Call of the White (30 page)

Eventually, there was barely an episode in my 32-year life that I hadn't minutely examined and the tentacles of my brain reached out for something else to fill the hours and days. I listened attentively to the lyrics played through my MP3 player, invented sequels to films I had seen recently, constructed plots for novels I might write one day and even composed a few lines of poetry – but I was always aware that I was hovering on the edge of a black abyss. To be bored was a torment that seemed to gouge out my insides so that it took all my will to stop myself screaming into the cold air and striking out at the hovering landscape. Sometimes as we set off for another 90-minute leg, I would realise with horror that my brain was completely empty, that I could not find a single avenue for thought. I'd be seized with panic, scrambling through my internal catalogue of memories and ideas for something to catch hold of my imagination. It's difficult to imagine not being able to think of a single thing to think about but it was at these moments that the abyss yawned largest.

Each of us had our own methods for keeping our minds busy. Most of us had MP3 players as a basic first line of defence. Sophia had recorded the music she used for her kick-boxing classes and ran through her routines in her head as we skied. Watching her in line ahead of me, every now and again I would catch her punching the air or lifting a knee into her chest with lightning speed. She challenged Steph to a competition to see who could make their precious daily boiled sweet last the longest. (Sophia won by being able to savour her sweet for 46 songs.) Steph in particular was adamant that she wouldn't be able to get through the day without music and looked after her slim iPod religiously. Therefore it was somehow inevitable that the pampered iPod stopped working shortly after we left the resupply. Steph was distraught. ‘I can't do it without music,' she wailed in panic. ‘I'll go nuts.' But she had little choice. At the end of her first music-less day she was sullen; the day had dragged painfully. By the end of the fifth day without music her attitude had changed completely. ‘I'm actually quite enjoying it,' she admitted. ‘Sometimes I get lost in a tunnel of thought and the days just fly past.' She hesitated before adding as a hasty afterthought, ‘I do miss it, though.'

In complete contrast to Steph, Reena had declined to bring music with her right from the start. ‘I live in Delhi where there is noise all the time, there is no escaping it. To have six weeks of silence is going to be bliss for me,' she explained emphatically. I was worried that she might regret her decision as we moved into our fourth week on the ice but she found the shapes of the sastrugi kept her imagination busy. ‘Today I saw fairy steps in the snow,' she wrote in the team journal.

We might have been worried about her sanity except, in truth, this was indeed a place where your imagination could run riot. The sun dogs that had danced around the sun grew into a single circular rainbow, trapping the sun within a fortification of colour as if protecting it from the skein of milky cloud that slowly crept across the sky like advancing cataracts. Sometimes there were haloes within haloes, barely perceptible echoes of colour rippling across the sky in concentric circles. The sun and its haloes seemed to float beside us like our personal guardian angel.

It is easy to imagine that the divine live here; that the South is the only place on earth where it is possible to come face to face with your God. Era certainly found Antarctica a spiritual place, using the time to ‘pray and think about how to make myself a better Muslim'. We'd all come to be very fond of practical and devout Era. She delighted in explaining the intricacies of her religion to us and took any opportunity in the tent in the evening to tell us an interesting, bizarre or notable fact about her beliefs. As a result, we often found ourselves falling into long discussions about our thoughts and philosophies. Sometimes we got so carried away that we'd realise with horror that it was way past our intended bedtime and that we had squandered precious hours of sleep. Jokingly, we referred to ourselves as ‘the tent of Zen'. Hearing Era's views was fascinating because they diverged so completely from my own, but I found some of her ideas disturbing. ‘It is quite extreme, but me and my husband feel it is better to have a short life because there is less opportunity to sin,' she told us one evening. I see life as the most precious gift and to resent it in this way seemed to me to be an insult to all those who have life so cruelly taken away prematurely. I sensed Era knew she had upset me. She tactfully acknowledged my view while making it clear her opinion had not changed. It was a practised response that I had noticed her use many times – a mix of good manners and resolute defiance that suggested she saw our discussions as a test of her faith. Our views were a temptation to be resisted. I suspected that if her views survived the expedition intact, Era would see this as a sign of her strength as a Muslim.

During one break Sophia sat heavily on her sledge and spoke quietly to Kylie who had pulled up next to her. I couldn't hear what was being said but from their body language I could tell something was wrong. When I skied over to them, Sophia waved away my concerns. ‘My chest feels tight,' she explained. ‘It's like a panic attack.'

‘I think it might be the altitude,' Kylie suggested.

Our seemingly endless climb through sastrugi land had brought us to an altitude of just under 3,000 metres. This isn't very much in mountaineering terms but it is possible to feel the effects of altitude at anything over 2,000 metres. We had gained height so gradually over the last month that I hadn't expected us to be affected but I'd noticed that recently I found myself out of breath as we skied. It was difficult to be sure whether this was just general exhaustion or something more until I had woken up in the night with a feeling of being short of breath. I'd gasped in panic, gripped by a fear of not being able to breathe. It was a sensation I'd felt before at altitude, and it seemed that Sophia was having a similar problem. Kylie had spent more time than anyone else in the team at altitude and advised us all to concentrate on breathing out if we felt short of breath, rather than just focusing on inhaling.

As we continued to climb the air wasn't our only problem. On our map we could see that we were approaching the polar plateau, a vast expanse of high ground at the centre of the Antarctic continent that surrounds the South Pole. Our arrival on the plateau was marked by a noticeable drop in temperature and a strong wind from the south that seemed to cut straight through our clothing as if it wasn't there. The change caught us by surprise and we suddenly felt very vulnerable. The calm, relatively warm weather of the past month had allowed us to get away with sloppy habits. The new weather sought out our weaknesses and exploited them mercilessly. Steph had become used to unzipping her trousers up to the thigh for ventilation so that the skin beneath was covered by just her thin thermal leggings but now she found itchy red lumps appearing on her legs. The blood vessels in her skin had frozen in the exposure to the cold air to form nasty chilblains. Era found an angry red mark on her face where the cold wind had found a narrow gap between her goggles and mask. It was a reminder to all of us to double-check our face-coverings as we used to at the outset of the expedition. I noticed I found it particularly difficult to keep my nose warm and so fashioned some extra padding on the inside of my mask from some fleece scraps in our repair kit. Everyone found that the cold headwind exacerbated the difficulties with our goggles. The slightest moisture would freeze instantly until thick wedges of ice sat in the well of the lenses beneath our eyes and slowly crawled up the inside. We became used to seeing the world through a distorting film of ice crystals.

Our face masks too became instruments of slow torture. Frozen breath built up on the inside so that ice sat uncomfortably next to our skin and threatened us with frostbite. Unable to spare my hands as we clambered unsteadily over sastrugi I became adept at pushing frozen material away from my face with my tongue or making strange grimaces behind my mask to ensure my cheeks didn't freeze. Kylie mentioned that she did the same and soon the whole team were swapping techniques. Reena described how she blew hot air upwards, puffing like a steam engine, in an attempt to warm the tip of her nose or melt a small peep hole into the ice covering her goggles. I realised things had become desperate when I caught Steph using a shovel one evening to chip inch-thick blocks of ice from the inside of her face mask. ‘I didn't want to bring it inside like that,' she explained. ‘It would drip all over the place.'

The cold air seemed to freeze the clouds, too, so that they dropped out of the sky, filling the air with tiny flecks of crystal. Like fireflies, the diamond dust was impossible to look at directly but created an optical white noise around the edges of our vision. We had become used to sun dogs and haloes but this was new. ‘It's like blessings falling from the sky,' said Reena. I loved the description; somehow it seemed comforting. However, later that day it appeared that our blessings had run out.

I sat in the tent with my knees pulled into my chest to keep them out of the way as my three tent-mates moved about preparing for bed. Above the noise of the stove I heard footsteps approach. Kylie called through the tent, ‘Felicity, have you got a minute?'

I recognised her tone all too well: something was wrong. Outside Kylie had the hood of her jacket pulled tightly around her face with a hat on underneath. Her cheeks and nose were red with cold and her fingers were folded into the palm of her hands. It looked as if she had been outside in the cold for a while.

‘Don't panic,' she started, ‘but I've had a fuel leak in my sledge.' I took a slow intake of breath but followed her advice not to panic. Kylie led me over to her tent where the contents of her sledge were laid out on the snow. ‘I've been through everything and it seems that the fuel has got into the ration bags but only affected the noodles. So I've taken all the noodles out and repacked the rest of the food and made sure nothing else was contaminated.' Kylie looked at me, waiting for a response. I wasn't sure what to say.

The fuel cans all had special tape stuck to the thread of the caps to prevent leaks and were wrapped in individual plastic bags as well as being placed together in a second strengthened plastic sack. The food was also in its own separate plastic sack and was divided into sealed plastic day bags. Therefore there were four or five separate layers of protection that should, theoretically, have prevented any cross-contamination. In a tent group of four, no one carried both food and fuel in their sledge but as Kylie was part of a tent group of three she was, unusually, carrying both. Only a few days before I had asked the team to check their fuel can every morning after Era had noticed that hers was dripping slightly. ‘I did check it,' Kylie replied defensively. ‘I swear it was fine this morning.' I reflected that we had crossed a lot of big sastrugi that day. It was quite possible that the cap on the fuel can had worked its way free as the sledge was bumped and bashed over repeated sastrugi and that the leaked fuel had then run between all the different layers of protective wrapping to contaminate the food.

‘It's lucky that the main meals are in their own sealed foil packets,' I thought aloud. Kylie grimaced. ‘Helen has been mixing a handful of noodles into her meals,' she said. ‘So she got a belly full of fuel.'

‘It was disgusting,' called Helen from inside the tent. I hadn't been aware Helen and Reena were listening. I lifted one of the bags of noodles and stuck my nose into the bag. The smell of fuel was unmistakable. ‘Every bag is the same, except two,' said Kylie. The noodles had always been an optional extra in our rations, added after the resupply to give our bodies an extra boost of carbohydrates. It was unfortunate that Reena, Kylie and Helen would lose this extra input of energy, but we could share the noodles from the other tent to lessen the impact. The loss wasn't ideal but neither was it critical.

‘Well, it looks like you've done what you can for now,' I said indicating all the bags sorted out on the snow. ‘You're not going to run out of food as long as we get to the South Pole on time. It just puts a little more pressure on us, that's all.' I smiled flatly at her through pursed lips.

Leaving Kylie to repack her sledge I retired to my habitual corner of the tent and took out the team notebook to look at my mileage calculations. Despite the lack of noodles, we still had enough food to keep us on full rations until Day 38. If we maintained the mileage we'd been covering over the last week and stopped for one rest day, I calculated that it left us without much margin for error, but it would be enough. As I counted out the days for a final time, scribbling numbers into the margins as I worked, some sixth sense fell over me like a shadow. I had the abrupt conviction that something was wrong with the figures.

Sacrificing a clean sheet from the notebook I started afresh, using the GPS to double-check exactly how far we were from the South Pole. Adding up our target miles I looked at the final total in horror. Forcing down the panic already tingling in my fingertips, I added up the target mileage again and went through the sheet day by day to make sure there were no mistakes. I put down the notebook and ran my hands through my hair in frustration. There was no denying it, we had a whole 11 extra nautical miles to go to the South Pole than I had accounted for. Eleven miles doesn't seem like much but it was the equivalent of a whole day skiing. I couldn't understand how the miles had been dropped but here they were. On top of the lost breakfast bags and the contaminated food, this extra day of skiing squeezed our already tight schedule even tighter.

The next day I pondered our options as we skied. In order to make the South Pole before we ran out of food we would either need to cover more miles each day, reduce our rations and save the excess to create an extra day of food, or sacrifice the rest day we had planned for 25 December and use it to regain the additional 11 nautical miles. None of these options appealed. Although we had been skiing for more than a month, the team were still struggling to finish their rations every day, but I was keen for them to continue getting a full intake of nutrients for as long as possible. Already Era was showing signs of tiring and I was worried that Helen and Sophia would soon follow. I was also reluctant to abandon our rest day. It was a question of morale as much as our physical need for a rest. I knew that everyone was already counting down the days until our ‘holiday' on Christmas Day. More than anything it was the idea of having a lie-in, a day when we didn't have to force ourselves from our warm sleeping bags into the subzero temperatures and frozen torments of our average day. I wasn't sure what the mental effects might be of taking away the carrot that dangled so tantalisingly ahead of us. That left the option of skiing just a little further each day. We had covered some 200 nautical miles since the resupply and the distance was beginning to show in our bodies. I didn't want to push too hard now that we were so close to the final stages. We'd all heard the stories of teams in years past being rescued from the 88th degree or beyond, less than 100 nautical miles from the pole and yet unable to go on. It was a spectre I kept close to remind myself not to get complacent or overzealous.