Part 20 (2/2)
Man, under pressure of circ.u.mstances, will adapt himself to most conditions of life. To me the other-world environment of the Polar-pack, far from continental fastness, was beginning to seem quite natural.
We forced marches day after day. We traveled until dogs languished or legs failed. Ice hills rose and fell before us. Mirages grimaced at our das.h.i.+ng teams with wondering faces. Daily the incidents and our position were recorded, but our adventures were promptly forgotten in the mental bleach of the next day's effort.
Night was now as bright as day. By habit, we emerged from our igloos later and later. On the 5th and 6th we waited until noon before starting, to get observations; but, as was so often the case, when the sun was watched, it slipped under clouds. This late start brought our stopping time close to midnight, and infused an interest in the midnight sun; but the persistent haze which clouded the horizon at night when the sun was low denied us a glimpse of the midnight luminary.
The night of April 7 was made notable by the swing of the sun at midnight, above the usual obscuring mist, behind which it had, during previous days, sunk with its night dip of splendor. For a number of nights it made grim faces at us in its setting. A tantalizing mist, drawn as a curtain over the northern sea at midnight, had afforded curious advantages for celestial staging. We were unable to determine sharply the advent of the midnight sun, but the colored cloud and haze into which it nightly sank produced a spectacular play which interested us immensely.
Sometimes the great luminary was drawn out into an egg-shaped elongation with horizontal lines of color drawn through it. I pictured it as some splendid fire-colored lantern flung from the window of Heaven. Again, it was pressed into a basin flaming with magical fires, burning behind a mystic curtain of opalescent frosts. Blue at other times, it appeared like a huge vase of luminous crystal, such as might be evoked by the weird genii of the Orient, from which it required very little imagination to see purple, violet, crimson and multi-colored flowers springing beauteously into the sky.
These changes took place quickly, as by magic. Usually the last display was of distorted faces, some animal, some semi-human--huge, grotesque, and curiously twitching countenances of clouds and fire. At times they appallingly resembled the hideous teeth-gnas.h.i.+ng deities of China, that, with gnarled arms upraised, holding daggers of flame and surrounded by smoke, were rising toward us from beyond the horizon.
Sometimes in our northward progress these faces laughed, again they scowled ominously. What the actual configurations were I do not know; I suppose two men see nothing exactly alike in this topsy-turvy world.
Rus.h.i.+ng northward with forced haste, unreal beauties took form as if to lure us to pause. Clouds of steam rising from frozen seas like geysers a.s.sumed the aspects of huge fountains of iridescent fire. As the sun rose, lines of light like quicksilver quivered and writhed about the horizon, and in swirling, swimming circles closed and narrowed about us on the increasingly color-burned but death-chilled areas of ice over which we worked. Setting amid a dance of purple radiance, the sun, however, instead of inspiring us, filled us with a sick feeling of giddiness. What beauty there was in these spectacles was often lost upon our benumbed senses.
Nowhere in the world, perhaps, are seen such spectacles of celestial glory. The play of light on clouds and ice produces the illusion of some supernatural realm.
We had now followed the sun's northward advance--from its first peep, at midday, above the southern ice of the Polar gateway, to its sweep over the northern ice at midnight. From the end of the Polar night, late in February, to the first of the double days and the midnight suns, we had forced a trail through darkness and blood-hardening temperature, and over leg-breaking irregularities of an unknown world of ice, to a spot almost exactly two hundred miles from the Pole! To this point our destiny had been auspiciously protected. Ultimate success seemed within grasp. But we were not blind to the long line of desperate effort still required to push over the last distance.
Now that we had the sun unmistakably at midnight, its new glory before us was an incentive to onward efforts. Previous to this the sun had been undoubtedly above the horizon, but, as is well known, when the sun is low and the atmospheric humidity is high, as it always is over the pack, a dense cloud of frost crystals rests on the ice and obscures the horizon. During the previous days the sun sank into this frosty haze and was lost for several hours.
Observations on April 8[15] placed camp at lat.i.tude 86 36', longitude 94 2'. Although we had made long marches and really great speed, we had advanced only ninety-six miles in the nine days. Much of our hard work had been lost in circuitous twists around troublesome pressure lines and high, irregular fields of very old ice. The drift ice was throwing us to the east with sufficient force to give us some anxiety, but with eyes closed to danger and hards.h.i.+ps, double days of fatigue and double days of glitter quickly followed one another.
Everything was now in our favor, but here we felt most of the acc.u.mulating effect of long torture, in a world where every element of Nature is hostile. Human endurance has distinct limits. Bodily abuse will long be counterbalanced by man's superb recuperative power, but sooner or later there comes a time when out-worn cells call a halt.
We had lived for weeks on a steady diet of withered beef and tallow.
There was no change, we had no hot meat, and never more to eat than was absolutely necessary to keep life within the body. We became indifferent to the aching vacant pain of the stomach. Every organ had been whipped to serve energy to the all important movement of our legs. The depletion of energy, the la.s.situde of overstrained limbs, manifested themselves.
The Eskimos were lax in the swing of the whip and indifferent in urging on the dogs. The dogs displayed the same spirit by lowered tails, limp ears, and drooping noses, as their shoulders dragged the sleds farther, ever farther from the land of life.
A light life-sapping wind came from the west. We battled against it. We swung our arms to fight it and maintain circulation, as a swimmer in water. Veering a little at times, it always struck the face at a piercing angle. It froze the tip of my nose so often that that feature felt like a foreign b.u.mp on my face. Our cheeks had in like manner been so often bleached in spots that the skin was covered with ugly scars.
Our eyes were often sealed by frozen eyelashes. The tear sack made icicles. Every particle of breath froze as it left the nostrils, and coated the face in a mask of ice.
The sun at times flamed the clouds, while the snow glowed in burning tones. In the presence of all this we suffered the chill of death. All Nature exulted in a wave of hysteria. Delusions took form about us--in mirages, in the clouds. We moved in a world of delusions. The heat of the sun was a sham, its light a torment. A very curious world this, I thought dumbly, as we pushed our sleds and lashed our lagging dogs. Our footing was solid; there was no motion. Our horizon was lined with all the topographic features of a solid land scene, with mountains, valleys and plains, rivers of open water; but under it all there was the heaving of a restless sea. Although nothing visibly moved, it was all in motion.
Seemingly a solid crust of earth, it imperceptibly drifts in response to every wind. We moved with it, but ever took our landscape with us.
Of the danger of this movement, of the possibility of its hopelessly carrying us away from our goal, and the possibility of ultimate starvation, I never lost consciousness. Although the distance may seem slight, now that we had gone so far, the last two hundred miles seemed hopelessly impossible. With aching, stiffened legs we started our continuing marches without enthusiasm, with little ambition. But marches we made--distance leaped at times under our swift running feet.
It sometimes now seems that unknown and subtle forces of which we are not cognizant supported me. I could almost believe that there were unseen beings there, whose voices urged me in the wailing wind; who, in my success, themselves sought soul peace, and who, that I might obtain it, in some strange, mysterious way succored and buoyed me.
OVER POLAR SEAS OF MYSTERY
THE MADDENING TORTURES OF A WORLD WHERE ICE WATER SEEMS HOT, AND COLD KNIVES BURN ONE'S HANDS--ANGUISHED PROGRESS ON THE LAST STRETCH OF TWO HUNDRED MILES OVER ANCh.o.r.eD LAND ICE--DAYS OF SUFFERING AND GLOOM--THE TIME OF DESPAIR--”IT IS WELL TO DIE,” SAYS AH-WE-LAH; ”BEYOND IS IMPOSSIBLE.”
XVIII
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