Death on the Ice (54 page)

God could, indeed, be on their side.

Scott excused himself and went into the tent to write up his journal.

I wonder what is in store for us. At present everything seems to be going with extraordinary smoothness, and one can scarcely believe that obstacles will not present themselves to make our task more difficult.

Wilson entered and began to set up the primus stove. In all the excitement, they were late with dinner. ‘Everyone seems in good spirits.’

Scott, writing, was only lending half an ear. ‘Yes.’

‘Oates has lost his pipe. Reckons he dropped it saying goodbye to Teddy and the others.’

‘Shame.’

‘You know, Taff cut his hand when he was sawing those sledges down.’

‘Hhhmm.’

‘Won’t let me look at it.’

‘He’s a big strong lad.’

‘I suppose. Hoosh?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Dinner? How about hoosh for a change?’

‘Why not?’ asked Scott, with a grin.

‘Good choice, if I may say so.’

By the time they had eaten, Scott’s words had come back to haunt him.
One can scarcely believe that obstacles will not present themselves to make our task more difficult.

At close to ten thousand feet, the food was difficult enough to heat through properly at the best of times. Once Wilson had made his hoosh and Scott had checked the total cooking time, a niggling fact occurred to him. At that altitude, it took a lot longer to melt ice and prepare food for five than it did for four. Which meant they consumed considerably more fuel. They would need every ounce of Taff’s and Bowers’s considerable strength to keep ahead of that curve, he thought glumly.

I wonder what is in your log? I would love to be able to read it, to hear what you are experiencing. And when the ship arrives, and you come back from your adventure in the South, you will find my journal with my last entry in October and therefore so, so out of date. Such a gap between the doing and the reading of it. In those pages I said that we were lucky dogs, you and I. Now I am not so sure. The separation is hard for Peter and me. I have been keeping track of where you might be. It is January. About now you must be turning around. Oh dear, if I could only know how you have fared. The waiting would be a lot less agony. I wonder if you thought of me on New Year’s Eve—I went lonely to bed quite forgetting it was New Year’s Eve, but I woke up in the night hearing, I thought, three loud taps. I lit the light and found it was exactly midnight. I lay and thought about you so perhaps it was you who woke me—oh darling, I do so love you and so hope you haven’t forgotten me. Oh, I so hope you are turning around, back towards me.

T
HE ONLY CONSTANT OF
the next few days was pain, thought Oates. Every pressure sent a jagged lance of agony from the ball of his foot. No matter how much padding he put in the boot, it was as if the flesh had been stripped from his soles and he was skiing on the uncovered bone. The leg, too, was giving him some trouble, the wound burning like fire or sometimes turning down to a dull but constant ache. Trying to favour the right meant his hips and lower back hurt.

Antarctica also seemed to have waited till all support had gone before launching an attack on them. ‘Just like the Boers,’ he muttered to himself. Now, at their most vulnerable, the plateau began to hamper their progress. First came more of that strange, sticky snow, then the sastrugi began to switch and turn, becoming cross hatched in places, so it was difficult to get any sort of rhythm going. The confusing, undulating surface meant Bowers slithered and stumbled in the traces.

‘Halt!’

Scott raised an arm and they stopped. Now came the agony of muscles cramping and burning. It was too early for lunch, so Oates wondered why he had arrested their painful progress.

‘I think,’ said Scott through his wind-chapped lips, ‘we should try without the skis. These sastrugi are not good.’ He bent down and snapped off one of the fish-hooked tops. ‘We are in danger of breaking one of the skis.’

‘Now we’ll see who pulls the best,’ says Bowers, pleased they would all be on an equal footing.

They strapped their skis to the sledge and as they did so, Taff Evans suddenly let out an exclamation.

‘What is it?’

‘There’s a sleeping bag missing,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘There’re only four, skipper.’ Taff looked as if he were about to cry, even though it wasn’t he who had strapped them on. ‘Only four.’ His lower lip began to quiver.

‘Oh, for God’s sake. Who—’

Scott stopped himself when Wilson put a hand on his shoulder. ‘It doesn’t matter who. Only how. As in, how long ago do we think it fell off?’

Nobody could say. Wilson volunteered to return and search for the lost item and Oates went with him.

‘Are you all right, Soldier?’ Wilson asked as they shushed back over their tracks, making good time with a following wind and no sledge.

‘Well enough, Bill.’

‘I never knew the bullet wound was quite so bad till that night in the tent. Shattered the bone, you said. Does it trouble you?’

‘Not really.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes. I wish I’d known.’

‘Would you have stopped me coming?’

Wilson said nothing.

‘Is PO all right?’

‘Taff? He’s pulling as well as ever.’

That wasn’t what he meant. Oates could recall being so tired he wanted to sob, but it hadn’t happened on this trip. Not yet. But he sometimes saw that moment in Taff’s trembling lip, a look of total despondency. They skied on in silence.

‘There it is,’ said Wilson.

It cost them less than an hour in all before they had returned and were ready to move the sledge on foot, having stowed the skis once more. The increased effort made Oates sweat in his clothes. He had to lean forward at a steeper angle, and the sinking of the boots made for a much tougher march. Nobody spoke; each just found their own way of tugging. The slog caused his old wound to grumble even more.

The others, so they said, thought about food while they hauled. Oates dreamed of warmth. He had forgotten what it felt like for all of his body to be at normal temperature. Something—feet, hands, face—always seemed to be frozen, even in the tent. He often imagined the drawing room of Gestingthorpe with the eternal fire, never extinguished, always stoked by Gilbert. It was a challenge to remember how it felt to be toast-warm, to sweat fluid that didn’t start to chill within seconds, To feel safe and content.

‘Halt.’

The men stumbled to a stop.

‘We camp.’

Already? Thought Oates.

The hoosh was thick with biscuit that night, and as they ate, Scott announced that they had passed Shackleton’s Furthest South. They all gave a ragged cheer. Even the wind gave a hoot, it seemed.

‘How far to go?’ asked Taff Evans wearily. ‘In time, I mean, not miles.’

‘A week, if we can stay in double figures,’ replied Scott, still glowing from having surpassed his old friend and rival. ‘But I fear we must go back to the skis. Is that all right, Birdie?’

Bowers nodded. The constant sinking of his legs in the drifts made for terrible cramps and aches, but he would plough on. Oh, for a firmer crust. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘We’ll have to make one more dump and we can lighten the sledge for the last day or two’s march.’

The men began the difficult manoeuvre of settling into position for the meal without encroaching on anyone else’s space. Elbows were lethal weapons in such tight surroundings. If they were all the size of Bowers, it would be no problem, thought Oates, but he and Taff felt like giants. It was worse when they slept, because someone inevitably pushed against the walls, letting cold air or snow in as the side parted from the groundsheet.

‘Ow.’ Taff said it involuntarily as he gripped his spoon awkwardly.

‘Can I see that hand, Taff?’ asked Wilson.

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Nevertheless, PO.’

‘Do as he says,’ said Scott firmly.

Taff reluctantly unwrapped the dirty bandage covering his wound and held his hand out. All could see the crimson gash across the palm, its edges blackened and puckered.

‘For God’s sake, Taff, that needs a decent dressing.’

‘Had worse.’

‘I don’t doubt it. At sea level. Not in this cold. I’ll bandage it before we set off.’

‘As you wish, Dr Wilson.’

They ate on for a while, lost in their thoughts.

‘What’ll you do when you get back, Taff?’ asked Birdie, trying to lighten the seaman’s mood. He appreciated it must be hard being the only rating in a tent full of officers.

‘Me? I’ll open a pub. The South Pole.’

They all laughed. ‘What?’ he asked, baffled by the response.

‘The trick to owning a public house, PO,’ said Scott softly, ‘is to make sure there is some ale left over for the public to buy’

This time Taff joined in the laughter. ‘You can josh me all you like. I don’t think you understand. A Welshman at the South Pole. I’ll be famous, man. Famous.’

‘What about you, Soldier?’ asked Wilson.

‘Back to the army.’

‘Pah,’ said Wilson. ‘You can’t just go back to the ordinary army after this.’

‘Watch me.’

‘Is there no other ambition?’ Wilson asked.

There’s one, Oates thought. There is a little girl I’d like to find. But he shook his head. ‘To win the Military Cup, perhaps.’

‘No sweetheart?’ the doctor pressed.

‘The only woman I have ever loved is my mother.’

‘Here, here!’ shouted Bowers.

Scott thought of Hannah and raised his pannikin of cocoa. ‘To mothers.’

‘To mothers!’

For the next few days, the surface was bad and the sun misted over so comprehensively it could hardly be distinguished. They managed between six and ten miles a day, leaving frequent marker cairns to help them navigate on their return. When they camped on 12 January, nobody could get warm; all shivered in their bags, apart from Bowers. He sat half out of his, writing up his sitings and checking and rechecking the food stocks and denoting arrangements, which he confirmed were still very satisfactory. ‘No reason why we shouldn’t make it,’ he concluded. ‘None at all.’

‘If God will just send us some better weather,’ said Oates.

‘And smoother surfaces,’ Scott added.

Bowers and Wilson, the two most religious men, said nothing,

Scott noted down that Oates seemed to have the most trouble of all with the chill, his teeth chattering. Taff Evans, uncharacteristically, complained of cold feet. Scott, too, found his hands shaking, even with a warm pannikin in them. He checked the temperature, but it wasn’t particularly low, around minus eleven. This was fifteen or more degrees warmer than they had been experiencing at night, and with little wind. So why were they so frozen?
Must be a damp in the air
, he wrote in his dairy. And then he prayed that’s all it was.

T
OM CREAN THOUGHT HE
had never heard an officer apologise quite so profusely. Not one like Teddy Evans at any rate. Lashly, too, raised his snow-frosted eyebrows to show his surprise.

‘Let you down. Sorry,’ said Evans. ‘I really am. Don’t know what I was thinking.’

The three of them, still in harness, were standing at the top of an icefall; below them was the glacier. They had come too far across to the West and were now facing the most heavily crevassed section of the Beardmore, the one Shackleton had warned them about. There was little they could make out through the silvery mist that swirled across the ice. Where it did part they could see the tell-tale blue glint of canyons. Cherry had called the ones they had experienced on the ascent ‘as big as Regent Street’. In which case, they were facing canyons the size of a small town. Deny, perhaps, thought Crean.

‘We could go back around,’ Evans said, pointing with his pole. They had detoured to miss another set of fissures and had clearly chosen the wrong way. It would lose them another day to go back. They had been hauling for a week since they left the polar party and it had been hellish, especially for Crean, who had suffered an instant attack of snowblindess.

Evans sounded weary. His eyes were going, just as Crean’s were getting better. Goggles didn’t seem to help. He had complained of pains behind his knees, too.

‘They should have reached the Pole by now,’ said Crean absentmindedly.

‘Yes,’ said Lashly. ‘In better shape than we are, I hope.’

Pulling with just three men was bone-breaking, far harder than they had imagined. All of them had damaged muscles and tendons, and they were still a long way from home. ‘Unless that blizzard hit them too.’ A squall had cost them a day in the tent.

‘Well,’ said Crean, ‘I vote we go down.’

‘We have no crampons,’ said Evans tetchily. ‘We wouldn’t last fifty yards. We’ll have to go back.’

‘There isn’t enough food allowance,’ said Lashly. ‘But, Tom, I’m not sure we should try and ski down.’

‘I’m not suggesting, we ski down. I’m suggesting we go down on that.’

Evans began to laugh; a high girlish sound, thought Tom.

‘You are joking,’ said Lashly, following where the ski pole was pointing. ‘On the sledge?’

‘It’s been snowing. There’ll be bridges.’

‘Shackleton said some of the crevasses were two hundred feet across. What kind of bridge are you expecting?’

‘The Norskies do it. What have we got to lose?’

‘Our lives,’ suggested Lashly.

‘Oh, those,’ said Tom blithely. When Evans wasn’t looking he made some signals to Lashly about his officer. But he couldn’t convey what he was really thinking. Pains behind the knees. One of the symptoms of scurvy. If that had struck them, there would be no spare days to lose.

‘Very well,’ said Lashly. ‘But if I die in the trying, I’ll never forgive you. Sir? All right with you?’

Evans looked panicked at the thought, but could conjure up no reasonable alternative. ‘Very well. If we must.’

They unharnessed and stowed the traces. The skis were strapped on the sledge, but Crean suggested they keep the poles for steering. The load was redistributed to make three places for them to sit. Then they hauled the sledge to the lip of the icefall. Crean sat astride at the front, Evans in the middle, Lashly bringing up the rear.