The Worst Journey in the World (34 page)

Come and stand outside the hut door. All round you, except where the cape
joins the mountain, is the sea. You are facing north with your back to
the Great Ice Barrier and the Pole, with your eyes looking out of the
mouth of McMurdo Sound over the Ross Sea towards New Zealand, two
thousand miles of open water, pack and bergs. Look over the sea to your
left. It is mid-day, and though the sun will not appear above the horizon
he is still near enough to throw a soft yellow light over the Western
Mountains. These form the coast-line thirty miles across the Sound, and
as they disappear northwards are miraged up into the air and float, black
islands in a lemon sky. Straight ahead of you there is nothing to be seen
but black open sea, with a high light over the horizon, which you know
betokens pack; this is ice blink. But as you watch there appears and
disappears a little dark smudge. This puzzles you for some time, and then
you realize that this is the mirage of some far mountain or of Beaufort
Island, which guards the mouth of McMurdo Sound against such traffic as
ever comes that way, by piling up the ice floes across the entrance.

As you still look north, in the middle distance, jutting out into the
sea, is a low black line of land, with one excrescence. This is Cape
Royds, with Shackleton's old hut upon it; the excrescence is High Peak,
and this line marks the first land upon the eastern side of McMurdo Sound
which you can see, and indeed is actually the most eastern point of Ross
Island. It disappears abruptly behind a high wall, and if you let your
eyes travel round towards your right front you see that the wall is a
perpendicular cliff two hundred feet high of pure green and blue ice,
which falls sheer into the sea, and forms, with Cape Evans, on which we
stand, the bay which lies in front of our hut, and which we called North
Bay. This great ice-cliff with its crevasses, towers, bastions and
cornices, was a never-ending source of delight to us; it forms the snout
of one of the many glaciers which slide down the slopes of Erebus: in
smooth slopes and contours where the mountain underneath is of regular
shape: in impassable icefalls where the underlying surface is steep or
broken. This particular ice stream is called the Barne Glacier, and is
about two miles across. The whole background from our right front to our
right rear, that is from N.E. to S.E., is occupied by our massive and
volcanic neighbour, Erebus. He stands 13,500 feet high. We live beneath
his shadow and have both admiration and friendship for him, sometimes
perhaps tinged with respect. However, there are no signs of dangerous
eruptive disturbances in modern times, and we feel pretty safe, despite
the fact that the smoke which issues from his crater sometimes rises in
dense clouds for many thousands of feet, and at others the trail of his
plume can be measured for at least a hundred miles.

If you are not too cold standing about (it does not pay to stand about at
Cape Evans) let us make our way behind the hut and up Wind Vane Hill.
This is only some sixty-five feet high, yet it dominates the rest of the
cape and is steep enough to require a scramble, even now when the wind is
calm. Look out that you do not step on the electric wires which connect
the wind-vane cups on the hill with the recording dial in the hut. These
cups revolve in the wind, the revolutions being registered electrically:
every four miles a signal was sent to the hut, and a pen working upon a
chronograph registered one more step. There is also a meteorological
screen on the summit, which has to be visited at eight o'clock each
morning in all weathers.

Arrived on the top you will now be facing south, that is in the opposite
direction to which you were facing before. The first thing that will
strike you is that the sea, now frozen in the bays though still unfrozen
in the open sound, flows in nearly to your feet. The second, that though
the sea stretches back for nearly twenty miles, yet the horizon shows
land or ice in every direction. For a ship this is a cul-de-sac, as Ross
found seventy years ago. But as soon as you have grasped these two
facts your whole attention will be riveted to the amazing sight on your
left. Here are the southern slopes of Erebus; but how different from
those which you have lately seen. Northwards they fell in broad calm
lines to a beautiful stately cliff which edged the sea. But here—all the
epithets and all the adjectives which denote chaotic immensity could not
adequately tell of them. Visualize a torrent ten miles long and twenty
miles broad; imagine it falling over mountainous rocks and tumbling over
itself in giant waves; imagine it arrested in the twinkling of an eye,
frozen and white. Countless blizzards have swept their drifts over it,
but have failed to hide it. And it continues to move. As you stand in the
still cold air you may sometimes hear the silence broken by the sharp
reports as the cold contracts it or its own weight splits it. Nature is
tearing up that ice as human beings tear paper.

The sea-cliff is not so high here, and is more broken up by crevasses and
caves, and more covered with snow. Some five miles along the coast the
white line is broken by a bluff and black outcrop of rock; this is Turk's
Head, and beyond it is the low white line of Glacier Tongue, jutting out
for miles into the sea. We know, for we have already crossed it, that
there is a small frozen bay of sea-ice beyond, but all we can see from
Cape Evans is the base of the Hut Point Peninsula, with a rock outcrop
just showing where the Hutton Cliffs lie. The Peninsula prevents us from
seeing the Barrier, though the Barrier wind is constantly flowing over
it, as the clouds of drift now smoking over the Cliffs bear witness.
Farther to the right still, the land is clear: Castle Rock stands up like
a sentinel, and beyond are Arrival Heights and the old craters we have
got to know so well during our stay at Hut Point. The Discovery hut,
which would, in any case, be invisible at fifteen miles, is round that
steep rocky corner which ends the Peninsula, due south from where we
stand.

There remains undescribed the quadrant which stretches to our right front
from south to west. Just as we have previously seen the line of the
Western Mountains disappearing to the north miraged up in the light of
the mid-day sun, so now we see the same line of mountains running south,
with many miles of sea or Barrier between us and them. On the far
southern horizon, almost in transit with Hut Point, stands Minna Bluff,
some ninety miles away, beyond which we have laid the One Ton Depôt, and
from this point, as our eyes move round to the right, we see peak after
peak of these great mountain ranges—Discovery, Morning, Lister, Hooker,
and the glaciers which divide them one from another. They rise almost
without a break to a height of thirteen thousand feet. Between us and
them is the Barrier to the south, and the sea to the north. Unless a
blizzard is impending or blowing, they are clearly visible, a gigantic
wall of snow and ice and rock, which bounds our view to the west,
constantly varied by the ever-changing colour of the Antarctic. Beyond is
the plateau.

We have not yet mentioned four islands which lie within a radius of about
three miles from where we stand. The most important is a mile from the
end of Cape Evans and is called Inaccessible Island, owing to the
inhospitality of its steep lava side, even when the sea is frozen; we
found a way up, but it is not a very interesting place. Tent Island lies
farther out and to the south-west. The remaining two, which are more
islets than islands, rise in front of us in South Bay. They are called
Great and Little Razorback, being ribs of rock with a sharp divide in the
centre. The latter of these is the refuge upon which Scott's party
returning to Cape Evans pitched their camp when overtaken by a blizzard
some weeks ago. All these islands are of volcanic origin and black in
general colour, but I believe there is evidence to show that the lava
stream which created them flowed from McMurdo Sound rather than from the
more obvious craters of Erebus. Their importance in this story is the
indirect help they gave in holding in sea-ice against southerly
blizzards, and in forming landmarks which proved useful more than once to
men who had lost their bearings in darkness and thick weather. In this
respect also several icebergs which sailed in from the Ross Sea and
grounded on the shallows which run between Inaccessible Island and the
cape, as well as in South Bay, were most useful as well as being
interesting and beautiful. For two years we watched the weathering of
these great towers and bastions of ice by sea and sun and wind, and left
them still lying in the same positions, but mere tumbled ruins of their
former selves.

Many places in the panorama we have examined show black rock, and the
cape on which we stand exposes at times more black than white. This fact
always puzzles those who naturally conclude that all the Antarctic is
covered with ice and snow. The explanation is simple, that winds of the
great velocity which prevails in this region will not only prevent snow
resting to windward of out-cropping rocks and cliffs, but will even wear
away the rocks themselves. The fact that these winds always blow from the
south, or southerly, causes a tendency for this aspect of any projecting
rock to be blown free from snow, while the north or lee side is drifted
up by a marbled and extremely hard tongue of snow, which disappears into
a point at a distance which depends upon the size of the rock.

Of course for the most part the land is covered to such a depth by
glaciers and snow that no wind will do more than pack the snow or expose
the ice beneath. At the same time, to visualize the Antarctic as a white
land is a mistake, for, not only is there much rock projecting wherever
mountains or rocky capes and islands rise, but the snow seldom looks
white, and if carefully looked at will be found to be shaded with many
colours, but chiefly with cobalt blue or rose-madder, and all the
gradations of lilac and mauve which the mixture of these colours will
produce. A White Day is so rare that I have recollections of going out
from the hut or the tent and being impressed by the fact that the snow
really looked white. When to the beautiful tints in the sky and the
delicate shading on the snow are added perhaps the deep colours of the
open sea, with reflections from the ice foot and ice-cliffs in it, all
brilliant blues and emerald greens, then indeed a man may realize how
beautiful this world can be, and how clean.

Though I may struggle with inadequate expression to show the reader that
this pure Land of the South has many gifts to squander upon those who
woo her, chiefest of these gifts is that of her beauty. Next, perhaps, is
that of grandeur and immensity, of giant mountains and limitless spaces,
which must awe the most casual, and may well terrify the least
imaginative of mortals. And there is one other gift which she gives with
both hands, more prosaic, but almost more desirable. That is the gift of
sleep. Perhaps it is true of others as is certainly the case with me,
that the more horrible the conditions in which we sleep, the more
soothing and wonderful are the dreams which visit us. Some of us have
slept in a hurricane of wind and a hell of drifting snow and darkness,
with no roof above our heads, with no tent to help us home, with no
conceivable chance that we should ever see our friends again, with no
food that we could eat, and only the snow which drifted into our
sleeping-bags which we could drink day after day and night after night.
We slept not only soundly the greater part of these days and nights, but
with a certain numbed pleasure. We wanted something sweet to eat: for
preference tinned peaches in syrup! Well! That is the kind of sleep the
Antarctic offers you at her worst, or nearly at her worst. And if the
worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for you in the snow, he comes
disguised as Sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than as
a gruesome foe. She treats you thus when you are in the extremity of
peril and hardship; perhaps then you can imagine what draughts of deep
and healthy slumber she will give a tired sledger at the end of a long
day's march in summer, when after a nice hot supper he tucks his soft dry
warm furry bag round him with the light beating in through the green silk
tent, the homely smell of tobacco in the air, and the only noise that of
the ponies tethered outside, munching their supper in the sun.

And so it came about that during our sojourn at Cape Evans, in our
comfortable warm roomy home, we took our full allotted span of sleep.
Most were in their bunks by 10 P.M., sometimes with a candle and a book,
not rarely with a piece of chocolate. The acetylene was turned off at
10.30, for we had a limited quantity of carbide, and soon the room was
in complete darkness, save for the glow of the galley stove and where a
splash of light showed the night watchman preparing his supper. Some
snored loudly, but none so loud as Bowers; others talked in their sleep,
the more so when some nasty experience had lately set their nerves on
edge. There was always the ticking of many instruments, and sometimes the
ring of a little bell: to this day I do not know what most of them meant.
On a calm night no sound penetrated except, perhaps, the whine of a dog,
or the occasional kick of a pony in the stable outside. Any disturbance
was the night watchman's job. But on a bad blizzard night the wind, as it
tore seawards over the hut, roared and howled in the ventilator let into
the roof: in the more furious gusts the whole hut shook, and the pebbles
picked up by the hurricane scattered themselves noisily against the
woodwork of the southern wall. We did not get many nights like these the
first winter; during the second we seemed to get nothing else. One
ghastly blizzard blew for six weeks.

The night watchman took his last hourly observation at 7 A.M., and was
free to turn in after waking the cook and making up the fire. Frequently,
however, he had so much work to do that he preferred to forgo his sleep
and remain up. For instance, if the weather looked threatening, he would
take his pony out for exercise as soon as possible in the morning, or
those lists of stores were not finished, or that fish trap had to be
looked after: all kinds of things.