Dan Simmons - The Terror

It was like hauling a cumbersome thousand pounds of lumber and goods across moderately rough rock. And the pressure ridges could have been four-storey-high heaps of boulders and gravel for all the ease of crossing one.

This first serious one – just one of many stretching across their path to the southeast as far as they could see – must have been sixty feet high.

Unlashing the carefully secured top foods, boxes of fuel bottles, robes, sleeping bags, and heavy tent, they lightened the load, ending up with fifty- to hundred-pound bundles and boxes that they had to pull up the steep, tumbled, jagged ridge before even attempting to move the sledge.

Goodsir realized quickly that if the pressure ridges had been discrete things – that is, mere ridges rising out of relatively smooth sea ice – climbing them would not have been the soul-destroying exertion that it proved to be. None of the frozen sea was smooth, but for fifty to a hundred yards around each pressure ridge the sea ice became a truly insane maze of rough snow, tumbled seracs, and giant ice blocks – a maze that had to be solved and traversed before the real climbing could begin.

The climbing itself was never linear but always a tortuous back-and-forth, a constant search for footholds on treacherous ice or handholds on a block that might break away at any moment. The eight men zigzagged upward in ridiculous diagonals as they climbed, handed heavy loads up to one another, hacked away at clumps of ice with their pickaxes to create steps and shelves, and generally tried not to fall or be fallen upon. Parcels slipped out of icy mittens and crashed below, bringing up short but impressive clouds of curses from the five seamen below before Gore or Des Voeux shouted them into silence. Everything had to be unpacked and repacked ten times.

Finally the heavy sledge itself, with perhaps half its load still lashed to it, had to be pulled, shoved, lifted, braced, dislodged from entrapping seracs, angled, lifted again, and tugged to the summit of each uneven pressure ridge. There was no rest for the men even atop these ridges since to relax for a minute meant that eight layers of sweat-sodden outer clothing and underlayers would begin to freeze.

After tying new lines to the vertical posts and cross braces at the rear of the sledge, some of the men would get ahead of it to brace its descent – usually the large Marine, Pilkington, and Morfin and Ferrier had this duty – while others dug in their cleats and lowered it to a syncopated chorus of gasps, calls, warnings, and more curses.

Then they would carefully reload the sledge, double-check the lashings, boil snow to pour on the frozen-in runners, and be off again, forcing their way through the tumble-labyrinth on this side of the pressure ridge.

Thirty minutes later they would come to the next ridge.

Their first night out on the ice was terrifyingly memorable for Harry D. S. Goodsir.

The surgeon had never done any camping in his life, but he knew that Graham Gore was telling the truth when the lieutenant said, laughingly, that everything took five times longer on the ice: unpacking the materials, firing up the spirit lamps and stoves, laying out the brown Holland tent and securing screws as anchor stakes in the ice, unrolling the many blanket rolls and sleeping bags, and especially heating up the tinned soup and pork they’d brought along.

And all the while, one had to keep moving – waving arms and shaking legs and stamping feet – or extremities would freeze.

On a normal arctic summer, Mr. Des Voeux reminded Goodsir, citing their previous summer of ice-breaking southward from Beechey Island as an example, temperatures at this latitude on a sunny June day with no wind might rise as high as 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Not this summer. Lieutenant Gore had taken measurements of the air temperature at 10:00 p.m. – the time they stopped to make camp with the sun still on the southern horizon and the sky quite bright – and the thermometer read only −2 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature at their midday tea and biscuit break had been +6 degrees.

The Holland tent was small. In a storm it would save their lives but this first night out on the ice was clear with almost no wind, so Des Voeux and the five sailors decided to sleep outside on their wolfskins and tarps with only their Hudson’s Bay Company blanket sleeping bags for shelter – they would retreat to a very crowded tent if bad weather blew in – and after debating with himself for a moment, Goodsir decided to sleep outside with the men rather than inside with just Lieutenant Gore, as capable and affable a fellow as Gore was.

The daylight was maddening. It grew dim around midnight, but the sky was as light as an 8:00 p.m. London evening in midsummer, and Goodsir was damned if he could fall asleep. Here he was more physically tired than ever before in his life and he couldn’t sleep. The aches and pains from the day’s exertions also impeded sleep, he realized. He wished he’d brought some laudanum with him. A small draught of that would moderate the discomfort and allow him to sleep. Unlike some surgeons with a doctor’s certificate to administer drugs, Goodsir was not an addict – he used the various opiates only to allow himself to sleep or to concentrate when he had to. No more than once or twice a week.

And it was cold . After eating the heated soup and beef from the tins and walking through the ice jumble to find a private place to relieve himself – also an outdoor lifetime first for him and one, he realized, that must be accomplished quickly if frostbite of very important areas was to be avoided – Goodsir settled in on one of the large six-foot-by-five-foot wolfskin-blanket sleeping robes, unrolled his personal sleeping bag, and crawled deep into it.

But not deep enough to get warm. Des Voeux had explained to him that he had to remove his boots and slide them down into the bag with him so that the leather would not freeze solid – at one point Goodsir had pricked the bottom of his foot on the nails hammered through the sole of one of the boots – but all the men left on all their other clothes. The wool – all the wool, Goodsir realized not for the first time that day – was soaked through with his sweat and exhalations from the long day. The endless day.

For a while around midnight, the light deepened toward twilight enough that a few stars – planets, Goodsir now knew from a private lecture at the ad hoc observatory atop the iceberg two years ago – became visible. But the light never disappeared.

Nor did the cold. No longer moving or exerting itself, Goodsir’s thin body was defenseless against the cold that came in through the sleeping bag’s too-wide opening and that crept up from the ice through the hair-out wolfskin pad beneath him, crawling through the thick Hudson’s Bay Company blankets like some cold-fingered predator. Goodsir began to shake. His teeth chattered.

Around him, the four sleeping men – there were two on guard duty – snored so loudly that the surgeon wondered if the men on both ships miles northwest of them on the ice, beyond the countless pressure ridges – dear God, we have to cross those again going back – could hear the rasping and sawing and snorting.

Goodsir was shaking. At this rate he was sure he would not survive until morning. They would try to roust him out of his blanket and bag and find only a frozen, curled corpse.

He crawled as far down into the sewn-blankets sleeping bag as he could, pulling the ice-ridged opening closed above him, inhaling his own sour-sweat smell and exhalations rather than be exposed to that freezing air again.

In addition to the insidious light and the even more insidious creeping cold, the cold of death, Goodsir realized, the cold of the grave and of the black cliff wall above the Beechey Island headstones, there was the noise; the surgeon had thought himself accustomed to the groan of ship’s timbers, occasional creakings and snappings of supercold ship’s metal in the dark of two winters, and the constant noise antics of the ice holding the ship in its vise, but out here, with nothing separating his body from the ice except a few layers of wool and wolfskin, the groaning and movement of the ice beneath him was terrible. It was like trying to sleep on the belly of a living beast. The sense of the ice moving beneath him, however exaggerated, was real enough to give him vertigo as he curled more tightly into a fetal position.