The Worst Journey in the World (42 page)

By now we had realized that we must reverse the usual sledging routine
and do everything slowly, wearing when possible the fur mitts which
fitted over our woollen mitts, and always stopping whatever we were
doing, directly we felt that any part of us was getting frozen, until the
circulation was restored. Henceforward it was common for one or other of
us to leave the other two to continue the camp work while he stamped
about in the snow, beat his arms, or nursed some exposed part. But we
could not restore the circulation of our feet like this—the only way
then was to camp and get some hot water into ourselves before we took our
foot-gear off. The difficulty was to know whether our feet were frozen or
not, for the only thing we knew for certain was that we had lost all
feeling in them. Wilson's knowledge as a doctor came in here: many a time
he had to decide from our descriptions of our feet whether to camp or to
go on for another hour. A wrong decision meant disaster, for if one of us
had been crippled the whole party would have been placed in great
difficulties. Probably we should all have died.

On June 29 the temperature was -50° all day and there was sometimes a
light breeze which was inclined to frost-bite our faces and hands. Owing
to the weight of our two sledges and the bad surface our pace was not
more than a slow and very heavy plod: at our lunch camp Wilson had the
heel and sole of one foot frost-bitten, and I had two big toes. Bowers
was never worried by frost-bitten feet.

That night was very cold, the temperature falling to -66°, and it was
-55° at breakfast on June 30. We had not shipped the eider-down linings
to our sleeping-bags, in order to keep them dry as long as possible. My
own fur bag was too big for me, and throughout this journey was more
difficult to thaw out than the other two: on the other hand, it never
split, as did Bill's.

We were now getting into that cold bay which lies between the Hut Point
Peninsula and Terror Point. It was known from old Discovery days that the
Barrier winds are deflected from this area, pouring out into McMurdo
Sound behind us, and into the Ross Sea at Cape Crozier in front. In
consequence of the lack of high winds the surface of the snow is never
swept and hardened and polished as elsewhere: it was now a mass of the
hardest and smallest snow crystals, to pull through which in cold
temperatures was just like pulling through sand. I have spoken elsewhere
of Barrier surfaces, and how, when the cold is very great, sledge runners
cannot melt the crystal points but only advance by rolling them over and
over upon one another. That was the surface we met on this journey, and
in soft snow the effect is accentuated. Our feet were sinking deep at
every step.

And so when we tried to start on June 30 we found we could not move both
sledges together. There was nothing for it but to take one on at a time
and come back for the other. This has often been done in daylight when
the only risks run are those of blizzards which may spring up suddenly
and obliterate tracks. Now in darkness it was more complicated. From 11
A.M. to 3 P.M. there was enough light to see the big holes made by our
feet, and we took on one sledge, trudged back in our tracks, and brought
on the second. Bowers used to toggle and untoggle our harnesses when we
changed sledges. Of course in this relay work we covered three miles in
distance for every one mile forward, and even the single sledges were
very hard pulling. When we lunched the temperature was -61°. After lunch
the little light had gone, and we carried a naked lighted candle back
with us when we went to find our second sledge. It was the weirdest kind
of procession, three frozen men and a little pool of light. Generally we
steered by Jupiter, and I never see him now without recalling his
friendship in those days.

We were very silent, it was not very easy to talk: but sledging is always
a silent business. I remember a long discussion which began just now
about cold snaps—was this the normal condition of the Barrier, or was it
a cold snap?—what constituted a cold snap? The discussion lasted about a
week. Do things slowly, always slowly, that was the burden of Wilson's
leadership: and every now and then the question, Shall we go on? and the
answer Yes. "I think we are all right as long as our appetites are good,"
said Bill. Always patient, self-possessed, unruffled, he was the only man
on earth, as I believe, who could have led this journey.

That day we made 3¼ miles, and travelled 10 miles to do it. The
temperature was -66° when we camped, and we were already pretty badly
iced up. That was the last night I lay (I had written slept) in my big
reindeer bag without the lining of eider-down which we each carried. For
me it was a very bad night: a succession of shivering fits which I was
quite unable to stop, and which took possession of my body for many
minutes at a time until I thought my back would break, such was the
strain placed upon it. They talk of chattering teeth: but when your body
chatters you may call yourself cold. I can only compare the strain to
that which I have been unfortunate enough to see in a case of lock-jaw.
One of my big toes was frost-bitten, but I do not know for how long.
Wilson was fairly comfortable in his smaller bag, and Bowers was snoring
loudly. The minimum temperature that night as taken under the sledge was
-69°; and as taken on the sledge was -75°. That is a hundred and seven
degrees of frost.

We did the same relay work on July 1, but found the pulling still harder;
and it was all that we could do to move the one sledge forward. From now
onwards Wilson and I, but not to the same extent Bowers, experienced a
curious optical delusion when returning in our tracks for the second
sledge. I have said that we found our way back by the light of a candle,
and we found it necessary to go back in our same footprints. These holes
became to our tired brains not depressions but elevations: hummocks over
which we stepped, raising our feet painfully and draggingly. And then we
remembered, and said what fools we were, and for a while we compelled
ourselves to walk through these phantom hills. But it was no lasting
good, and as the days passed we realized that we must suffer this
absurdity, for we could not do anything else. But of course it took it
out of us.

During these days the blisters on my fingers were very painful. Long
before my hands were frost-bitten, or indeed anything but cold, which was
of course a normal thing, the matter inside these big blisters, which
rose all down my fingers with only a skin between them, was frozen into
ice. To handle the cooking gear or the food bags was agony; to start the
primus was worse; and when, one day, I was able to prick six or seven of
the blisters after supper and let the liquid matter out, the relief was
very great. Every night after that I treated such others as were ready in
the same way until they gradually disappeared. Sometimes it was difficult
not to howl.

I
did
want to howl many times every hour of these days and nights, but
I invented a formula instead, which I repeated to myself continually.
Especially, I remember, it came in useful when at the end of the march
with my feet frost-bitten, my heart beating slowly, my vitality at its
lowest ebb, my body solid with cold, I used to seize the shovel and go on
digging snow on to the tent skirting while the cook inside was trying to
light the primus. "You've got it in the neck—stick it—stick it—you've
got it in the neck," was the refrain, and I wanted every little bit of
encouragement it would give me: then I would find myself repeating "Stick
it—stick it—stick it—stick it," and then "You've got it in the neck."
One of the joys of summer sledging is that you can let your mind wander
thousands of miles away for weeks and weeks. Oates used to provision his
little yacht (there was a pickled herring he was going to have): I
invented the compactest little revolving bookcase which was going to hold
not books, but pemmican and chocolate and biscuit and cocoa and sugar,
and have a cooker on the top, and was going to stand always ready to
quench my hunger when I got home: and we visited restaurants and theatres
and grouse moors, and we thought of a pretty girl, or girls, and.... But
now that was all impossible. Our conditions forced themselves upon us
without pause: it was not possible to think of anything else. We got no
respite. I found it best to refuse to let myself think of the past or the
future—to live only for the job of the moment, and to compel myself to
think only how to do it most efficiently. Once you let yourself
imagine....

This day also (July 1) we were harassed by a nasty little wind which blew
in our faces. The temperature was -66°, and in such temperatures the
effect of even the lightest airs is blighting, and immediately freezes
any exposed part. But we all fitted the bits of wind-proof lined with
fur which we had made in the hut, across our balaclavas in front of our
noses, and these were of the greatest comfort. They formed other places
upon which our breath could freeze, and the lower parts of our faces were
soon covered with solid sheets of ice, which was in itself an additional
protection. This was a normal and not uncomfortable condition during the
journey: the hair on our faces kept the ice away from the skin, and for
myself I would rather have the ice than be without it, until I want to
get my balaclava off to drink my hoosh. We only made 2¼ miles, and it
took 8 hours.

It blew force 3 that night with a temperature of -65.2°, and there was
some drift. This was pretty bad, but luckily the wind dropped to a light
breeze by the time we were ready to start the next morning (July 2). The
temperature was then -60°, and continued so all day, falling lower in the
evening. At 4 P.M. we watched a bank of fog form over the peninsula to
our left and noticed at the same time that our frozen mitts thawed out on
our hands, and the outlines of the land as shown by the stars became
obscured. We made 2½ miles with the usual relaying, and camped at 8 P.M.
with the temperature -65°. It really was a terrible march, and parts of
both my feet were frozen at lunch. After supper I pricked six or seven of
the worst blisters, and the relief was considerable.

I have met with amusement people who say, "Oh, we had minus fifty
temperatures in Canada; they didn't worry
me
," or "I've been down to
minus sixty something in Siberia." And then you find that they had nice
dry clothing, a nice night's sleep in a nice aired bed, and had just
walked out after lunch for a few minutes from a nice warm hut or an
overheated train. And they look back upon it as an experience to be
remembered. Well! of course as an experience of cold this can only be
compared to eating a vanilla ice with hot chocolate cream after an
excellent dinner at Claridge's. But in our present state we began to look
upon minus fifties as a luxury which we did not often get.

That evening, for the first time, we discarded our naked candle in
favour of the rising moon. We had started before the moon on purpose, but
as we shall see she gave us little light. However, we owed our escape
from a very sticky death to her on one occasion.

It was a little later on when we were among crevasses, with Terror above
us, but invisible, somewhere on our left, and the Barrier pressure on our
right. We were quite lost in the darkness, and only knew that we were
running downhill, the sledge almost catching our heels. There had been no
light all day, clouds obscured the moon, we had not seen her since
yesterday. And quite suddenly a little patch of clear sky drifted, as it
were, over her face, and she showed us three paces ahead a great crevasse
with just a shining icy lid not much thicker than glass. We should all
have walked into it, and the sledge would certainly have followed us
down. After that I felt we had a chance of pulling through: God could not
be so cruel as to have saved us just to prolong our agony.

But at present we need not worry about crevasses; for we had not reached
the long stretch where the moving Barrier, with the weight of many
hundred miles of ice behind it, comes butting up against the slopes of
Mount Terror, itself some eleven thousand feet high. Now we were still
plunging ankle-deep in the mass of soft sandy snow which lies in the
windless area. It seemed to have no bottom at all, and since the snow was
much the same temperature as the air, our feet, as well as our bodies,
got colder and colder the longer we marched: in ordinary sledging you
begin to warm up after a quarter of an hour's pulling, here it was just
the reverse. Even now I find myself unconsciously kicking the toes of my
right foot against the heel of my left: a habit I picked up on this
journey by doing it every time we halted. Well no. Not always. For there
was one halt when we just lay on our backs and gazed up into the sky,
where, so the others said, there was blazing the most wonderful aurora
they had ever seen. I did not see it, being so near-sighted and unable to
wear spectacles owing to the cold. The aurora was always before us as we
travelled east, more beautiful than any seen by previous expeditions
wintering in McMurdo Sound, where Erebus must have hidden the most
brilliant displays. Now most of the sky was covered with swinging,
swaying curtains which met in a great whirl overhead: lemon yellow, green
and orange.

The minimum this night was -65°, and during July 3 it ranged between -52°
and -58°. We got forward only 2½ miles, and by this time I had silently
made up my mind that we had not the ghost of a chance of reaching the
penguins. I am sure that Bill was having a very bad time these nights,
though it was an impression rather than anything else, for he never said
so. We knew we did sleep, for we heard one another snore, and also we
used to have dreams and nightmares; but we had little consciousness of
it, and we were now beginning to drop off when we halted on the march.