The Purple Cloud Page 9
the fourth day out, we had made only nineteen miles, andcould still from a hummock discern afar the leaning masts of the oldBoreal. Clark led on ski, captaining a sledge with 400 lbs. ofinstruments, ammunition, pemmican, aleuronate bread; Mew followed, hissledge containing provisions only; and last came I, with a mixedfreight. But on the third day Clark had an attack of snow-blindness, andMew took his place.
Pretty soon our sufferings commenced, and they were bitter enough. Thesun, though constantly visible day and night, gave no heat. Oursleeping-bags (Clark and Mew slept together in one, I in another) weresoaking wet all the night, being thawed by our warmth; and our fingers,under wrappings of senne-grass and wolf-skin, were always bleeding.Sometimes our frail bamboo-cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, wouldcrash perilously against an ice-ridge--and they were our one hope ofreaching land. But the dogs were the great difficulty: we lost sixmortal hours a day in harnessing and tending them. On the twelfth dayClark took a single-altitude observation, and found that we were only inlatitude 86 deg. 45'; but the next day we passed beyond the furthest pointyet reached by man, viz. 86 deg. 53', attained by the _Nix_ explorers fouryears previously.
* * * * *
Our one secret thought now was food, food--our day-long lust for theeating-time. Mew suffered from 'Arctic thirst.
* * * * *
Under these conditions, man becomes in a few days, not a savage only,but a mere beast, hardly a grade above the bear and walrus. Ah, the ice!A long and sordid nightmare was that, God knows.
On we pressed, crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoarsilence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, hadwatched.
* * * * *
After the eleventh day our rate of march improved: all lanesdisappeared, and ridges became much less frequent. By the fifteenth dayI was leaving behind the ice-grave of David Wilson at the rate of ten tothirteen miles a day.
Yet, as it were, his arm reached out and touched me, even there.
His disappearance had been explained by a hundred different guesses onthe ship--all plausible enough. I had no idea that anyone connected mein any way with his death.
But on our twenty-second day of march, 140 miles from our goal, hecaused a conflagration of rage and hate to break out among us three.
It was at the end of a march, when our stomachs were hollow, our framesready to drop, and our mood ravenous and inflamed. One of Mew's dogs wassick: it was necessary to kill it: he asked me to do it.
'Oh,' said I, 'you kill your own dog, of course.'
'Well, I don't know,' he replied, catching fire at once, 'you ought tobe used to killing, Jeffson.'
'How do you mean, Mew?' said I with a mad start, for madness and theflames of Hell were instant and uppermost in us all: 'you mean becausemy profession----'
'Profession! damn it, no,' he snarled like a dog: 'go and dig up DavidWilson--I dare say you know where to find him--and he will tell you mymeaning, right enough.'
I rushed at once to Clark, who was stooping among the dogs,unharnessing: and savagely pushing his shoulder, I exclaimed:
'That beast accuses me of murdering David Wilson!'
'Well?' said Clark.
'I'd split his skull as clean----!'
'Go away, Adam Jeffson, and let me be!' snarled Clark.
'Is that all you've got to say about it, then--you?'
'To the devil with you, man, say I, and let me be!' cried he: 'you knowyour own conscience best, I suppose.'
Before this insult I stood with grinding teeth, but impotent. However,from that moment a deeper mood of brooding malice occupied my spirit.Indeed the humour of us all was one of dangerous, even murderous,fierceness. In that pursuit of riches into that region of cold, we hadbecome almost like the beasts that perish.
* * * * *
On the 10th April we passed the 89th parallel of latitude, and thoughsick to death, both in spirit and body, pressed still on. Like the loweranimals, we were stricken now with dumbness, and hardly once in a weekspoke a word one to the other, but in selfish brutishness on through areal hell of cold we moved. It is a cursed region--beyond doubtcursed--not meant to be penetrated by man: and rapid and awful was thedegeneration of our souls. As for me, never could I have conceived thatsavagery so heinous could brood in a human bosom as now I felt it broodin mine. If men could enter into a country specially set apart for thehabitation of devils, and there become possessed of evil, as we were sowould they be.
* * * * *
As we advanced, the ice every day became smoother; so that, from fourmiles a day, our rate increased to fifteen, and finally (as the sledgeslightened) to twenty.
It was now that we began to encounter a succession of strange-lookingobjects lying scattered over the ice, whose number continuallyincreased as we proceeded. They had the appearance of rocks, or piecesof iron, incrusted with glass-fragments of various colours, and theywere of every size. Their incrustations we soon determined to bediamonds, and other precious stones. On our first twenty-mile day Mewpicked up a diamond-crystal as large as a child's foot, and such objectssoon became common. We thus found the riches which we sought, beyond alldream; but as the bear and the walrus find them: for ourselves we hadlost; and it was a loss of riches barren as ashes, for all thosemillions we would not have given an ounce of fish-meal. Clark grumbledsomething about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substancehad been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning intheir fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased tointerest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they obstructed ourway.
* * * * *
We had all along had good weather: till, suddenly, on the morning of the13th April, we were overtaken by a tempest from the S.W., of such mightyand solemn volume that the heart quailed beneath it. It lasted in itsfull power only an hour, but during that time snatched two of oursledges long distances, and compelled us to lie face-downward. We hadtravelled all the sun-lit night, and were gasping with fatigue; so assoon as the wind allowed us to huddle together our scattered things, wecrawled into the sleeping-bags, and instantly slept.
We knew that the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as oureyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittlecracklings of artillery. This may have been a result of the tempeststirring up the ocean beneath the ice. Whatever it was, we did not care:we slept deep.
We were within ten miles of the Pole.
* * * * *
In my sleep it was as though someone suddenly shook my shoulder withurgent '_Up! up_!' It was neither Clark nor Mew, but a dream merely: forClark and Mew, when I started up, I saw lying still in theirsleeping-bag.
I suppose it must have been about noon. I sat staring a minute, and myfirst numb thought was somehow this: that the Countess Clodagh hadprayed me 'Be first'--for her. Wondrous little now cared I for theCountess Clodagh in her far unreal world of warmth--precious little forthe fortune which she coveted: millions on millions of fortunes layunregarded around me. But that thought, _Be first!_ was deeply suggestedin my brain, as if whispered there. Instinctively, brutishly, as theGadarean swine rushed down a steep place, I, rubbing my daft eyes,arose.
The first thing which my mind opened to perceive was that, while thetempest was less strong, the ice was now in extraordinary agitation. Ilooked abroad upon a vast plain, stretched out to a circular, but wavinghorizon, and varied by many hillocks, boulders, and sparklingmeteor-stones that everywhere tinselled the blinding white, some big ashouses, most small as limbs. And this great plain was now rearrangingitself in a widespread drama of havoc, withdrawing in ravines likemutual backing curtsies, then surging to clap together in passionatemountain-peaks, else jostling like the Symplegades, fluent andinconstant as billows of the sea, grinding itself, piling itself,pouring itself in cataracts of powdered ice, whil
e here and there I sawthe meteor-stones leap spasmodically, in dusts and heaps, like geysersor spurting froths in a steamer's wake, a tremendous uproar, meantime,filling all the air. As I stood, I plunged and staggered, and I foundthe dogs sprawling, with whimperings, on the heaving floor.
I did not care. Instinctively, daftly, brutishly, I harnessed ten ofthem to my sledge; put on Canadian snow-shoes: and was awaynorthward--alone.
The sun shone with a clear, benign, but heatless shining: a ghostly,remote, yet quite limpid light, which seemed designed for the lightingof other planets and systems, and to strike here by happy chance. Agreat wind from the S.W., meantime, sent thin snow-sweepings flyingnorthward past me.
The odometer which I had with me had not yet measured four miles, when Ibegan to notice two things: first that the jewelled meteor-stones werenow accumulating beyond all limit, filling my range of vision to thenorthern horizon with a