A Grue Of Ice (20 page)

Helen was white, too, as we threaded our way back through

Upton's cabin. I put Pirow in the lead up the short ladder to the bridge. Sailhardy was almost alongside me. His eagerness made me feel almost sorry for what was coming to Walter.

We emerged silently on to the bridge, my knife-point touching Pirow's back. Walter was standing near the helm indicator

trying to see out into the fog. Upton was close to the starboard wing. Both were engrossed. 113

" Walter!" I called. I held Pirow in front of me with my left hand as a shield.

The thick-set Norwegian swung round. Upton and Bjerko

stood rooted to the spot. Sailhardy's left thumb tapped against his palm with that idiosyncrasy of his which preceded physical action. Walter cast one startled glance at my knife. He whipped the Luger out, but was still fumbling with the safetycatch when Sailhardy slid forward and struck him with the sawn-off manacle. He screamed with pain as the shackle bit

his wrist. I leaped forward and snatched the automatic from where it had fallen on the gratings. Knife and Luger

in hand, I guarded the four men.

Before I could say anything, there was a heavy bump forward by the bows. The indeterminate definition went from the light. We were out of the fog. In place of the veil-like, watery obscurity of a moment before, the light was clear and hard. The razor-edged bank of fog lay immediately astern.

It was forward that we gazed, transfixed. The sun hung

like a blood-filled grape. Underneath, the whole world was

blue.

8. "A
Cold Grue of Terror"

It would have been less terrifying if
Antarctica
had rushed head-on through the fog and destroyed herself against the

massive ice-cliff which rose before us. As it was, the bump of her bow against the ice held the menace of a long-drawnout death. The sudden drop of the fog-curtain astern heightened the awe-provoking spectacle which lay before our eyes. The fact that I had warned Upton against just this did not mitigate my own fear, the same fear as had once made

me thrust the bridge telegraph of H.M.S.
Scott
to full speed ahead—anything, anything to escape, with all the thrust of

her great turbines, from the same platelike crystals of ice, called by whalermen frazil crystals, which now hung halfsubmerged in the sea everywhere, plates of ice which come together with uncanny speed and form the ice belt which
is
Bouvet's killer.
Antarctica
seemed to have touched against the central buttress of the encircling semicircle of pack-ice. Nowhere was any white ice to be seen. To port, the cliff blocked out all view, but to starboard the field was low, perhaps only twenty feet above the level of the sea. A vast 114

agglomeration of blue hummocks and pressure ridges stretched away into the distance as far as the eye could see. Within a hundred yards of the ice-edge was a huge, domed mound, smoothed and fashioned by the wind, and a series of lesser mounds stretched away behind. The ice was all shades and variations of blue—azure where the parody of a sun struck down, royal blue where the fluted, striated cliffs to port overhung the leaden-blue sea. At our backs lay the bank of strontium-yellow fog. The knife I held had turned aconite. The air off the blue icefield was as raw and sharp as the blade itself. I wanted to cough as it took me by the throat. The human antagonisms which had been present a moment before were swamped by what the Southern Ocean had conjured up before our startled eyes. The blue light gave Pirow's shocked white face the pallor of a ghost. There seemed almost no need to guard Upton, Walter and Pirow, they were so overcome by what they saw.

" This is it," I said to Upton. " I warned you but you wouldn't listen."

His eyes were very bright, and the way he spoke made me surer of his mental state. I had a gun and a knife in my hand, but he addressed me with the same easy inescapable charm as on our first meeting. " Bruce, boy," he said, " you wouldn't be here if I didn't think you the finest sailor in the Southern Ocean. I should have listened, but it's all yours now. Put those damned toys away. This is what matters for the moment." He jerked his head at the icefield. His smile in the pewter mask was grotesque, reflecting the blue.

Antarctica
was bumping gently against the ice-cliff in the still sea. She was in no danger from the movement, beyond the buckling of a few plates in her bows. Her danger lay in the millions of small spicules or thin plates of ice floating in the sea in the first stage of freezing ; soon they would lock together and add to the cliffs, hillocks and ridges before us, and in that process crush the big factory ship's steel plates. The offshore mass of bergy bits, growlers, sludge and pancake ice was witness of how quickly the sea was freezing ; the curious, upturned edges of the pancake ice were already kissing and coalescing into ever-growing acres of thin ice. For the moment there was a strange stillness, broken only by a faint tinkling as the ice-rind splintered against
Antarctica's
sides. I remembered that deadly tinkle as I had shaken H.M.S.
Scott
clear: it had paralleled the distant sound of her engineroom telepraphs.
Antarctica's
bows could still cut through the 115

ice-plates, but in a couple of hours they would freeze ironhard. I knew that the intensity of the cold which now gripped us was changing even the crystal structure of the metal of the weapons I held ; soon they would become brittle as glass

—so would
Antarctica's
plates, making the task of the ice-vice easier still.

By now, I thought, Upton must have read the annotation on the back of Captain Norris' log. Norris was a sensitive man—his sketches of the lost Thompson Island showed that. What he had written to complement the laconic deck-log version of his discovery revealed his terror at seeing the same icekiller as we were seeing now. Norris had known then it meant death, and who knows to what eventual ghastly end he and his gallant
Sprightly
went? I could recall by heart what Norris had written, the impress of fear was so vivid upon his words:

I s a w T h o m p s o n I s l a n d o n t h e m i d - a f t e r n o o n o f
December 13, 1825. There
was
fog, floating ice and a
Force 8 gale from the north-west. There was the island,
long and low in the foreground, and a high peak more
distantly. The crew of the Sprightly gazed awe-struck at
t h i s u n k n o w n h a v e n o f r e f u g e a m i d s t s e a s w h i c h , b y
contrast with their wild tumult, made its ice-bound shores
s e e m l i k e p a r a d i s e . T h e g i a n t g l a c i e r w h i c h c a p p e d
Thompson Island like a nightmare caul continued into
the sea
as
a solid tongue of steel-blue ice, linking a
gigantic, unbroken icefleld on the southern horizon. The
grotesque nature of this single massive tongue, like that of
a malice-filled and possessive viper from the unknown
regions of the Pole, struck a cold grue of terror into my
men, used even as they were, to the hardships and evils of
the wild Southern Ocean.

A
cold grue of terror!

Norris had used the Scots word in all its force, and the grue, the thrill of naked fear, which ran through me as I

gazed at the blue icefield, was as primordial as the birth of the killer-pack.

" Yes," I said to Upton. " It's saving our skins that matters most."
I
spoke to Sailhardy. " Put them, Upton, Walter and Bjerko, in irons in Upton's cabin. The same with Pirow, in

his radio office. Chain him near his transmitting key.
I
may need him later."

Sailhardy came over to me to take the Luger. At the same

moment our ears were stunned by an immense thunder. It was

116

the icefield. Every rivet in the ship trembled. A cluster of Skua gulls rose in white detonation from the foot of the blue cliff. The reverberation roared through the yellow fog. Helen buried her head against my thick sweater. Across the flat side of the icefield I saw a new mound ejaculate itself, rusty-rose, as some hidden pressure-force threw up ice the size of St.

Paul's Cathedral. Bouvet's conquistador with his sword of

ice was coming at us. If the ship were nipped, we could still get stores ashore on the ice-pack, but we would not survive as Shackleton and others had done. Their ice had stayed solid ; I knew that Bouvet's pack, when The Albatross' Foot reached it, would dissolve and leave us to drown. We would

die either of exposure on the ice or of drowning when the

life-giving warmth came. I had to save
Antarctica,
I told myself—

before, the challenge itself would have been enough, but now

. . . I looked down at the fair hair against my shoulder.

I found myself shouting, I was so deaf. " Pirow! Signal the catchers! Tell them to form up in line astern, and come through there." I pointed at the plumes of vapour ghosting above the blue ice forming in the sea, the way
Antarctica
had come. " Tell them to rush it, and keep the lead open. Each one is to go full astern within three cables' lengths of this ship. I'

ll then go full astern and try and break out. Understood?"

" Yes, Herr Kapitan."

Sailhardy ushered the prisoners away, Walter cursing under his breath and holding his injured wrist.

H e l e n d r e w h e r s e l f a w a y f r o m m e . " G o d ! I t l o o k s hopeless!"

" There are still open leads of water," I said. " Look at the clouds there above the icefield—see the dark patches? That's water sky, which means that somewhere, even in that

lot, there is some sea which is not frozen solid—yet." She shuddered. The frost-smoke or vapour plumes which

the whalermen call The Barber could guide us to salvation

yet. My first job was to get the head of the factory ship clear of the ice-buttress, and keep the sea reasonably ice-free at the stern. Even if the ice closed, I thought rapidly, we might

escape the fate of the factory ship if I brought the catchers in to surround her: with their shallow draught they might pop

like peas in a pod out of the clutches of the ice without fatal damage, whereas
Antarctica
would be trapped because of her greater depth. It was worth risking as a last resort. There were, however, more immediate things to do aboard

117

Antarctica.
In the piercing cold, I must get the water drained from the deck mains and have a steam hose run through them, to clear the drain-cocks, or else they would burst soon, leaving us without a water supply. I must also have the rudder strengthened with wire pendants to prevent its being unshipped as we crashed stern-first through the ice. My mind raced on: I hoped that
Antarctica
had been fitted out by someone icewise and that she had a propeller with removable blades, for we seemed almost certain to damage one of the blades on projecting pieces of ice in getting clear. Breaking propeller blades was, I knew from hard experience, the commonest damage when trying, in a situation like ours, to extricate a ship from being nipped.

" Bruce," said Helen, " what do you intend to do with them, particularly my father? Are you going to hand them over to
Thorshammer?"

"
That question will have to wait," I replied. " The ice is the danger. Go and get yourself as warmly dressed as you can. Pack something small. Let the valuables go, if you have them. A pair of warm gloves might be more use in the long

run."

" You're going to . . . to . . . abandon ship, without even a fight?" she asked.

" The fight is on," I said. " Quick now. Come back here." Sailhardy returned to the bridge. He smiled grimly as he looked about him. " She's sick, this ship. Sick with the cold."

" Get aft and trim her down well by the stern," I ordered. " Rig some steel wire pendants to the rudderhead from both quarters. . . . My God!" I indicated the echo-sounding equipment. It showed fifteen fathoms—in the middle of the Southern Ocean! It meant that the cold was so intense that even the anti-freeze in the transmitter and receiver tanks had started to freeze. The ice was closing on
Antarctica
quicker than I thought.

Sailhardy let out a long whistle.

" Get steam through the mains," I snapped down the bridge telephone to the maindeck. Scarcely had I said it, when there was a scream of metal immediately below the bridge. The winch

through which the steam had to pass gave a quarter-turn as

the head of steam tried to burst through. Then the heavy piping, already frozen inside, ripped along its whole length, as if it had been opened by a huge unseen tin-opener.

Helen came back to the bridge, wearing
a
heavy coat of 118

sea-leopard skin. She heard the scream of the metal, but without speaking thrust my heavy gloves, reefer jacket, cap, seaboots and duffel coat into my hands. Dragging them on, I raced to the port wing of the bridge and looked at the sea. It was viscous now as it froze.

" Sailhardy!" I said. " Get down on the maindeck first before you rig the tackles. Have them bring ice-axes, crowbars, boat-hooks and poles up from below. You know the drill—