Call of the White (28 page)

I was shocked. I had never seen Helen so upset.

‘Helen, what is the matter?'

‘First you say to go faster, then I have to slow down. I don't know what to do anymore.'

She ripped off her mittens and threw them into the snow next to her ski poles. Lifting her goggles she covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. I blinked in shock for a few seconds before turning to the rest of the team who were looking on in stunned silence. ‘Guys, let's have a break for ten minutes. Put on your jackets and have something to eat and drink. But don't get cold.'

I helped Helen unhitch her sledge and led her a small distance from the team so that we were out of earshot. She'd stopped crying and had clearly calmed down a little. ‘I'm just trying to do what everyone wants,' she started but I interrupted. I felt let down by her outburst but realised that sympathy and some comfort was what she needed right now.

‘Helen, this hasn't got anything to do with our pace. This is all about you feeling angry with yourself for the breakfast being left behind. Do you agree?'

Helen didn't answer but took a deep breath and studied the horizon behind me.

‘It doesn't matter now whose fault it was that the breakfast got left behind. It's one of those things and now we've found a solution you have to forget about it. We all have to move on.' I paused before giving her a big hug. ‘You've just had a bad day, that's all.' Helen nodded silently and wiped her eyes. I left her to drink some water and eat some food as I skied back along the line to speak to the team who were waiting quietly.

‘I want to draw a line under all this rubbish about our pace. You each know what speed to set when you lead and you know what to do if you want the lead to slow down. No one is going too fast or too slow; so let's just get on with it.' I was addressing the team but I raised my voice enough so that Helen could hear me clearly. There were nods of agreement along the line and as we moved off once more I felt like we had made a breakthrough. The unspoken disagreement about our speed had reached a climax and we were finally rid of it for good, I hoped.

Sastrugi Land

My vision had been reduced to a tiny sliver just above my right eye.
The rest had been obliterated by a creeping layer of ice forming on the inside of my goggles. It was a daily occurrence and on some days no amount of adjusting my face-covering or funnelling warm breath away from my goggles could prevent it happening – it was just a matter of time. During the last break I had tried removing my goggles and chipping away at the ice with my gloved fingers but it only seemed to have made the problem worse. If I tilted my head forward a little, I could still see just enough to follow the sledge in front and ski in the team's tracks. At the next break I decided I would have to swap to my spare goggles and hope that by the time they too iced up, my first pair would have cleared. Otherwise, I'd be as good as blind.

Despite my limited view there was nothing to hide the hill that lay ahead. With every step forward it seemed to bulge further out of the ground like an exaggerated boil growing out of a cartoon character's head. Without any features like trees and houses to give a sense of scale there was no way of knowing how big the hill was or how far away it might be. Sometimes we would march towards a hill all day never to reach it; at others the ground would seem to scoop into a near vertical wall ahead of us only to turn out to be a mirage. As I watched the slope in front tower ever further into the sky I prayed silently, ‘Please be a mirage, please be a mirage.'

Since leaving the resupply a few days before it felt like we had done nothing but climb hills. From our maps we knew that over our 900-kilometre route we would need to gain considerable altitude from our start at sea level to the South Pole which sits at around 3,000 metres on a huge dome of ice – but we hadn't expected to do it all at once. During the first half of the expedition we had gained over 1,000 metres but almost imperceptibly. In a landscape that was more optical illusion than reality, often the only indication that we were climbing was a slight burn in our thighs, the suspicion that we were inexplicably slowing down and the nagging notion that our sledges felt a bit heavier. Once or twice we had stopped for the day with the unshakeable impression that we were camped on the top of a hill but without any evidence to back up our instinct. Looking behind us I might imagine that I could see slightly more of our tracks than usual slithering away to the horizon, or perhaps have a slightly higher prospective of the sastrugi that stretched away in all directions but there was no way of knowing for sure.

Over the last couple of days, the hills had been unmistakable. They'd show up on the horizon as a slightly darker band of snow before growing into a morphing giant blocking our path. The evidence of our rise and fall was all too clear in the Thiel Mountains that still hovered on the horizon to our right. As we climbed, the mountains would appear to draw closer, revealing new summits and plateaux, while at other times they'd disappear below the horizon completely. The first time I glanced to my right to find a blemish-free horizon and the mountains gone, I felt a kind of panic, as if discovering that we'd lost a vital piece of equipment. Then as they began to come and go, seemingly at will, I began to wish we could shake them off for good; their presence was a continual reminder of our ponderous progress.

‘I can see a crocodile about to eat something,' Kylie mused as we sat on our sledges chewing in silence during a break. She pointed to the mountains with her ski pole. ‘There is its head, its back and its tail.' While some of the team were too engrossed in the delicate process of breaking open their frozen face masks to deliver food to their mouths, one or two turned to look.

‘Yes, yes, I see it!' Reena agreed enthusiastically. ‘No! It is a man on his back. See?'

After a week of gloomy weather, it had become sparkling once again. The severity of the sun turned the sky a concentrated blue and threw shadows from sastrugi that were so sharp that you could pick out every detail in the snow surface for what seemed like miles. It was still cold but the calm weather made the skiing hot work. This meant that while our bodies needed the freedom to perspire, our extremities (ears, hands and faces) needed warmth and protection. This led to a number of strange clothing choices along the line. Most of us skied in just a thermal with our thin, ultra-lightweight smocks over the top but Sophia, feeling the chill on her front, wore a fleece jacket backwards so that her back was open to the air. Our warm salopettes could be vented by opening long zips that ran down the sides. Most of us looked like Sinbad the Sailor with our unzipped trouser legs flaring but Kylie went one step further by tucking the free trouser legs into her waist harness. Her skinny little legs in tight thermal long johns stuck out from underneath her skirt of salopettes giving her the appearance of a Shakespearean actor in period costume.

The clear, calm days made camping on the ice almost a pleasure. Pitching our tents without fear of them blowing away, we could lay our icy kit out on the top of the tents to dry in the sun or suspended from our skis, which were speared into the snow like upright javelins. Steph and I took our time securing the outside of the tent, enjoying the feel of the sun through our warm down jackets and stopping to lounge on the sleeping bags which had been laid out on the snow to air. It was good to feel the sun's rays on our faces as we tipped them towards the big blue above. Thin wisps of cloud scored the sky, drawing together towards a single vanishing point as if sucking the whole universe towards the horizon. It looked like we were watching the eddies of a stream in freeze-frame, the vast speed and size of the processes happening above us captured in a snapshot. Four small but vibrant rainbows flecked the points of the compass around the sun, leaping out at us from the streaky blue of the sky. They were perfectly formed but shortened as if a normal rainbow had been snipped into four equal parts and placed around the sun to frame it. They were sun dogs, the faithful companions of the sun who are only ever seen dancing around their master, never too close but never too far. Steph and I watched the dramatic skyscape unfold until she broke the silence. ‘Thanks, Felicity.'

‘For what?' I asked confused.

‘For this,' she answered with a grin.

I couldn't help smiling. For all the stress and heartache and gruelling monotony I was glad that she was still able to see the miracle in what we were doing. I thought back to the first day I'd met Steph. She'd burst into the interview looking like she'd come straight from playing a sports match and I'd been impressed by her casual confidence. Steph laughed at my memory. ‘Errr… I have an admission to make,' she said nervously. ‘I was wearing trackpants because I'd been out all night and was terribly hung-over. I only woke up just in time to make it to the interview, which is why I didn't have time to get dressed into something more formal.'

We both laughed. I had been totally fooled. Knowing Steph as I now did, the story made absolute sense. Somehow the misunderstanding seemed rather fitting. Our first meeting in that over-heated glass-walled conference room two years ago felt like a different lifetime. It seemed impossible that there had been a time I hadn't known Steph or any of the other women. As we drifted back into our own thoughts I listened to the laughter and chatter coming from the two tents a short distance away. A wave of sudden clarity washed through me and I marvelled at this strange yet wonderful group of women I had gathered together. We were no longer Cypriot and Kiwi, Muslim and Hindu: we now had a common identity. I could feel the pride we each had in each other and the unspoken trust between us.

Laid out on our sleeping bags like overdressed sunbathers, it wasn't long before Steph and I both began to feel the chill. Even on a sunny, calm day like this one the cold gradually worked its way in through our layers of clothing and nibbled at the exposed skin of our faces. I stooped to enter through the curved door of the tent and was hit by a wave of heat from the stoves at the far end. Having followed me in, Steph was already stripping off her outer clothing so that she sat in just the thermal layer that we slept in. Obsessed with detecting any weight loss, she carefully inspected her hips and thighs. ‘It's just not fair. I haven't lost any weight at all,' she moaned. I disagreed. I spent most of my days skiing behind Steph and had noticed a distinct change in her body shape. Her salopettes now noticeably hung from her hips. ‘Believe me, Steph,' I insisted, ‘your backside is my view most days, so I should know.' My own weight loss was rather less flattering. I'd noticed that there was a lot more room in my sports bra than there had been at the outset. I used my bra as a convenient extra pocket for the various batteries that Steph would share out between us every morning after re-charging them from our solar panel overnight. The batteries needed to be kept warm to conserve their charge, along with the lighter we each carried and our MP3 players. At the outset it had been quite a squeeze to fit one of the chunky video camera batteries down my front but I now noticed with disappointment that two fitted easily. Even so, I complained loudly when Steph handed me a third. ‘If I can fit three video batteries down my front I really am in trouble,' I protested.

Era, like Steph, was disappointed in the results of our extreme weight-loss programme. ‘I still have a fat face,' she said sadly, looking at herself in our tiny mirror. (The mirror was meant for looking for any signs of chilblains or frostnip on our faces but quickly became the most popular item in our first aid kit, closely followed by the tweezers.) I was concerned that this desire to lose weight might be a contributing factor in Era's continued struggle to finish her daily rations. Every day I made her show me what she had eaten and nagged at her to finish off her snack bags. I was aware that my nagging was getting on her nerves but ignored her glares across the tent as I insisted she keep eating. I risked pushing her goodwill even further by charging Kylie with the responsibility of being Era's break-buddy to check up on exactly how much she was eating each time we stopped. I didn't want to upset Era but the prospect of her failing to eat enough was just too serious to leave to chance. I'd noticed that Era wore her fleece-lined smock on days when everyone else was happy in a windproof and worried that her energy levels were already starting to wane, her lack of energy making her feel the cold more than everyone else.

That night I slept fitfully. In that strange state between alert and asleep I could hear footsteps in the snow outside and wondered absently why someone was walking around so much in the night. Snow has an amazing ability to transmit sound. Even though the footsteps were perhaps a dozen metres away it seemed as if they were trampling the ground just a few inches from my ears. In the morning I wondered if I had imagined the mysterious wanderer until Reena mentioned that Helen hadn't been well. I found Helen already up and out of her tent, intently packing her sledge. I could tell from the slump in her shoulders that she was feeling down. ‘I think it might be the sports drink powder that's upsetting my stomach,' she said unhappily. I thought it was more likely to be the antibiotics but Helen was unsure. ‘I hope not because I've got to take the antibiotics for another ten days,' she said with a sigh.

That day, despite taking pills to stop the diarrhoea, every break turned into a toilet stop for Helen. That in itself was bad enough but it also left her with little time to eat or drink to keep up her energy. It wasn't long before a gap was opening up in the line ahead of her and even though the team slowed, she was still finding it hard to keep up. From the back of the line I watched her ski and noted with concern that she looked terribly frail, her padded clothing hanging limp from her shoulders. By the end of the day she was clearly exhausted. After completing five legs I stopped the team. Leaving my tent group to pitch our tent by themselves I joined Kylie and Reena, telling Helen to forget her jobs and get straight into her sleeping bag. My tone was firm as I expected her to put up a fight but her face looked drawn as she meekly conceded and lay down in the tent.

Emerging into the cold air the next morning I noticed that Helen was already up and about. She said that she felt better after a good sleep but her face still looked grey and her forehead was creased in a pained expression.

‘I really think you ought to think about stopping the antibiotics,' I suggested.

‘But what about my toe?'

I hesitated before speaking. I hadn't felt it my place to voice my doubts about her infection but now that the antibiotics were affecting her so badly, it was threatening the well-being of the team.

‘Helen, I'm not sure your toe is infected. I think if it was infected you would have clearer signs by now.'

Helen answered lightly but looked thoughtful, ‘Well, let's see how it goes today.'

I nodded but throughout the day my concern grew as yet more breaks saw Helen reaching for her Louis Poo-uitton. This added stress was the last thing her body needed, both mentally and physically. That evening I sat next to Helen in her tent, both of us peering at her blistered big toe. The adhesive bandage was still firmly stuck to her nail but as the damaged nail slowly came free we could see the skin beneath. There were none of the typical signs of infection; no angry red, no swelling or pus and although the newly formed skin was tender there was no pain.

With our inspection over, Helen sat back and looked at me in silence for a moment. ‘I'm going to stop taking the antibiotics,' she said decisively. ‘I can't be ill anymore. It's too draining.' I went back to my tent feeling relieved. Helen had made the right decision.

Without the antibiotics in her system her recovery was almost miraculous. The next morning she reported with pride that she had spent the evening fashioning a fake toenail out of a corner of our laminated Antarctic map to replace the nail she had lost. The fake toenail, complete with a snippit of latitude lines and the contours of a nunatak, stayed in place for the rest of the expedition.