A Grue Of Ice (35 page)

I found one of the stoves and a can of soup. I lit it and its tiny circle of warmth was more comforting to me than the great blazes which danced across the sky.

Sailhardy lay still. He was still alive, but only just. There was a stir from forward and Upton sat up in his sleeping-bag. He looked at me, the sky and the sea, in disbelief. He crawled over to me. " Why isn't there ice on the water, Bruce?" His use of my Christian name was an indication of his own distress. His sunken eyes became alive. " Thompson Island! You've brought me to Thompson Island!"

I tried to laugh, but the cold held my jaw. " I have not the remotest idea where we are. I couldn't give a damn for Thompson or any other mystery at the moment. All I want is some hot food."

I propped Helen's head against me and gave her a spoonful of hot soup. She took it, uncertainly, and her eyes remained closed. The seal pup stared inquisitively. I filled the spoon again and drank from the can myself, and then passed it over to Upton. I felt the warm life of it flood inside me. He passed the can back, three-quarters empty. " Get another couple of cans—in there," I said, indicating the stern cubbyhole. He was back quickly and heated them while I tried to get Helen to take some more.

" Try and get some down Sailhardy's throat," I told him. " He's pretty near finished."

Helen opened her eyes. The glazed look of delirium was gone. " What is it, Bruce? Did you find Thompson Island?" The way she said it made the name sound like a curse.

" I don't know where we are," I said. " I don't see land. All I know is that it's calm and the sea is free of ice. I can't even account for the light."

197

I gave her more hot soup and did the same for Sailhardy.

It must have been an hour before he was fully conscious, and he seemed very weak and lethargic. Upton roused both Walter and Pirow, who looked like a ghost. We brought out

the second alpine stove and cooked our first hot meal in a

week. It was nearly dawn by the time we had finished.

The light began to change almost imperceptibly. The

hemisphere-reaching flares of the Southern Lights drew back into their icy matrix. The whole upper lobe of the sky

became one great sweep of light in a huge arch which stretched, not north and south like the Southern Lights, but east and west. The gigantic tracery was faint and white,

although there seemed to be a background of rising colour.

It was something I had scarcely hoped ever to see—the rare Parry's Arc. It seemed a fitting glory for our deliverance, if indeed deliverance it was.

I told Helen what it was, and she sat up. The faint white

of Parry's Arc began to be laced with brilliant reds, scarlets, greens, violets and blues ; then the arc itself became double in a breathtaking display of ethereal pyrotechnics, and spread itself across the whole sky, the arc elongating itself into an ellipse which seemed to stretch from the Weddell Sea to

Australia.

" My God!" called Upton front the bows.

The light from Parry's Arc was bright enough to reveal

the awesome spectacle as far as the eye could see: ,the

whole horizon to windward was a gigantic mass of ice-bergs, between a thousand and fifteen hundred feet high. Behind

them, still higher—higher than the cliffs of the great Ross Barrier itself—reached a wall of ice. We lay in a bay, probably fifty miles across, of ice. Perhaps five miles astern, on our starboard quarter, the north-western cliff of floating ice continent—it was scarcely less than that—thrust a squared buttress into the Southern Ocean. Under the uncertain light, it was impossible to tell where it began and ended, and out to port there seemed to be a patch of heavy fog.

I realised then that we were in the presence of the phenomenon which had first enabled Norris to see Thompson Island, and seventy years later, Captain Fuller and, the third recorded time, myself. In cycles of seventy years a great continent of ice builds up along the shores of the Antarctic mainland,

detaches itself, and drifts northwards—toward Thompson

and Bouvet Islands. Any big icefield will clear visibility, but it took all of a continent of ice to clear the fog-shrouded 198

shores of Thompson Island, which lay in the heart of the Southern Ocean's weather machine. To back up what I now knew was one of the secrets of Thompson Island, I remembered that when the Japanese had conducted aerial surveys of the Antarctic coastline directly to the south of Bouvet, they were surprised to find that they bore little resemblance to Lars Christensen's air photographs of three decades previously. And I was struck by the coincidence that in the same year that Captain Fuller saw Thompson Island, three famous clippers, including the
Cutty Sark,
had reported passing clean through a continent of ice—she had used those words in her log to describe it—and all three had barely escaped destruction. I rose to my knees and looked round the horizon. But the great flare of Parry's Arc which had lit the distant ice barrier faded, and it was impossible to see much. We were all too weak and too overcome by the sight to do anything but stare.

Sailhardy croaked: " Look at the albatross, boy!" The bird was balancing himself above the cutwater with his wings wide. The last starlets, reds, golds, blues and violets of Parry's Arc made a tracery across their whiteness. For a moment he hung on, uncertain, flapping his wings. Then he

launched himself, dipped for a moment towards the water, picked up, wheeled round the whaleboat twice, and struck off towards a point beyond the port bow.

There was a commotion at my feet and I looked at Helen's sleeping-bag. The seal pup was fighting to kick himself free. The little animal shot out of the mouth of the bag. He leapt on to the thwart next to me and stood with his head cocked, every muscle tense.

Someone was knocking on the bottom of the boat.

13.
Thompson Island

For a moment I thought Sailhardy or Helen was striking

the bottom-boards in some final convulsion of weakness.

Knock! knock! knock ! —someone might have been rapping a

knuckle on the underside of the boat.

Saidhardy's eyes opened and he put his ear to the gratings. I knelt down and did the same.

The islander exclaimed faintly. " It's the Tristan Knocker!" 199

" The Tristan Knocker?"

I could see his excitement, but he was so weak that he

had to speak deliberately to get the words out. " It's got
a
scientific name in South Georgia, but on Tristan we call
it
the Knocker. It's a big fish, like a cod. That's the noise they make when they're courting! Look at the seal!"

The little animal had slithered across the thwart and was gazing excitedly at the sea. At any moment he would go over the side.

Upton stood over us, gaunt, wild-eyed. " What
is it?
What is it, you two?"

S a i l h a r d y s a t u p . " I t ' s l a n d ! T h e T r i s t a n K n o c k e r spawns in shallow water. There's land—close!"

The seal pup dived over the side. It was just light enough

to see in the dawn. The albatross made a point of white against the dark patch out to port which I thought to be fog. Upton's face was alive. " Land! Thompson Island!" Helen turned her face away.

" If it is the
Meteor's
base,
I will
know it," said Pirow. " You can't mistake the entrance and the headland."

Walter screwed up his eyes, but the albatross was now

out of sight. " That would be the way to go, sure, but how? There'

s no wind and we're too weak to row."

" Get up to the tiller, Wetherby," said Upton.

" There is no way on her ..." I began.

" There will be," he replied. " I'm going to row!" Without waiting, he went forward and returned with the bag he had salvaged from the factory ship. He filled the syringe carefully. We watched, fascinated. With Walter helping, he heaved up one

of the big oars into position in the thole. Gripping the oar with his right hand, he took the hypodermic in his left and thrust the point into the muscles of his right. Quickly he

changed hands and repeated the strange performance.

" What the hell . . . ?" I said.

" Caffeine," he said shortly. " Now get up to the tiller." " This is not the time to start giving yourself fancy drugs." He did not take his eyes off my face, but sat at the oar,

clamping and unclamping his fingers. Then he did not seem

to be able to open them any more.

He grinned. " I'm going to row this boat
to
Thompson Island. Caffeine paralyses the muscles. I can't take my hands off the oars. They're going to stay there until we reach Thompson Island. Steer!"

" Over there—where the albatross went?"

200

" Yes I "

I clambered stiffly up to the tiller seat. The boat felt

lop-sided with one oar, but I brought her head round towards the dark patch. The sun came up and turned the vast amphitheatre of ice into a breathing panorama. The sea was bluegreen and calm, and my eyes could scarcely tolerate the whiteness of the barrier. We were heading away from the nearest cliffs, which rose to full view, in the direction of a belt of fog which completely blanked off the eastern and southern shores of the barrier. The seal pup sported about

the boat with a Tristan Knocker in his mouth.

Pirow and Walter cooked more food, and Walter took

a short trick at another oar but soon gave it up. Helen brought me some hot food and had some herself, but she

looked deathly pale. Upton's stroke became weaker and weaker. Suddenly I felt a strong thrust underneath the boat. It took us quickly into the belt of fog, before I realised that the boat was in the grip of a powerful current. I felt the warmth first, and then the wetness of the fog. Upton, dragging the oar which he could not unclench, was hidden from view ; the fog was so thick that Helen, only a few feet away, became a murky outline. The current swept the boat on and on. Once Helen called to me in a frightened, disembodied voice

to ask where we were going. The warmth was as unexpected

as the darkness. I reached down cautiously and tested the

water with my ungloved hand ; it too was warm, compared

with the normal icy seas of the Southern Ocean.

We broke out of the fog.

Thompson Island lay before our eyes.

I identified it immediately: the low, level east point like a Blue Whale's snout was unmistakable. I had seen it with my own eyes and I had studied Captain Norris' sketches of it. The entrance sloped away abruptly and to the west was the

point Norris had called Dalrymple Head. But it was upon neither of these that our eyes fixed in wonder and awe, it was upon the giant glacier which capped—to use Norris' own words—

the island like a nightmare caul. The strange colour made one automatically think of it as evil. It rose up two thousand feet sheer, its foot in the inner anchorage, which was still out of sight. It had none of the opaque whiteness and soft undertones of blue and green of the floating ice-continent which encircled the island and had aroused our wonder earlier : the caul was bottle-green and translucent to such a degree that one could see huge trapped boulders deep inside, its 201

heart ; there was a tracery of white in a group about halfway up which looked as if it might have been the entombed skeletons of half a dozen Blue Whales. The baleful green gave it an inherent quality of malice, heightened by my realisation that the anchorage entrance of ragged basalt and pumice cliffs resembled the open jaws of a serpent. There was no sign of

ice or snow on them. By contrast, the caul towered in archangelic glory and stretched away out of sight to the south. Upton, hampered by the oar, gazed speechlessly. His voice

was thick when he gestured at the cliffs flanking the entrance. " Caesium! Caesium!"

Striated and grooved with white, like the stripes on
a
zebra's flank, were the veins of priceless ore.

I had never seen Upton so moved. The gaunt face was

radiant under its patina of stubble, argyria and fatigue. " Mine!" he exclaimed. " All mine!"

The strong current swept us in towards the point like driftwood.

Pirow was smiling. The sight of Thompson Island had

restored his morale. " The fleet is waiting for you, Herr Kapitan!"

I turned to look
at
him. The boat was swept round the headland into a long fjord.

" See!" he said.

Canted against the northern bank of the anchorage was

a liner. I did not need to see her name. That Clyde-built silhouette was as familiar to me as London Bridge. For months I had studied it—the streamlined funnel set further

aft than was usual during the war, and the peculiar derricks forward. The liner's picture had hung in the chartroom of H.M.S. Scott. The liner's last agonised signal, outward bound to Melbourne in 1942, was fresh in my mind:

"
QQQ—QQQ—QQQ-45° South, 10° West—liner Kyle of
Lochalsh—am being attacked by unknown ship."

Before my eyes, in Thompson Island's harbour, lay the
Kyle of Lochalsh.

A little further down the fjord, half-beached, was the tanker
Grönland.
Rommel never knew that Kohler had won one of the Afrika Korp's battles in the frozen fastnesses of the Southern Ocean. The loss of fifteen thousand tons of aviation spirit and diesel oil she was carrying to the Middle East had reduced still further Britain's hold there.
Gronland
had vanished while under my charge. The tanker's heavy feeder