Alone (18 page)

Thursday the 14th brought a radio schedule. Murphy was in high humor. He said everything was fine at Little America, and passed on a couple of jokes which he had picked up while chatting with somebody in New York during a broadcast test. "I can't vouch for their authenticity," he said dryly, "because they come secondhand." Then Dr. Poulter came on, with answers to the questions I had asked about the fumes from the stove and the lanterns. From the elegance of the language, I judged he was reading from a prepared statement; I even fancied that I could hear the rustle of the paper in the microphone. If he had been lecture a class in physics at Iowa Wesleyan, he could not have been more earnest, more impersonal.

As between two kind of lamps, Dr. Poulter thought that the storm lantern was the safer. He warned me that, if moisture was consistently present in the fuel, it could cause the stove or lamp to burn with a dirty yellowish flame which would give off some CO. He also advised me to mend all leaks around the burners in the stove where drip or the hot metal would vaporize the kerosene and give rise to nauseating fumes.

That settled the matter temporarily, so far as Dr. Poulter was concerned. As it also did for me, since I had done everything that was humanly possible along the lines suggested. Moreover, I was reluctant to press the matter further, lest I arouse suspicion. Whereupon my Senior Scientist launched into a subject very close to his scientist's heart: meteor observations. Ever since darkness had fallen, he and his crew, in co-operation with observatories scattered throughout the world, had been keeping a continuous watch on the sky for meteors. As I was interested in this and frequently found meteoric fragments in the snow I melted for water, I was informed from time to time about the progress of these observations, either by Dr. Poulter directly or by Charlie Murphy. Into the roof of his own shack at Little America, Dr. Poulter had built a transparent turret, almost flush with the surface, which faced the four quadrants of the sky and was manned continuously by observers when the sky was clear. The results had been phenomenal. On account of the extraordinary clarity of the Antarctic atmosphere, vast numbers of meteors were observed which would not ordinarily be visible through the layer of dust and water particles which obscures the sky over more temperate regions. This was an important astronomical discovery which changed upwards the prevailing estimates of how much material was constantly being received by the earth from this source.

"We're delighted with this piece of research," Dr. Poulter said. "I had no idea that it would turn out so well. Now, we're planning to go a step farther. Demas, as you know, is overhauling the tractors. The canvas tops are being replaced with stout wooden bodies, equipped with bunks, stoves, radio -- complete trail units, in other worlds. What we'd like to do is to take one of the cars out and set up a second meteor station on the Barrier about thirty miles out on the Southern Trail."

"How long expect occupy base?" I keyed back.

"A couple of days, during a clear spell," was the answer in the earphones. "That way, we can get a base line from which to calculate the radients, the altitude at which the meteors enter the atmosphere, and so forth."

"When will tractors be ready?" was my next question.

Poulter wasn't sure. That would depend upon Demas and the mechanics. "But Number One should be ready within a few days."

"Test run?" I guessed.

"To Amundsen Arm [
a heavily crevassed arm of the Bay of Whales, lying about 10 miles south of Little America
] and back," the scientist said. "That's far enough to give us a line on the extent to which the flags are snowed under, and whether we'll be able to follow the trail."

"When?"

"Oh, in about a month. We'll see how things turn out, then we'll discuss the whole project with you."

"OK." I keyed a closing message to Dyer: "Sked Sunday?"

Dyer broke in, "Yes, we shall look for you at the usual time Sunday. Good night, sir. This is KFZ signing off." That was Dyer, as brilliant a young man as ever served under me, never ruffled, never at a loss, and as courteous as the winter night was long.

Curiously, the implications of the proposition at first passed over my head, so casually was it presented. Perhaps in my weariness I could not see them. Only once before had anyone seriously undertaken a major journey during the Antarctic winter night. [The celebrated winter journey made on foot from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier by Dr. Wilson, Cherry-Gerrard, Evans, and Bowers of the Scott expedition.] The cold was too great for dogs, and for airplanes the risks -- particularly those surrounding a forced landing -- were almost overwhelming. A month is a long time in the Antarctic; the best-laid plans have a way of vanishing into thin air. We shall see, I muttered to myself as I stumbled into the tunnel to shut off the engine. It did not occur to me for an instant that this development could have any connection with my dwindling fortunes. Nor was it so intended at Little America.

As had the others, this schedule left me worn out; the difference was the speed with which I recuperated. Toward late afternoon, after several hours in the bunk, I felt strong enough to attempt a stroll -- the first in a fortnight. Or perhaps "stroll" isn't quite the word, because I leaned on a bamboo staff and rested every other step to catch my breath and calm the rapid beating of my heart. Altogether I did not walk more than twenty yards, but I was grateful for that little. You are getting well, I told myself; and the words sounded convincing.

I do not recall ever seeing the aurora more active. Even through the ventilator I could see flashes of it. In addition to the regular "obs," I made several other excursions topside to watch the show. The sky had been obscured all day, but in the evening the clouds seemed to roll back especially for the aurora. At first it was a sheaf of tremulous rays; then it became a great river of silver shot through with flaming gold. About 10:30 o'clock, when I pushed open the trapdoor for a last look, it was a swollen mass of gauzy vapor which lay sprawled uneasily through the zenith, between the northern and southern horizons. It began to pulsate, gently at first, then faster and faster. The whole structure dissolved into a system of virescent arches, all sharply defiant. Above these revolved battery upon battery of searchlights, which fanned the heavens with a heightening lustrousness. Pale greens and reds and yellows touched the stately structures; the whole dark sky came to life.

The graceful, trembling movements were somehow suggestively feminine. I sat and watched, my weakness momentarily forgotten. Swinging faster and faster, the criss-crossing rays suddenly became curling spirals which heaved into a system of immense convolutions, all profoundly agitated and touched with a fragile coloration. In an instant the immense arrangement was gone, as if drained though a spigot. All that remained were a few rays whose sthenic excitement was a signal saying: "It's not over yet, not yet."

Gazing up from under the trapdoor, I divined that a climax was coming. And then from all around the horizon -- north, east, south, and west -- there leaped up countless numbers of towering rays, as though a great city were springing from sleep to finger the sky for air raiders. The columns of light would rush two-thirds of the way up to the zenith, slide back with a draining of color, then surge up again. Finally, with a mighty push, they freed themselves from the horizon, gliding with infinite grace into the zenith. There, in the height of the sky, they flowered in the surpassing geometry of a corona, laced with gorgeous streams of radial light. And red Mars and the Southern Cross and Orion's belted brightness were contrastingly as pale as the candles in the shack.

*****

On Friday the 15th the temperature rose to 7 degrees in the early morning, then turned and nose-dived through the minus 20's. Rime sheathed everything in a swollen insulation. The wind vane was stuck, and in the forenoon I climbed the anemometer pole to free it and clean the copper contact points at the same time. ("I haven't yet sufficient strength to do this sort of thing -- it took a tremendous lot out of me," the diary says.) Saturday was pitch-black. The barometer dropped to 28.04 inches, after a long, slow fall; and the days of quietude were broken by the wind, which made up afresh in the northeast. Snow fell, and drift surged over the Barrier in wind-flattened rushes. All day long there was a steady spiraling of drift through the ventilator and part of the stovepipe. After the windless silence, the sound of the storm was singularly exciting; its distant thumping reminded me of my returning strength and security. I found that I could read again, without hurting my eyes, and spent a wonderful hour or so finishing Marquand's tale about that eccentric eighteenth-century gentleman, Lord Timothy Dexter. Later, I played the phonograph, for the first time in nearly a week. It seems incredible that a person should lack strength to wind such a small spring, but this was the case. I remember the records well, having noted them in the diary. One was "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers"; the other, "Holy Night," sung by Lucy Marsh. The last one of my favorites, especially the melody in the beginning, which goes:

Oh, Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining
'Tis the night of our dear Saviour's birth.

After this came an unintelligible sentence, followed by a phrase about a thrill of hope. In the past I had played the record over and over again, trying to make out the words so that I could sing them. I have never succeeded; and that day I vowed that, if I came out of this affair alive, I would lead a national reform movement insisting upon clearer diction by sopranos for the peace of mind of explorers who might be tempted to take up singing late in life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Nine -- JUNE III: THE PROPOSAL

Back To Previous Page

June was a period of marches and counter-marches, of victories and retreats. Now I was overtaken by the first serious reverse since May's disastrous ending. The 17th was a Sunday -- a radio schedule day. My diary has no entry covering the date for the reason that I could not summon up the will to write. All the ground that had been so painfully recovered meanwhile was whipped from under my feet in a single morning.

June 18
. . . Yesterday my invisible enemy struck again. The engine had been running badly toward the end of my previous schedule, so for this one I started the engine about half an hour before schedule time in order to make whatever adjustments were necessary. As usual, since May 31st, I took the precaution of clearing the ice out of the ventilator over the engine. Tinkered with the mixture valve for about twenty minutes or so; the engine was just running nicely when I felt very dizzy and dropped to my knees. Dropping to my knees was instinctive. I crawled back to my shack, shut the door, and lay on the bunk waiting for schedule time. I believe that I was late coming on and had a very tough time holding out during the conversation. Hope my answers on Charlie's questions satisfied him.

I kept my head low when I turned off the engine, but it was running smoother and there were less fumes. I'm back, I'm afraid, where I was the first four days of this month. I'd like to say more, but for some reason writing is taking too much out of me tonight. The worst of it is that Murphy, Poulter, and Innes-Taylor were standing by to discuss a plan for advancing the date set for the start of the spring operations. Indeed, they are already talking at Little America about the possibilities of laying bases with the tractors as early as August, in order to lengthen the field season and with it the scope of the scientific program. Apparently they have been inspired to attempt this as a result of reconstructing the tractor. But it was all pretty vague.

This entry is significant, at least to me, for what it fails to say. Grim as it is, it does not begin to describe what I went through. All this time I was deliberately understating the facts, since the diary was written primarily for my family, and in case I did not survive they would be spared the unpleasant details of my last days. For example, that evening I was too far gone to go topside for the 8 p.m. observation, or even to transfer data from the automatic instruments to the Weather Bureau form. That night I scarcely slept at all, but tossed instead in my sleeping bag, racked by pain and literally shaken by the thumping in my heart. At times I thought that if this kept up I must go out of my head. I vomited up the little milk I was able to swallow, and my arms were too weak to mop up the mess. Curled up in the bunk, I mumbled like a monk fingering his beads. When my voice stopped, the silence crowded in. In the calm between the rushes of pain I had the sense of waiting, of waiting and listening for something to happen; waiting with a pent-up expectancy that was neither fear nor hope, but rather midway between.

Starting the day had always been hard; now it became a task for Hercules. I had to push the night back and the day ahead; the weight of the solar system cut into my shoulders. It was all I could do to force myself out of the sleeping bag in the morning. By then the stove would have been out at least twelve hours; my lips bled from where my teeth bit into them. You asked for it, the small voice within me said; and here it is. For all my resolve, I doubt whether I'd have been able to survive this second relapse if it had not been for a half a dozen heat pads which I found in a box in the food tunnel.

These little flat pads, shaped like envelopes and weighing about a pound, contained a sandlike chemical which gives off heat when water is added. At night I took two of these pads to bed with me, together with a full thermos jug. On awakening, I'd pour a little water into the pads and knead them gently until the warmth came; then, with a string around my waist, I'd wear them, one fore and one aft, between the pants and underwear. Without refilling, the pads stayed warm for about an hour, by which time the stove would have heated up the shack. I used the pads sparingly, not knowing how long the supply would last; but I blessed the supply officer for the illogical impulse which had prompted him to throw those things into the Advance Base gear.

The days that followed were hardening knots in the strands of the hours. I managed to keep up the observations; I wound the clocks and changed the sheets; and when I couldn't get topside I faithfully copied the data on form 1083. But none of these things seemed to have any connection with reality. While one part of me groped about these tasks, another part seemed to be watching from the bunk. At night it was just as bad. Propped up in the sleeping bag, with the top of a box resting on my knees, I tried to play Canfield. The baffling weakness in my arms as I dealt out the cards continued to vex me unreasonably; when the game went against me I threw the cards on the deck. I picked up Ludwig's
Napoleon
, but after a page or two the letters became blurred and my eyes ached. You can't go on, the querulous small voice insisted. This is habit carrying on, not you. You are through.

Wednesday noon, June 20th, with two heat pads belted around my waist and wearing furs, I climbed topside to escape the unmitigated gloom of the shack. A heap of drift lay in the lee of the stovepipe; on this I sat, too exhausted to walk. It was snowing gently. In the east and south the horizon was as dark as the Barrier itself; but in the north a watery smear of crimson rouged the horizon line, the farthest light that the vanished sun could throw past the earth's round. The winter night was approaching its climax. In two days would come the winter solstice, when the sun, at its maximum declination of 23-1/2 degrees below the horizon, would stand still on its northward journey, and then head back into the Southern Hemisphere.

Beyond the Barrier, beyond Little America, and beyond the frozen wastes of the Ross Sea, the sun was still performing its daily, inevitable miracle. It was queer to think that at a calculable instant warmth and light were washing into one part of the world as they ebbed from another. That in some longitudes millions of people were going to bed, and in other longitudes other millions, speaking different languages, were responding to different compulsions, were awakening to the full light of day. All that seemed unbearably remote. Where I was, it would take the sun as long to return as it had taken it to go. Here it was June. It would be August 27 -- by the nautical almanac and a little arithmetic -- before the sun returned to Latitude 80 degrees 08 minutes South. And by that time I should be past caring.

But you have been through the worst of it, the inner voice said; now is the time for stocktaking. Every day after the solstice the sun would climb a little higher, and the light in the north would wax a little stronger at noon; and every day, as the dawn-light washed in over the Barrier, the flag-marked trail between Advance Base and Little America would be lifted a little out of darkness and toward the light. But you won't see it accomplished, the inner voice said; yet something desperate within me denied the prophecy. For, if I had one incorruptible hope now, it was to see the sun and the daylight marching over the Barrier. That much at least I must have; the will to live would concede nothing short of it.

As I sat there, this thought suddenly brought to mind the idle conversation that Little America had had with me over starting base-laying operations with the return of the sun in August. For the first time I perceived a possible relevance to my own desperate affairs. They must come this way --
they must come here
. Now at last I had an overwhelming incentive for wanting to see the sun.

Until then I had paid little attention to the base-laying talk, leaving it for the officers at Little America to decide for themselves the details of these preliminary operations. There were two directions these operations would take. One was to the east, toward Marie Byrd Land. The other was to the south toward the Queen Mauds. The second would carry them past my door; and since this was so, the conviction took root in my mind that I owed it to my family and myself to bring them here first, and at the earliest date consistent with safety. This was the only sensible attitude to take. The next day was schedule day. When I talked to Little America tomorrow, I would give Poulter a carefully-phrased directive, urging him to hasten preparations for the early journey, and yet phrased so carefully that he would have no reason to read any personal urgency into it. It had to be handled that way or not at all.

Having made this resolve, I went below feeling more hopeful than I had felt in nearly four months. In the diary that evening I wrote, ". . . For the first time since the 16th I feel strong enough not to find writing a chore. The sun is a long way off, but October is a whole light year farther. If they will only change the radio schedule to the afternoon, my cup will be running over."

*****

In the morning I met Little America on the dot. "Congratulations on the punctuality," Charlie Murphy said. "How come you were so curt with us last Sunday?"

The directness of the question took me aback for an instant. Well, the truth would do no harm. I keyed a short message saying that fumes from the engine had made me feel "rocky," and I had therefore decided to shut down until I could find out what was wrong.

"Is everything all right now?" Charlie wanted to know.

"OK."

"Good."

"Thanks," I replied. Then, to disarm any possible suspicion, I gave him a brief report on how I averted monotony -- a grim and for me humorless digest of the tricks I had used in May, by then an eternity once removed.

"Myself, I just count sheep by the millions," Charlie agreeably said. "And before I forget it, Tractor Number One is having its coming-out party tomorrow, if weather holds good. Poulter and Demas are taking it for a short trial spin. That is, if we can muster enough hands to dig away about fifty tons of snow from the garage ramp so as to get the damn thing on the surface."

My heart went up at that. "Have message for Poulter," I said.

"All right. John is ready."

Although I didn't know it then, Poulter was working in the radio shack, virtually at Dyer's elbow.

The message was brief and matter of fact. Giving as my reasons the depleted state of the expedition treasury and the consequent necessity of winding up our affairs as rapidly as possible after the arrival of the ships from New Zealand, I said that I favored a very early start of field operations and that, if it were practicable, I should probably take advantage of the base-laying trip south to return to Little America somewhat earlier than I had expected to. I ended up with the usual admonition to prepare carefully and wait for ample daylight on the Barrier.

Dyer read back the message without comment.

"OK," I said. The last thing Dyer did before signing off was to advance the schedules to 2 o'clock in the afternoon, in response to my previous request.

"I hope this will be satisfactory," he said.

"Fine."

Then we shut down.

*****

Friday the 22nd was wine in a glass. This was the day the sun stood still on the turntable of the solstice. A mackerel sky and a gliding half-moon. The temperature was 50 degrees below, the coldest registration thus far in June. Next day was just as cold, just as clear; but the moon was rounding out and looked like an ancient silver coin, a little squashed out on one side. I was learning new things about myself. Whereas, seventy-two hours before I was reconciled to the hopeless business of waiting for help until October, now my hopes were clasping the end of August. I couldn't think of anything else. and yet, there was no peace in it. My good sense would not let me be. With the best of fortunes it would still be a struggle for men to make good the distance between Little America and Advance Base. The Col on Mount Everest is no more punishing than the Barrier at the end of the winter night. There must be no mistakes, no rash plans. The whole idea might fall dead at my feet.

June 23
For the last few days I've had a rough time. In an effort to rid my body of the poison and so get my strength back, I have lain in the sleeping bag hour after hour, with the fire out and even the lantern dark. I have no appetite, but I force myself to eat.

June 24
Still feeling miserable. Today on the schedule, Bailey asked me to move my schedule back to the morning, explaining that the new time interrupted Little America's midday schedules with the U.S. When I asked Dyer how important this was, he said it was up to me, and that he was agreeable to continuing our afternoon schedule. "Then let it stand," I said. And yet, Bailey's request, was on second thought a good sign. Proof to me that the men at Little America, always independent and touchy about their rights, construed my own request as nothing worse than an arbitrary whim on the part of the C.O. to coddle himself.

June 25
Nothing . . . nothing. . . .

June 26
I've been counting calories, and find that I average about 1,200 daily. Not enough. I should average about 2,500. This morning, for the sake of the extra calories, I melted a big chunk of butter into the hot, sweet milk. Supper menu tonight: dried lima beans, rice, and tomatoes, plus canned turnip tops, plus Virginia ham. I'm eating more nowadays, but my appetite is zero.

June 27
Nothing -- and yet, there must be countless things to write about, if I had the will to look. . . .

Next day brought news in plenty. I met the radio schedule on time. Dyer said briskly and with characteristic Yankee understatement: "Doc and Charlie are both waiting. I think you will be interested in what they have to say."

Tractor Number One, with Poulter himself aboard, two days before had made the trial run through Amundsen Arm and to the crest of high Barrier just beyond, approximately eleven miles south of Little America. "Everything went very nicely," Poulter said. "We side-stepped the crevasses and had no special difficulty following the trail. The flags are standing all right, and don't seem to have been frayed much by the wind. Just about the time we'd have one flag abeam, the next flag would be showing up in the headlights. However, I may be able to throw together a makeshift searchlight, which ought to help a lot.