A Grue Of Ice (28 page)

" Will you hell!" said Upton. " All you'd have to do would be to roll a few rocks down on our heads, or block the path. Without the depot, we'd be dead in three days—

and you know it."

" Yes," I replied. " I know it. I also know how desperate our position is, even if we find the hut. If you had any sense, you'

d get back to the catchers as quickly as the whaleboat would take us."

" There's enough rope in the boat to lash the five of us together," said Upton. " You, Wetherby, will lead. Then Pirow, between you and Sailhardy. If he slips, there will be two good men to hold him. Then me, and Walter in the rear."

Sailhardy looked anxiously at the sky. " If it come up a full gale, the sea will sweep this beach. The boat will be lost." Upton smiled mirthlessly. " That boat is as valuable to me now as it is to you, Sailhardy. Get it up into the corner by the flagstaff, and weight her down with stones. If the path isn't too rough, you and Wetherby might carry the boat up

to the top later. After all, the Norwegians must have transported a whole depot hut and stores to the top." I looked up at the grim cliffs and shuddered. The Norwegians had made the climb later in the season, when there was less ice. We did not have even an ice-axe to cut steps up the glacier should it become necessary.

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I had an idea. " Bring the rowlocks from the boat," I called to Sailhardy, who had already started, with great care, to weight down the boat with some of the big boulders the

place was littered with. " We may find them useful higher up as pitons. That wrench of yours may be wanted as a

hammer yet, Walter."

The prospect of the climb seemed to have cowed the

big Norwegian. Perhaps he was suffering from delayed shock from the mine, too. He surveyed the vague pathway gloomily. " One man slips, and the rest go with him," he said. " Better we climb unroped on our own."

" No!" retorted Upton. " Get that rope round us, Sailhardy." I took the six rough, horseshoe-shaped rowlocks. They

were so cold they would have seared the flesh if my hands

had not been gloved. The rope was perhaps thirty feet long. Sailhardy tied and tested each knot carefully.

When we were about to start, Pirow bowed formally and

shook me by the hand. It was clear that he thought our

last moments had arrived. " I wish you luck in the lead, Herr Kapitan. I wish it for myself, too."

I shrugged and we set off up the ill-defined path. After the first thirty feet it widened and, although steep, was not dangerous. We trekked up and up through the moraine.

Pirow behind me started to blow heavily. I raised my hand

and called a halt, lifting my eyes for the first time from the pathway. My head reeled. Fully five hundred feet below

were a series of rock-pools, beyond the headland which masked the beach. One slip of the boot on the narrow track would have sent any of us crashing to a fearsome end. Far out to sea, beyond the line of the icebergs, I could see the three catchers. My heart lifted at the orange splash on one of

them—it was the helicopter aboard Crozet. The thin line of

ships stood blockade across the open lead of water. How

Upton proposed to get past them in the whaleboat was beyond me.

We paused for five minutes, not speaking. Then on and up.

The ascent became steeper and slippery. The wind on the

exposed face plucked at our clothing. The weather was clearer, which was a bad sign, for it meant that the wind was coming hard off the ice. After another few hundred feet, I found

myself gasping the raw air, which rasped like a file in my

throat. Behind me, each man had pulled his hood as close to 158

his face as he could. On Walter's beard I could see the icicles where his breath had condensed and frozen.

We struggled on. Round a bend, the pathway ran dead. It

was clearly defined and ended against the side of the huge fortress of rock which I had noticed from below. The enormous rock overhung the cliff and the pathway. Like everything higher up, it was coated with a veneer of ice. I edged closer. Then, beneath the six-inch patina of ice, I saw a steel ladder set into the rock, leading beyond an overhang twenty feet above my head.

" Walter!" I called. " Bring that wrench, or pass it up here. There's a ladder under the ice. Ill try and chip it free." I steadied myself and the wrench was passed cautiously from hand to hand, each man fearing he might slip and take a death-plunge. The height seemed to smooth out the rollers. I swung the heavy wrench against the ice. It bounced back. I might have been striking the rock itself. I struck again. The solid head of steel splintered into fragments. The cold had made it as brittle as glass.

I faced about, precariously. " Upton! Do want to go on with this crazy climb any further? You're risking everyone's lives."

The cold and the exertion had flushed his face that strange pink, as if his anger were permanently engraved in it. " Either you go on, or you come back . . . into this!" he replied. He waved the knife. " Hammer the rowlocks into the ice, and climb up on them. Get going!"

" Bruce!" broke in Sailhardy. " Let me go! I . . ." But I had already started to untie the rope from my waist.

Pirow's face was pinched. " If you fall, don't fall on me, for God's sake!" he mouthed. " Don't go, Herr Kapitan." In reply, I hammered the first crude rowlock cautiously into the ice with the shaft of the wrench a few feet above the pathway level. I swung myself up, one foot across its broad horseshoe. Nothing else stood between me and the drop to the sea a thousand feet below. Carefully, and not using much force, so as not to shatter the wrench shaft or

the rowlocks, I hammered in another. Using the rowlocks as pitons I reached twelve feet, where the rock overhang began. Through the ice, clear as plate-glass, I could see the rungs Christensen's men had clamped into the rock. Even assured of the ladder's safety, each load carried to the summit must have been a hair-raising experience.

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I hung on a piton set below the overhang, looking for a

suitable place to drive in the next. Somehow the rungs of the ladder seemed clearer. I balanced on one leg and drove in the next rowlock.

The ice stripped off the overhang like orange peel. The rungs had been clearer because here the ice was only a couple of inches thick.

My gloves clutched empty air. I started to fall. The wrench and piton clinked on the ice and shot downwards towards the rocks and sea. My foot slid off the piton. As I slipped sideways, I grabbed in frantic terror. My right hand closed over one of the newly-exposed rungs. At the same moment my left fingers groped, found, and clasped. My feet swung wide away from the rock face, over the sea below. I cast one desperate glance beneath. The four men were staring at me with as much horror as I myself felt. There was only one thing I could could do: I swung myself sideways and made a desperate clutch at the rung up. My hand closed round it. I hung for half a minute before repeating the manoeuvre. The muscles in my arms started to kick. I knew they would only

last another few minutes. I edged still one rung higher and then pulled my body in against the cliff, resting my toes on the shelf of ice, about six inches wide, where it had peeled away. Slowly, painfully, I pulled myself up until my feet as well as my hands rested on the iron ladder: The sweat froze on my

face as it formed. Great gasps from my lungs. I would have

fallen if I had looked down. The ladder continued at a gentler angle once it was round the bulge of the overhang, and brought me out to a shallow plateau, from which the pathway continued to the summit, now clearly visible about

five hundred feet farther up. I could not see the others because of the overhang, and although I heard Sailhardy shouting, the wind blew the words away. I tried shouting back, but it was futile. For perhaps a quarter of an hour I rested and recovered my nerve, and then stumbled up the easier gradient to the summit.

I dragged myself over the top. Fifty yards from the edge,

up a gentle path, was a wooden hut, heavily shored and stayed against the gales. Lars Christensen's men had built the roverhullet well. The hut was big enough for a dozen men, and there was an outbuilding which I guessed must be a store-room. Each corner of the structure, as well as the roof, was guyed to steel posts driven between fissures of the rock. In front was an iron 160

flagstaff, which had been bent double like a sapling by the gales. I wished I had the Luger as I moved slowly towards

the roverhullet. Its lack of windows added to its air of utter desolation. The backdrop of the massive Christensen glacier made it appear puny. The front door was held by four big

sliding bolts, unlocked, which were heavily greased. I slid them back and threw open the door. It was eerie and halfdark and for a moment I wondered whether I would find inside some ghastly corpse like the one the famous explorer, Sir James Clark Ross, had found in the Kerguelen Islands in the 1840s—a man with a bottle in his hand, terror in his eyes, and gigantic footprints leading up to him. .

I put such thoughts from my mind and stepped inside.
It
was hard to see, and there was that curious smell of frozenness which only the Antarctic can produce. The walls were flasked-lined with ice. There was a big stove in the centre of the first room, and a notice in Norwegian and English said:

" This hut is for the use of distressed seamen. There are stores, provisions, fuel and other necessaries in the store-room beyond. Please put back whatever is not used."

I went through two more rooms and had to bend down to

enter the store-room. When I saw the piles of sleeping bags, blankets, cases of kerosene lamps, and a host of paraphernalia so essential for survival in the Antarctic, I remembered that Christensen had originally planned to establish a weather

station on Bouvet but had abandoned the thought after seeing the wildness of the place.

In a rack, heavily greased, were
a
number of ice-axes, pitons, skis and old-fashioned throwing harpoons, each with a length of rope attached to the shaft. There were coils of thick rope, hundreds of feet of it, but before it could be used it would have to be thawed out. I noted with approval that all the boxes—and indeed the joints of the hut itself—were all dovetails and dowels. There was not a nail to be seen. These men had

known their job, for in the Antarctic, wood changes its nature and the cold dries it out so that nails lose their withdrawal resistance.

I took four ice-axes and one of the harpoons, whose steel

shaft must have been six feet long, and some pitons. My

immediate task was to bring the party past the ice-ladder

to the hut. We could make the path and ladder usable later on, but for the moment they would have to cut steps

in the ice as far as the exposed rungs from which I had hung. I stood at the top of the cliff and looked out at the distant G.I. 161

catchers before starting down the track.
Crozet
was apart from the others. I watched in puzzlement, for I thought I could see her moving, since the orange of the helicopter showed against the general whiteness. Whatever she was about, it needed Sailhardy's eyesight to see. All I could distinguish was that
Crozet
was much nearer the ice than the others, who remained in the centre of the channel.

Then I saw. Radiating like spokes from a wheel hub, there were a number of other open passages between the ice to the north and north-east, converging on the towering northern cliffs of the island. They would be useless for a ship to negotiate,

but for the whaleboat .. .

I craned over the cliff and looked down, ramming the harpoon's blade firmly in a crack of the rocks to hold. My altitude above the sea gave the effect of an aerial photograph of the ice below. A number of fissures in the ice-belt followed the contours of the island ; in other words, there were small open channels running round Bouvet which would easily take the whaleboat into one of the wider channels to the north, and so avoid the catchers, which lay to the southwest. Upton could not miss seeing them either. I made my way slowly and cautiously down the path

back to the great fortress rock and the ice-ladder. I climbed over the overhang, carrying two ice-axes, and shouted. Sailhardy's voice, tense with relief, came back. Crouching on the last exposed rung, I handed the axes down, and felt them being seized by invisible hands. I climbed back to the top of the overhang, with its dizzy drop to the sea.

For about fifteen minutes I heard the clunk of ice-steps being cut, and then Sailhardy, grinning, hauled himself alongside me.

" Bruce, boy!" he exclaimed. " I thought you were a goner that time! Is there a hut?"

I told him about the roverhullet and the supplies. " There's enough there to last us a year or more."

It was also Upton's first question when he appeared next. He seemed in great spirits when I told him about the hut. Despite the height, he swung himself up and down on his toes in impatience to be off. Pirow looked like a ghost and Walter was sullen. All of them were blue with the cold and it was not until we neared the top that some colour came back into Pirow's face.