Death on the Ice (21 page)

‘Shackle, hold his arms.’

Scott fetched the small vial of cocaine solution from Wilson’s medical kit. They had all had some symptoms of snow-blindness, mainly the scratchy, sand-in-the-eye sensation, which caused agony when blinking. Wilson’s, though, was by far the worse case; it was likely the glare had burnt the retina. He said it was as if someone had scored the conjunctiva with a razor blade and then thrown salt into the wounds.

‘I’m going to try and lift up the lid so I can get the liquid under it.’

‘Be careful.’

Scott had only touched the puffy membrance when Wilson let out a yelp. One of the dogs replied from outside with a heartfelt howl.

‘How come the blasted huskies don’t get it?’ Wilson moaned. ‘They don’t have goggles.’ But he knew they had nictitating membranes, a third eyelid, to help protect their corneas.

‘Look, Billy, Christmas tomorrow,’ said Shackle, his voice low and raspy from serving his continuous tickly cough. ‘You’ll need your eyes for that.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Wilson, with uncharacteristic cynicism, ‘I wouldn’t want to miss the tree and decorations. Aargh. Scott, you bloody oaf.’

Scott had never witnessed Wilson swearing before. It was as unlikely as hearing his mother curse. ‘All right. Doctor, heal thy self. Do you want to do it?’

Wilson stopped squirming. ‘Sorry, Con. Go ahead.’

Scott managed to prise the lid up enough to squirt a good dose of the cocaine into the eye. ‘There. I’ll do the zinc sulphate later.’

Wilson continued to roll about and complain for a few minutes, but soon the drug had the desired effect, numbing the pain. Shackleton indicated they should go outside. The dogs stirred, expecting food, but the pair walked on, automatically striding further south, if only for a few paces. ‘We’ll have to take another dog soon,’ Scott said.

‘We?’ Shackleton said, bemused.

‘It’s a sordid business. But I’ll give it a go.’

‘You’d mess it up, skip. You have to be bold, so Billy said.’ He mimed stabbing with a ferociousness that made Scott flinch.

‘We are going to be pretty short to the Pole, aren’t we?’

They both examined the great exuberance of mountains and ice fields that lay to the West. Appropriately enough, much of the dusting over the soaring peaks seemed like marzipan on a Christmas cake.

‘We have to find a way to get past those first. It’s like God is guarding his crown jewel, keeping the Pole from human eyes.’

On the few occasions they had deviated and headed for land, their route had always been blocked by fearsome fields of ice-blocks and dizzying crevasses crossed only by unstable snow bridges. Even when they were roped together and climbing with ice axes, the obstacles defeated them.

‘Should we turn?’ Shackleton asked. ‘Given Billy’s eyes?’

‘The noon latitude was eighty-one point thirty-three South,’ Scott reminded him.

‘And you want eighty-two.’ It wasn’t really a question.

A muffled moan came from inside the tent. Surely the cocaine would last longer than that?

‘I do. You don’t?’

‘What does Billy think?’

‘A little further.’

‘Did he say that before or after his eyes were replaced by hot coals?’

‘He’ll walk blindfold if he has to.’

‘I know he will,’ replied Shackleton. ‘But should he have to?’ He tapped his cotton jacket. Through all his layers he could still feel his ribs. Stabs of deep pain, too wretched to be mere hunger, were plaguing his abdomen. He felt as if he were consuming himself from within. ‘We’re starving, skipper. You know that.’

Scott nodded. His urine was a strange colour now, and he could tell his muscles were wasting. ‘Yes. But we have plenty at Depot B for when we turn. It needs to be a little blacker before we give in.’

Shackleton resisted the urge to laugh in his face. His own lungs and throat were burning. Wilson was blind and Scott, with his hollow cheeks and burnt, wrinkled skin, looked like an old man. They’d all either chipped or cracked teeth on semi-thawed seal meat and could only sleep with heavily tightened belts. How much blacker did it need to be? But having been the one who curtailed the expedition last time, he kept his silence.

Scott interpreted the lack of reply as agreement. ‘So we go on. We should feed the dogs and make supper while Bill’s quiet.’

‘Yes.’

‘And put your goggles on if you are going to stare at the ice.’

‘I will.’ But Shackleton stayed where he was, watching the clouds scurry over the corkscrewed mountains, feeling a sharp blast on his face, stinging like shotgun pellets. He pulled the improvised windguard on his helmet forward. A wire ring held the cloth a few inches away from the face, so that he now saw life down a canvas tube. But it cut the exposure and the chance of frost-nip. Shackleton spoke to himself softly, reciting the poem he had written during the long night that now seemed so distant: ‘We leave our pleasant homelands, for the roaring south-east winds, all words of love and friendship, for yearning hearts and minds, for clasps of loving fingers, dreams must alone.’

He saw fingers of spindrift reaching out from the distinctive peak they had christened Mt Longstaff; a pair of them, like the devil’s horns. All around him the surface ice blew like sand, a fine mist tracking over the wastes. As the same wind found the cracks in his clothes, he prayed his mentor and sponsor would never be unlucky enough to see his namesake.

Shackleton took four paces, opened the front of his britches and, careful to cup exposed flesh in the fur of his mittens, made the snow yellow. He’d already had a bad bout of diarrhoea, and a frost-dappled arse to show for it. He didn’t want anything else on his body turning black and blistering. That would be rather difficult to explain to Emily on their wedding night.

He realised rather guiltily that it was some days since he had thought of her. Over winter, especially when he read mildly erotic verses on the
Discovery
, she had been a constant presence. As for most of the men, Gilbert’s turn as a cabin girl during the winter shows had aroused in him old urges. But Emily’s spectral presence hadn’t followed him out on to the barrier. Starvation had the effect of diminishing sexual hunger.

‘There’s not sufficient here for the dogs,’ he heard Scott yell. ‘Wolf’s pretty much gone.’

‘Brownie?’ Shackleton shouted back as he fastened himself up.

‘Brownie,’ Scott confirmed.

‘I’ll do it.’

‘You sure?’

Shackleton mumbled his reply. ‘One of us has to be man enough to do it. And they call Royds girlish.’ Then he raised his voice again. ‘No problem, skipper.’

Shackleton sighed, coughed, and went to fetch the blood-marked scalpel from the sledge. He hoped he got Brownie’s heart first dig.

Shackleton didn’t write up his account of Christmas Day till the twenty-sixth, after he had milked his companions’ surprise at his resourcefulness for all it was worth. Against all odds, the spirit of the day really did descend on the tent. Wilson recovered in one eye and managed with a bandage on the other, so he looked like a sun-ravaged pirate.

Shackleton smiled at the memory of his friends’ faces and, while the Boxing Day breakfast cooked, he jotted into his notebook:

Christmas Day

Beautiful day, the warmest we have yet had—clear blue sky.

We have made our best march, doing today ten geographical miles; we are entirely doing the pulling, the dogs being practically useless.

Started breakfast at 8.30, Billy cook.

Christmas breakfast: a pannikin of seal’s liver, with bacon mixed with biscuits, topped with a spoonful of blackberry jam; then I set the camera, and we took our photographs with the Union Jack flying and our sledge flags—I again arranged this by connecting a piece of rope line to the lever. Then four hours’ march. Had a hot lunch. I was cook:- Bovril, chocolate and Plasmon biscuit; two spoonfuls of jam each—Grand! Then another three hours’ march and we camped for the night. I was cook and took thirty-five minutes to cook two pannikins of N.A.O. ration and biscuit for the hoosh, boiled the plum pudding, and made cocoa. I must, of course, own up that I boiled the plum pudding in the water I boiled the cocoa in, for economy’s sake, but I think it was fairly quick time. The other two chaps did not know about the plum pudding. It only weighed six oz. And I had stowed it away in my socks (clean ones) in my sleeping bag, with a little piece of holly. It was a glorious surprise to them—that plum pudding, when I produced it. They immediately got our emergency allowance of brandy so as to set it on fire in proper style. We turned in really full.

The hunger came back, though, and Wilson’s eyes plagued him again over Boxing Day breakfast. Shackleton, too, had been feeling the grit of snowblindness. While they were packing up, he surreptitiously touched his aching gums and came away with blood on his fingerstips. He quickly wiped it off.

They moved on, Shackleton leading, a blindfolded Wilson also pulling with Scott steering and whipping the increasingly reluctant dogs. A silver fog surrounded them that night and persisted till they made camp on the last day of the year, when it finally lifted.

All around them they heard the booms and groans of the ice shifting and the strange miniature earthquakes that froze the heart. Sometimes they were convinced they were like fleas or lice, walking over the back of a giant creature, one that occasionally shifted and scratched at them.

The cliffs of the coastline, where ice barrier met land, were magnificent, often streaked in red or a dark brown. Scott estimated they were ten or twelve miles away, and they looked as formidably impenetrable as ever.

Scott took his sightings, checked the sledgemeter and announced his findings. ‘We are at eighty-two point sixteen South.’

Lips cracked once more as a smiling—and relieved—Shackleton and Wilson shook hands and then crossed to Scott. They were well past the eighty-second parallel. A new Farthest South by a great margin.

‘Well done, Con,’ said Wilson.

Scott gave a ridiculous little dance, spinning with an imaginary partner, drilling a hole in the snow, then fell down laughing, panting with the exertion. ‘But I think we have shot our bolt,’ Scott gasped. ‘We have two weeks’ worth of food to get us back to the depot. We must turn.’

There was no argument. Shackleton seemed to stagger at the news. When he took off the hat that had been shading his face, Scott was shocked at how liverish he looked. He struggled to his feet.

‘But shall we ski on a few miles?’ Scott asked. ‘To be certain? Shackle?’

‘Very well.’

‘I think not,’ said Wilson softly, putting a hand on Shackleton’s shoulder. ‘Rest might be better. Given your condition.’

‘Is that the physician speaking?’

‘Physician and friend.’

Shackleton was about to object, but then he slumped down on to the lead sled. ‘I’ll look after the dogs. You two go.’

‘Sure?’ asked Scott.

‘Yes.’ Shackleton put his head between his knees. He let himself cough freely for a whole minute. ‘I’ll be cook. You go.’

Wilson and Scott strapped themselves on to the wooden skis and set off, goggles carefully positioned. Wilson’s right eye was still covered by cloth, the other red and swollen.

They shushed through the snow, making good progress, till, after an hour, a fog bank loomed ahead. Under their skis, cracks had appeared in the ice, radiating from the mountains ahead, or so it seemed. Another ten minutes produced furrows, as if an ice-farmer had ploughed his fields, and the skis began to lose their grip as the land rose slightly to an incline.

They stood silently for a few minutes, watching the atmosphere play its tricks, distorting distance and size, taunting them to come on. Just a little further. The mountains are really close. You can reach out and touch them. One more push, boys. There really were sirens in this world, luring men to certain death, Scott thought, but not always at sea.

As soon as he thought that, a fog came down, obscuring the cliffs and shrouding the mountains, reducing them to distant silhouettes, a long, long way off. The mists seem to move, alternating in density, revealing some peaks, while obscuring others. It was just the high winds, he knew, but it was like watching a dance of the seven veils.

‘I think this is as far as we can go, Bill. It’s reached the tipping point. Every day I have weighed it up. On one pan, the danger of going on. The other side of the scales, the drive to go further, to achieve Farthest South or find a route through those mountains. You understand? I have always looked at the equations, Bill. It’s not blind ambition.’

Wilson realised Scott was apologising for bringing them on so far, for the pain it had given them. ‘I appreciate that. If I thought you were risking our lives unnecessarily, I would have said so.’

‘I hope so, Bill. I hope so. And now the. scales have moved.’

‘He’s all done, you know. Shackle. Like a balloon slowly deflating.’

‘I know.’

‘You must not be too hard on him.’

‘Am I being?’

‘No more than on yourself, perhaps, but he feels your disappointment in him. Or imagines he does.’

‘We all have our crosses.’ Scott gently tapped Wilson’s shin with the big ski pole. ‘How’s the leg?’

Wilson had been gamely trying to hide a limp since Christmas Day. ‘You noticed? Comes and goes. The ankles?’

Scott grimaced at the thought of the constant throbbing throughout the night he had endured. ‘Sore as hell. I’m ready, too. It’s almost 1903, Bill. We’ve been gone two months. It’s time to go home.’

Wilson touched the prayer book in his jacket and hoped they hadn’t left it too late for all three to return safely to
Discovery
. Despite what he had said, he feared the margin was too thin. So, although Wilson hadn’t guessed it, did Robert Falcon Scott.

T
HE SKY, PREVIOUSLY SO
clear and blue, was quickly darkened by the arrival of the swarming pigeons. The treacly air pulsed with their massed wing beats. Lieutenant Porter stepped from the shade of the makeshift hide the Sheikh had arranged, shouldered his rifle, and began firing into the flock. Three birds instantly detached and spun down to earth.