The Home Of The Blizzard Part 36

We hurried through breakfast, rolled up the bags and started packing the sledge. Three 100-lb. food-tanks, one 50-lb. bag opened for ready use, and four gallons of kerosene were selected. Stillwell took for us a 50-lb. food-tank, a 56-lb. tin of wholemeal biscuits, and a gallon of kerosene. With the 850 lbs. of food, 45 lbs. of kerosene, three sleeping-bags of 10 lbs. each, a tent of 40 lbs., 86 lbs. of clothing and personal gear for three men, a cooker, primus, pick, shovel, ice-axe, alpine rope, dip-circle, theodolite, tripod, smaller instruments such as aneroid, barometer and thermometer, tools, medical outfit and sledge-fittings, our total load amounted to nearly 800 lbs., and Stillwell's was about the same.

All were ready at 9 A.M., and, shaking hands with Murphy's party, who set off due south, we steered with Stillwell to the south-east. The preliminary instructions were to proceed south-east from the Cave to a distance of eighteen miles and there await the arrival of Dr. Mawson and his party, who were to overtake us with their dogteams.

The first few miles gave a gradual rise of one hundred feet per mile, so that, with a heavy load against wind and drift, travelling was very slow. The wind now dropped to almost calm, and the drift cleared. In the afternoon progress was hampered by creva.s.ses, which were very frequent, running east and west and from one to twenty feet in width. The wider ones were covered with firm snow-bridges; the snow in places having formed into granular and even solid ice. What caused most delay were the detours of several hundreds of yards which had to be made to find a safe crossing over a long, wide creva.s.se. At 6.30 P.M. we pitched camp, having only made five miles from the Cave.

We got away at 9 A.M. the next morning. Throughout the whole journey we thought over the same mysterious problem as confronted many another sledger: Where did the time go to in the mornings? Despite all our efforts we could not cut down the interval from "rise and shine" to the start below two hours.

Early that day we had our first experience of the treacherous creva.s.se.

Correll went down a fissure about three feet wide. I had jumped across it, thinking the bridge looked thin, but Correll stepped on it and went through. He dropped vertically down the full length of his harness--six feet. McLean and I soon had him out. The icy walls fell sheer for about sixty feet, where snow could be seen in the blue depths. Our respect for creva.s.ses rapidly increased after this, and we took greater precautions, shuddering to think of the light-hearted way we had trudged over the wider ones.

At twelve miles, blue, wind-swept ice gave place to an almost flat snow surface. Meanwhile the sky had rapidly clouded over, and the outlook was threatening. The light became worse, and the sastrugi indistinguishable.

Such a phenomenon always occurs on what we came to call a "snow-blind day." On these days the sky is covered with a white, even pall of cloud, and cloud and plateau seem as one. One walks into a deep trench or a sastruga two feet high without noticing it. The world seems one huge, white void, and the only difference between it and the pitch-dark night is that the one is white and the other black.

Light snow commenced at 2.30 P.M., the wind rising to forty-five miles per hour with heavy drift. Thirteen miles out we pitched camp.

This, the first "snow-blind day" claimed McLean for its victim. By the time we were under cover of the tent, his eyes were very sore, aching with a throbbing pain. At his request I placed a zinc-cocaine tablet in each eye. He spent the rest of the day in the darkness of his sleeping-bag and had his eyes bandaged all next day. Up till then we had not worn goggles, but were careful afterwards to use them on the trying, overcast days.

For four and a half days the weather was too bad to travel. On the 14th the wind increased and became steady at sixty miles per hour, accompanied by dense drifting snow. We found it very monotonous lying in the tent. As always happens during heavy drifts, the temperature outside was high, on this day averaging about 12 degrees F.; inside the tent it was above freezing-point, and the accompanying thaw was most unpleasant.

Stillwell's party had pitched their tent about ten paces to the leeward side of ours, of which stratagem they continually reminded us. Going outside for food to supply our two small meals per day was an operation fraught with much discomfort to all. This is what used to happen. The man on whom the duty fell had to insinuate himself into a bundle of wet burberrys, and, as soon as he was outside, they froze stiff. When, after a while, he signified his intention of coming in, the other two would collect everything to one end of the tent and roll up the floor-cloth.

Plastered with snow, he entered, and, despite every precaution, in removing burberrys and brushing himself he would scatter snow about and increase the general wetness. On these excursions we would visit Stillwell's tent and be hospitably, if somewhat gingerly, admitted; the inmates drawing back and pulling away their sleeping-bags as from one with a fell disease. As a supporting party they were good company, among other things, supplying us with tobacco ad libitum. When we parted, five days after, we missed them very much.

During the night the wind blew harder than ever--that terrible wind, laden with snow, that blows for ever across the vast, mysterious plateau, the "wind that shrills all night in a waste land, where no one comes or hath come since the making of the world." In the early hours of the morning it reached eighty miles per hour.

Not till 9 next morning did the sky clear and the drift diminish.

Considering that it had taken us eight days to do thirteen miles, we decided to move on the 16th at any cost.

Our library consisted of 'An Anthology of Australian Verse', Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair' and 'Hints to Travellers' in two volumes. McLean spent much of the time reading the Anthology and I started 'Vanity Fair'. The latter beguiled many weary hours in that tent during the journey. I read a good deal aloud and McLean read it afterwards. Correll used to pa.s.s the days of confinement arranging rations and costs for cycling tours and designing wonderful stoves and cooking utensils, all on the sledging, "cut down weight" principle.

On the 16th we were off at 9 A.M. with a blue sky above and a "beam"

wind of thirty-five miles per hour. Up a gentle slope over small sastrugi the going was heavy. We went back to help Stillwell's party occasionally, as we were moving a little faster.

Just after lunch I saw a small black spot on the horizon to the south.

Was it a man? How could Dr. Mawson have got there? We stopped and saw that Stillwell had noticed it too. Field-gla.s.ses showed it to be a man approaching, about one and a half miles away. We left our sledges in a body to meet him, imagining all kinds of wonderful things such as the possibility of it being a member of Wild's party--we did not know where Wild had been landed. All the theories vanished when the figure a.s.sumed the well-known form of Dr. Mawson. He had made a little more south than we, and his sledges were just out of sight, about two miles away.

Soon Mertz and Ninnis came into view with a dog-team, which was harnessed on to one sledge. All hands pulled the other sledge, and we came up fifteen minutes later with Dr. Mawson's camp at eighteen and a quarter miles. In the good Australian way we sat round a large pot of tea and after several cups put up our two tents.

It was a happy evening with the three tents grouped together and the dogs securely picketed on the great plateau, forming the only spot on the limitless plain. Every one was excited at the prospect of the weeks ahead; the mystery and charm of the "unknown" had taken a strange hold on us.

Ninnis and Mertz came into our tent for a short talk before turning in.

Mertz sang the old German student song:

Studio auf einer Reis'

Immer sich zu helfen weis Immer fort durch's d.i.c.k und Dunn Schlendert es durch's Leben hin.

We were nearly all University graduates. We knew that this would be our last evening together till all were safely back at the Hut. No thought was farther from our minds than that it was the last evening we would ever spend with two companions, who had been our dear comrades for just a year.

Before turning into sleeping-bags, a messenger brought me dispatches from the general's tent--a letter on the plateau. This proved to be the instructions to the Eastern Coastal Party. Arriving back at the Hut by January 15, we were to ascertain as much as possible of the coast lying east of the Mertz Glacier, investigating its broad features and carrying out the following scientific work: magnetic, biological and geological observations, the character, especially the nature and size of the grains of ice or snow surfaces, details of sastrugi, topographical features, heights and distances, and meteorology.

On Sunday, November 17, we moved on together to the east with the wind at fifteen miles an hour, the temperature being 9 degrees F. The sun shone strongly soon after the start, and with four miles to our credit a tent was run up at 1 P.M., and all lunched together on tea, biscuit, b.u.t.ter and chocolate. Up to this time we had had only three al fresco lunches, but, as the weather seemed to be much milder and the benefit of tea and a rest by the way were so great, we decided to use the tent in future, and did so throughout the journey.

In the afternoon, Dr. Mawson's party forged ahead, the dogs romping along on a downhill grade. We took the bit in our teeth as we saw them sitting on their sledges, growing smaller and smaller in front of us. We came up with them again as they had waited to exchange a few more words at a point on the track where a long extent of coast to the east came into view.

Here we bade a final adieu to Dr. Mawson, Mertz and Ninnis. The surface was on the down grade towards the east, and with a cheer and farewell wave they started off, Mertz walking rapidly ahead, followed by Ninnis and Dr. Mawson with their sledges and teams. They were soon lost to view behind the rolling undulations.

A mile farther on we pitched camp at 8 P.M. in a slight depression just out of sight of the sea. Every one slept soundly after a good day's pulling.

November 18 was a bright dazzling day, the sky dotted with fleecy alto-c.u.mulus. At 6 A.M. we were out to find Stillwell's party moving in their tent. There was a rush for shovels to fill the cookers with snow and a race to boil hoosh.

At this camp we tallied up the provisions, with the intention of taking what we might require from Stillwell and proceeding independently of him, as he was likely to leave us any day. There were fifty-nine days to go until January 15, 1913, the latest date of arrival back at the Hut, for which eight weeks' rations were considered to be sufficient. There were seven weeks' food on the sledge, so Stillwell handed over another fifty-pound bag as well as an odd five pounds of wholemeal biscuit. The total amount of kerosene was five gallons, with a bottle of methylated spirit.

Shortly after eight o'clock we caught sight of Dr. Mawson's camp, and set sail to make up the interval. This we did literally as there was a light westerly breeze--the only west wind we encountered during the whole journey.

The sledge was provided with a bamboo mast, seven feet high, stepped behind the cooker-box and stayed fore and aft with wire. The yard was a bamboo of six feet, slung from the top of the mast, its height being varied by altering the length of the slings. The bamboo was threaded through canvas leads in the floor-cloth which provided a spread of thirty square feet of sail. It was often such an ample area that it had to be reefed from below.

With the grade sloping gently down and the wind freshening, the pace became so hot that the sledge often overran us. A spurious "Epic of the East" (see 'Adelie Blizzard') records it:

Crowd on the sail- Let her speed full and free "on the run"

Over knife-edge and glaze, marble polish and pulverized chalk The finnesko glide in the race, and there's no time for talk.

Up hill, down dale, It's all in the game and the fun.

We rapidly neared Dr. Mawson's camp, but when we were within a few miles of it, the other party started in a south-easterly direction and were soon lost to sight. Our course was due east.

At thirty-three and a half miles the sea was in sight, some fine flat-topped bergs floating in the nearest bay. Suddenly a dark, rocky nunatak sprang into view on our left. It was a sudden contrast after ten days of unchanging whiteness, and we felt very anxious to visit this new find. As it was in Stillwell's limited territory we left it to him.

According to the rhymester it was:

A rock by the way- A spot in the circle of white- A grey, craggy spur plunging stark through the deep-splintered ice.

A trifle! you say, but a glow of warm land may suffice To brighten a day Prolonged to a midsummer night.

After leaving Aladdin's Cave, our sledge-meter had worked quite satisfactorily. Just before noon, the casting attaching the recording-dial to the forks broke--the first of a series of break-downs.

Correll bound it up with copper wire and splints borrowed from the medical outfit.

The wind died away and the sail was of little use. In addition to this, we met with a slight up grade on the eastern side of the depression, our rate diminishing accordingly. At 7 P.M. the tent was pitched in dead calm, after a day's run of fifteen miles with a full load of almost eight hundred pounds--a record which remained unbroken with us till near the end of the outward journey. Looking back, the nunatak and bergs were still visible.

Both parties were under way at 8 A.M. next day (November 19) on a calm and sunny morning. The course by sun-compa.s.s was set due east.

At noon I took a lat.i.tude "shot" with the three-inch Cary theodolite.

This little instrument proved very satisfactory and was easily handled in the cold. In lat.i.tude 67 degrees 15' south, forty-six and a half miles east of the Hut, we were once more on level country with a high rise to the north-east and another shallow gully in front.

A fog which had been moving along the sea-front in an opaque wall drifted over the land and enveloped us. Beautiful crystals of ice in the form of rosettes and small fern-fronds were deposited on the cordage of the sail and mast. One moment the mists would clear, and the next, we could not see more than a few hundred yards.

We now parted with Stillwell, Hodgeman and Close, who turned off to a rising knoll--Mount Hunt--visible in the north-east, and disappeared in the fog.

After the halt at noon the sastrugi became much larger and softer. The fog cleared at 2 P.M. and the sun came out and shone very fiercely.

A very inquisitive skua gull--the first sign of life we had seen thus far--flew around the tent and settled on the snow near by. In the calm, the heat was excessive and great thirst attacked us all the afternoon, which I attempted to a.s.suage at every halt by holding snow in my hands and licking the drops of water off my knuckles?--a cold and unsatisfactory expedient. We travelled without burberrys--at that time quite a novel sensation--wearing only fleece suits and light woollen undergarments. Correll pulled for the greater part of the afternoon in underclothing alone.

At forty-nine and a half miles a new and wonderful panorama opened before us. The sea lay just below, sweeping as a narrow gulf into the great, flat plain of debouching glacier-tongue which ebbed away north into the foggy horizon. A small ice-capped island was set like a pearl in the amethyst water. To the east, the glacier seemed to fuse with the blue line of the hinterland. Southward, the snowy slope rose quickly, and the far distance was unseen.