Against the Ice, page 5
Had he doubted that it would? Perhaps it would not be strange if he had, for you can scarcely take in the wonder of it, when the sun does at last return after being below the horizon for close on four months. You miss it dreadfully, as you miss its most faithful companion, shadow; you feel so strangely naked, so alone without your shadow. But the sun had come back and our shadows with it; black and so infinitely long that they almost seemed to reach the horizon in the north. We had run up on to the crest of the ridge to keep the sun in view as long as possible, and had stared southwards straight at its orange-coloured disc as it rolled along the horizon in a blaze of colours, so violent and so inharmonious in their fervour, as if it were a blaze kindled by demons wanting to burn the earth to cinders. Yet at the same time, high up in the zenith, the sky was of a dull blue colour, and in the north so black and grim that we had shivered at the sight of it.
For a few minutes the sun had delighted us, then it had disappeared again below the horizon. As it went, it was as though our shadows had run off towards the north and vanished or been obliterated. But the next day the sun had returned and brought light, colour and shadows, and life was good to live. And then the time for our long sledge journey was at hand.
We spoke, too, of the two others left at the ship, of Jørgensen who should have been with us on the inland ice, only his feet had been so badly frost-bitten on our way back from Lamberts Land that we had to amputate five toes — without a doctor, without antiseptics, without any better anaesthetic than half a bottle of whisky, a job none of us could think of without shuddering. Jørgensen had taken it like a man, and never once had we heard him complain about being thus debarred from taking part in the long sledge journeys we were to make in the spring. What he thought, we did not know, but he joked and laughed with us when there was anything to be amused at, and helped us in whatever way he could from his bunk. He was a man indeed, that Jørgensen, we were all agreed about that, and as we lay in our sleeping bags we elaborated the point in our attempts to find something to talk about and so be together a little while longer.
And there was that willing horse Unger, who undertook all the jobs no one else wanted to do. He so badly wanted to do the right thing, but as he did not know what was done and what was not done on board a ship, he often did the wrong thing. Now, as we were about to sever the last tie with the ship and our companions, we longingly thought of the wonderful dinner he had made for us the last evening on board, and how he must have worked all night to have produced the magnificent breakfast he served us before we set out. When we had finished it and gulped down a mug of his scalding coffee, we went out on to the ice and to the sledges to which the dogs had long been harnessed, disentangled the traces and set out on our way, but not without thanking Unger, the good companion, for the help he had always given so willingly, and for all the good meals he had made us at a time when meals were the only bright spots in our day.
It was not very easy to say goodbye to each other in that desolation of ice. Under what conditions would we meet again? The future was utterly uncertain, for so much could happen both to them and to us. Thus, we put off the moment as long as possible, sipping our hot tea and racking our brains for something else to say.
We were all of us a little uneasy, and when the position of the sun in the sky showed that we had procrastinated a little too long already, we said “goodbye and thanks for everything” and went our separate ways.
Our three companions headed south and soon disappeared among the hummocks on the uneven inland ice, leaving Iversen and me alone on that great white waste. Whatever happened now, we must rely solely on ourselves and what we carried on our sledges.
When our day’s work was finished and we were preparing to creep into our sleeping bags, I found under mine the exact number of biscuits and amount of butter that we had sacrificed on the farewell feast. “Sacrificed” is not too big a word, for under such conditions biscuits were infinitely precious, and butter too. On the biscuits lay a piece of paper on which was written: “You two need this more than we three. Good journey and safe return. Laub, Bessel and Poulsen.”
Iversen and I sat and looked at the piece of paper, at the biscuits — I think there were six — and at the butter, and at each other. The gift was like a last handclasp from our faithful, considerate friends.
CHAPTER V
Alone between Heaven and Earth
Crevasses in the inland ice — A lure for the dogs — Unsafe surface — Storm and drifting snow — Frost-bite — Stormy days
Iversen and I stood on a hummock of ice and watched our companions till they were out of sight. Soon they had disappeared down a valley of ice and when, after waiting, we did not see them reappear on the next ridge, we realized that they had found a practicable way behind it and had been engulfed in that great ice sea. Then we nodded to each other, and, without saying much, quietly got on with the job of reloading our sledges, dividing our gear and provisions between them in such a way that if we lost a sledge in one of the many crevasses with which we were perpetually surrounded, and whose black mouths led to an underworld whence escape was impossible, we would have at least a theoretical chance of managing for a while with what remained on the other sledge.
Knowing what had to be done, there was little need for words and so we said less and less and in the end fell silent. Neither of us liked the silence, though, especially Iver, and after one lengthy pause I heard him muttering some words to himself over and over again. Finally he found the tune, and that was as peculiar as the words:
“Alone, alone, quite alone between Heaven and earth,
Alone with dogs and ice, alone, quite alone.”
Louder and louder grew his mumble, till finally he burst into song. He glanced sideways at me, and I nodded in time to his improvised ditty, that sounded so melancholy and yet was so heartening in that great deathly silent waste.
He was a good comrade, Iver; the sort of man with whom you could go on a really long journey, such as that on which we were starting, for we had a thousand miles ahead of us, every foot of which we must cover before we got back to Alabama. By that time the grip of winter would be broken and summer have come; each mountain-side would be agush with streams, each hollow a gleaming mirror of water with migrant birds from the fair South disporting themselves on it.
First we had to cover the 270 miles across the inland ice to Danmarks Fjord, and that would be the hardest leg of the journey. The immense ice cap extended far and wide all round us, thousands of feet thick and nearly five thousand where we were. To the west stretched line after line of ice hills up to Greenland’s spine, where the mass of ice reached a thickness of close on ten thousand feet. From north to south this armour of ice is some 2300 miles long, and from east to west nearly 500 miles wide on the average — nearly one and a quarter million square miles, two and a half million cubic miles of ice! This inconceivable mass of ice has accumulated through the ages on a country that once, in the morning of Time, was covered with luxuriant tropical vegetation.
The two of us, then, were alone on all that ice — apart from our three companions who had disappeared beyond the ice horizon a few hours before. We were as cut off from the world’s seething mass of humanity, as if in some miraculous way we had been flung out into space and had landed in the largest crater on the moon, surrounded by an unbroken ring-wall of inconceivably high mountains across which no way led to the equally desolate territory beyond.
It was in truth a dismal place to find yourself in, no place for a man to be.
But what was the matter with us? Why were we complaining now that at last we had got where we had so long hankered to be? We had no reason to be disgruntled, quite the reverse. We had come there voluntarily, although perhaps rashly; we had even looked forward to getting up on to the great ice cap which we regarded as a more or less practicable road to our goal.
Nevertheless, we were slightly bewildered at finding ourselves alone up there on that boundless waste, where never a bird winged its way between sky and ice, where the scanning eye could not discover even the smallest track of roaming animal, where there were no other insects than the fleas our dogs carried in their thick hair, if even they had not been frozen to death. Even a miserable worm was too sensible to go where we had ventured of our own free will.
It was a dangerous wilderness, in that so many things both unforseen and unavoidable might happen, things which would mean death to us both and to the dogs and the fleas that perhaps still bred on them, sucking the blood of their weakened hosts. These might be quite minor things, a sprained ankle for example, that anywhere else would be worth no more than a regretful shrug of the shoulders. Elsewhere in the world of men a sprain was an easy thing to cure, but here it was a mortal hurt, not only for the one who suffered the injury, but also for his companion who would have to wait till the other had recovered and could put his weight on that foot before he could continue. There was nothing we could do, if one of us met with the least accident; there was no help to be had, however badly we needed it, no refuge to be found: either we both got through, or we both died and became as stiff and frozen as everything else around us.
Those were things you must not think too much about; thinking did not help and only tended to destroy your peace of mind. There we were on the inland ice, two rash humans who had gone there voluntarily, and what we had to do was to get down again as quickly as we could — on the other side. Nor had we any time to waste, so we harnessed the dogs to the sledges, took a last look at the site of our camp to make doubly sure that nothing had been forgotten, cracked our long whips at the dogs, hitting them where they felt it most, and flung ourselves into the traces to get the sledges going and so that the dogs should understand that the time for idling was over, and that now it was a question of pulling and pulling hard. So, with a great commotion of howls and cries that was good to hear in that eerie silence, we laboriously got under way, taking the first of our lonely steps towards the land round the first arm of Danmarks Fjord, 270 miles away. We hoped that when we had got there, we should find not too breakneck a way down the tall steep wall of ice, probably more than three hundred feet high, which bounded the ice cap in the north, and so escape from that hell of ice, cold and paralysing stillness.
We had long since acquired due respect for the many crevasses and fissures that gaped dangerously all round us. Some were narrow, others several yards wide, anything up to a hundred feet or more. Often they were hidden beneath a covering of hard wind-pressed snow, so that we never saw them, but merely felt them as the middle of the snow bridge gave slightly; or there might be a sudden, eerie, hollow sound as you thrust your feet in hard to keep the sledge going and happened to be over such a chasm.
Mostly the snow bridges held, but it did happen and not so seldom, that one broke beneath our weight or that of the sledge, and for minutes, sometimes scores of minutes, it was touch and go whether or not we got across with the dogs, sledges, gear and ourselves safe and sound.
We were lucky, and each time a snow bridge broke, there was always some insignificant little protruberance in the steep, often vertical lip of glass-hard ice that stopped the slipping sledge from falling into unfathomable depths, so that we were able, with infinite caution, to remove its precious load and carry it to safe ice, then draw the sledge to safety from the crevasse that was blue-white and gleaming up by the surface, but black, black as the grave some few yards down towards its icy depths. Once, however, a trace broke and a wretched dog fell in. It fell and fell and fell. We never heard it strike bottom, never heard so much as a whimper from the poor brute, which perhaps fell so far that no sound could reach up to the surface where Iver and I stood looking at each other, aghast at the thought that either of us, or both, might just as easily have been sent hurtling into those depths, through the glassy jaws of ice down into the blue-blackness.
One day when we thought we were relatively safe from crevasses, for fortunately there were such days as well, I heard Iver call out suddenly. I did not catch what he said, but the fright and horror in his voice were all too obvious. I spun round to see what had happened and saw Iver lying flat on the ice beside a black hole in the snow calling: “Puppy, Puppy, don’t you hear me?”
In a couple of bounds I reached the hole from which the searing breath of the ice struck at our faces. Iver gave me a horrified look and said:
“Puppy’s trace broke, he’s down there,” and he nodded down towards the black depths. “I didn’t hear him strike on the side or bottom, so perhaps he hasn’t even reached it yet. When we stopped for a rest a while ago, he crawled up on to the sledge, snuggled into me and gazed at me with his faithful eyes.”
A bead of ice rolled down Iver’s cheek into his beard, where it froze fast; another followed, then another, a whole lot; but five minutes later we were on our way north again, heading for other crevasses, broad or narrow as fate decreed, easy to cross or only to be negotiated after a long search for a snow bridge to which we dared entrust our weight.
There were days when our feet went through the fragile bridges however careful we were, however cautiously we tested their strength before venturing out on to them; and there were other days when it felt as though a kindly fate were guiding our steps, and we became more and more reckless, crossing snow bridges without first testing them and smiling superior smiles when we heard the ominous, hollow sound beneath our feet, though we would be careful to step but lightly on the snow and swing our whips furiously over the dogs, for the sledges had to be kept moving. To halt meant falling, and death.
I always kept a small lump of pemmican handy, and this I produced whenever we had to cross a specially unpleasant snow bridge, one that sagged in the middle and yet seemed safe enough, if only we could keep the sledges moving. The dogs were shown it and allowed to snuff in the delicious smell of it. They would howl and bark in their eagerness to get so rare a titbit, leap forward in the traces to get going and when they were all strained to the utmost, to their annoyance they would see the desired pemmican slung far ahead of them to the other side of the chasm. Now, it was a case of who could get there first; and with tails waving in the joys of anticipation, tongues hanging far out, and flanks going like bellows, the dogs would pull like creatures possessed in the hope of being the first to reach the titbit on the other side, the titbit they never got. They never got it, because I was always first across the bridge and kicked the lump of pemmican far out of their reach; then I picked it up to use it again in the next emergency, while the dogs flew at each other, biting and yelping, each believing that the other had had the luck to snap up what was safely back in my pocket. I used the same lump throughout the whole journey across that waste of ice.
It was swindling, if you like, and a shame on the trusting dogs who never suspected that we humans could be so mean, but I had to be mean, in order to get them and the sledge across those especially dangerous places.
We came across long stretches where the surface ice was splintered like a piece of glass that has been struck by a ricocheting bullet, riven by long narrow crevasses, not broad enough to fall down and perhaps not dangerous to us or the dogs and sledges, yet most unpleasant to tread in, for, if your luck were out, you could break your leg on the sharp edge of the ice, or sprain an ankle. That was a thing of which we were very afraid, as the chances of it happening were considerable, but we just had to disregard them. If we worried about everything that could have happened to us we might just as well have stayed at home in Copenhagen. We toiled on across the splintered ice, treading into fissures with one leg or perhaps with both, but getting up and out again before we had time to realize what had happened, and just flinging the word fissure over our shoulders to our companion following with his sledge a short way behind.
Of course, I always went in the lead, as was only right, and one day when we were crossing a part where there were unusually many of these narrow crevasses, I heard Iversen start chuckling away to himself. I turned in amazement and some irritation to see what could be the cause of all this merriment, for which I could see no occasion at all. “What are you laughing at?” I asked.
“What?” Iversen replied and laughed aloud. “Because you remind me of a toy I had as a child and used to love, a Jack-in-the-box, I think it was called. Anyway, you’re exactly like the Jack who shot out of the box every time I eased the lid. You are just as black as he was; your hair is long and tufted like his, and sticks out in the same way. And you flap your arms, just as he did as he popped out of the box. You’re down one moment, so that I can scarcely see you, and up the next. In fact, you look fearfully funny.”
It was all very well to talk of Jack-in-the-boxes and laugh at me, but it was my shins I was cutting on the sharp ice, and I would be the one whom fate perhaps would thrust down into some box, so that I stayed there. I certainly could see nothing to laugh at.
Up there on the inland ice, when the days were golden with sunlight and the frost so hard that the mercury had frozen in the thermometer, and the paraffin become so thick that it had to be thawed a bit in the warmth of our sleeping bags, before we could get it to burn in the Primus or even flow out of the can, there often happened something that was really lovely. All at once we would hear a faint rustling all round us, like the frou-frou of heavy silk, and at that moment every one of the infinite number of snow and ice crystals on the surface suddenly shone and gleamed most colourfully, as though each had been a sparkling diamond. It looked lovely and for an instant created an illusion of life around us; but it also got on our nerves and made us start each time it happened and think for a moment that we had come unawares onto a fragile snow bridge, which just then was breaking beneath us. The dogs were as nervy as we were and leaped on stiff legs as high as the traces let them, barked, howled and whined with fear.
