Part 36 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+ne” 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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.