eating, powering their spaghetti down and enjoying the rant for the tent entertainment it was, laughing even when they were waving chunks of garlic bread or shaking heads to mark their objections. And when Jack and Jim were done, and into their second mugs of brandy, Elspeth wiped their whole case away with a single sweep of a chocolate bar. “This is all just Huntford,” she said firmly. “You can’t take him seriously.”

Ta Shu looked interested in this; he had been following the whole conversation as if watching a sport he didn’t know, head swiveling this way and that, entertained but mystified. “What do you mean?” he asked Elspeth.

“All this anti-Scott stuff they’ve been giving us. It all comes from the Roland Huntford biography of Scott and Amundsen. It’s a good book in some ways, but it
should really have been called
Scott Was an Idiot
. It’s a five-hundred-page list of stupidities. But a lot of them are crazy.”

“What do you mean?” Jack challenged.

“I mean Huntford went overboard,” Elspeth said, with a steady look at Jack. Val saw that she didn’t like him either. “Sometimes he was right, but other times he was just making a case. He was the first writer to debunk the Scott myth, and he got so into it he turned into a prosecutor rather than a judge. Complaining that Scott had ambitions to be more than a torpedo lieutenant! I mean really. Or pretending it was Scott’s fault that he was given a bad ship. Or pretending that his men weren’t loyal to him. Or that England was so bad, and Norway such a virtuous little country, when at that time the Norwegians were out slaughtering the world’s whales to make their fortune and build their pretty towns.” She shook her head. “Huntford made everything black and white, and that’s not the way it was.”

Jim gulped a mouthful of brandy and choked a little, waving a hand at her. “Even if you discount Huntford—and I take your point about his book being extreme—you still have to admit that Scott was pretty comprehensively incompetent. That part is simply true.”

“Nothing is simply true,” Elspeth said. She liked Jim better than Jack, Val saw. “Cherry-Garrard didn’t think Scott was incompetent, and Cherry-Garrard was there.”

“He was biased.”

“So was Huntford.”

“But Cherry-Garrard was an apologist. He tied himself in knots to try to tell the truth and still protect Scott’s memory.”

Elspeth nodded. “His is a complicated book that
way. It has some of the grays in it, you see. That’s what makes it a great book. He tried to be honest. And all his best friends died in it, remember. And he was in the group that found their bodies the following spring. They were only eleven miles from the next depot, and it was Cherry-Garrard who had laid that depot the previous fall. He had had orders from Atkinson to lay it in that spot and turn back, and he was wrecked himself by then, so he obeyed the orders. But if he had gone on a little farther, and set the depot another fifteen miles farther out, the return party might have found it and gotten home okay. It was a possibility that haunted him all the rest of his life. He was a haunted man. The night they found the bodies he wrote in his journal, ‘I am afraid to go to sleep.’ And when he got back to England he was sent right into the trenches of World War I. He drove an ambulance and he saw it all. And then he got colitis and was sent home. And after that he wrote his book, and it took him years and years. It was the book of his life. And struggling with mental illness a lot of the time.”

Val, remembering the Ponting photo encased in the new display at Cape Crozier, said, “You can see that in the picture of the three of them after the Winter Journey.”

“Yes you can, can’t you? He looks quite mad. And in his later years, when he looked back on his time in the Antarctic, it was like looking back into another age. Into the time before the fall.”

Back when your friends were alive, Val thought. Back when your big brothers were alive. Bowers had been 28, Wilson 45; Cherry had been 22.

“But even he says Scott was moody,” Jim pointed out, “and a bad judge of character. Even when he was idealizing the whole experience, he had to say that.”

“That’s right. And I believe him when he says it, because he was there. But he was still intensely loyal to Scott, he still admired him despite the mistakes. And even more did he admire Wilson and Bowers, and they were Scott loyalists as well. You can’t take that away from Scott, no matter what Huntford said.”

Ta Shu turned from the stove, where he had started washing the dishes in a basin of steaming water. “Like Huxley,” he said.

They looked at him, nonplussed.

“Thomas Huxley?” Jim ventured.

“Al-dous Huxley. English explorer. Explorer of higher states of consciousness. Mescaline, LSD. He take LSD in last hours of his life, to see what would happen. Very brave! One of your great British explorers, like Scott or Shackleton. And in one of his books there is very profound scene. A man and a woman are in a hotel room, making love. Out their window there is a neon sign that changes colors, from red to green to red to green. Over and over. And that light comes in their window and falls on them. And when the red light is shining on them, all is rosy. Full of life. Mysterious and beautiful. And then the light change, and the green light shine on them, and all becomes ghastly and pale. Mechanical. Like a nightmare of insects. And the lights keep changing, back and forth, back and forth. Red to green to red. Lovers don’t know what to think.”

“Like Huntford and Cherry-Garrard,” Val said.

Ta Shu nodded.

Jack yukked: “Cherry red and Hunt green!”

“But it isn’t just a matter of interpretation,” Jim objected. “Some things happened and some things didn’t. And the point of history is first to try to determine what really happened, and not just tell lies about it. The heroic Scott is a lie, for the most part. When you really
look at what really happened—that’s when you get away from black and whites and into the grays. And then when you find something admirable, as Huntford did with Amundsen, and later with Shackleton, then it’s really worth your admiration. It’s a real accomplishment, rather than just lies and wishes.”

“Yes,” Elspeth said, “but Huntford went too far. I mean, to say that Scott made up Oates’s last words—how could he possibly know? He wasn’t in the tent.”

“No, but we have Oates’s diary. He was totally disgusted with Scott.”

“So? Do you think Scott would have lied about something like that? Say that Oates got up and said, ‘You bloody fool, you’ve doomed us all with your stupidity, and now I’m going to go out and kill myself because it’s obvious you want me out of the way’—Would Scott then have written down in his diary, ‘Oates said, “I am just going out and may be some time”’? What if the three men remaining had made it back, what then? Wilson and Bowers would have known it was a lie!”

“Neither of them mentioned the incident in their diaries,” Jim pointed out.

“That proves nothing. Wilson wasn’t even keeping his diary anymore at that point, as I recall. No, I’m sure Oates said something just like that—probably those precise words. These were men at the end of their tethers, you have to remember. They were starving and frostbitten and gangrenous. They were in desperate straits. Oates was only the worst of them. Scott would probably have lost his feet as well, if they had gotten home. In times like that it’s the old stories you were talking about that kick in more than ever, the public-school ethos and the military code. You don’t break
down and shout accusations at each other—you live out the deepest scripts in you.”

“Maybe,” Val said, remembering South Georgia Island.

“No, you see it time after time,” Elspeth insisted. “Men going to their deaths for some idea or other. Following a script, living out an ideology—there are a lot of ways of putting it.”

“Some people break under stress,” Val said despite herself.

“Yes they do. But that’s another story—that’s
Lord Jim
, a story that all these men knew very well. It was a cautionary tale to them—break down once, and your honor is lost forever. That’s why so many of them died in the trenches, going to certain death to make sure that they didn’t look like a shirker.”

Jim shook his head. “World War I killed that story for good.”

“I know what you mean by that,” Elspeth said. “But I’m not so sure it did.”

Ta Shu spoke again. “All stories are still alive,” he said. “All stories have colors in them.” He looked around at them, an older man from a different culture, weathered and strange, incongruous in his red parka. “This present moment—this is clear.” Although actually the light in the tent was its usual virulent blue; but they took his point. “The past—all stories. Nothing but stories. All colored. So we choose our colors. We choose what colors we see.”

Soon after that the big loads of food in them and the exhaustion of the day’s climb both hit at once, and they groaned through the icy brilliant air to their tents, to fall in their bags and sleep deeply, no matter the incandescent
brightness lasting through the night. And the next morning they got up and ate breakfast in silence, contemplating no doubt the day ahead of them. They broke camp and got it stuffed into its bags and into the sledge, and then they were off again. Val hauled the sledge by herself, starting slow so that people could get warmed up gradually. The hard field of firn covering the head of the Sargent Glacier was pretty easy going.

Then they had to climb into the saddle between Bell Peak and the high ridge of the Herbert Range to their right, and this proved to be a mean little wall; it took three hours of hard hauling to get the sled up it.

Finally they made it, however, and Val took the sledge and pulled it across the saddle until she reached the far side, where they had a full view of the Axel Heiberg. It would make a dramatic lunch spot.

She pulled up the final slope to a little snow-covered knob she had camped on during a previous expedition, and gestured to the others as they straggled up after her, waving at the view ahead. “Lunch time!” she cried.

While she waited for them she goggled at the view. A good two thousand feet below them, down the steep snow-blanketed slope of the glacier’s sidewall, lay the great ice river itself, the Axel Heiberg, pouring down from the polar cap in a truly frightening icefall, like an immense waterfall that had frozen to stillness and broken to shards. Then below them it flattened out and curved around the shoulder they stood on. It was easy to see that they could have taken the flat, broad, curving road of the lower Heiberg glacier in from where it poured onto the Ross Sea, and avoided every difficulty they had overcome in the previous two days, also the tricky work of successfully descending the slope leading back down to the glacier.

What also became suddenly clear to the understanding was just how huge and strange the Transantarctic Mountains were. This stupendous ice stream had torn a trench in the range so clean in its lines that it was hard to grasp how big it was; but it was almost as deep as the Grand Canyon, and considerably wider, and when one’s sense of scale came into focus, so to speak, it was hard not to feel a bit frightened, like a speck on the side of the abyss. It was clear also from this vantage point that the mountain range was a dam holding back the polar ice, the ice pouring down these giant spillways ten thousand feet to the sea. There was nothing like it anywhere else in the world, and standing there it was easy to feel the truth of that.

Ta Shu, the first one to join Val on the knob, needed no time to make his feng shui analysis. “This a very big place,” he declared, puffing and grinning at Val.

Jorge and Elspeth arrived and just stared at the scene, looking appalled. Jim arrived and was stunned. Jack arrived and said “God damn!” and hooted a few times. “Wow! Will you look at that!”

“God damn is right,” Jim said, checking out the precipitous slope they now had to descend. “Why didn’t Amundsen just follow the dogs!”