Хэммонд Иннес - Calling the Southern Cross!

“Gerda’s right,” Howe said, his words blurred through his thickened lips. “They’re both right. We’ve got to do something.”

“Yes, but what?” I demanded irritably. “We’ve no weapons. All together Bland has three rifles and about a thousand rounds of ammunition. Also, the men are well fed and for the first time in days they feel secure. When supplies get short and they get desperate, then maybe we can rush Bland.”

“Perhaps it is too late then,” Gerda said. “This berg may break out of the pack in the next storm. Then Bland will get away in one of the boats and stove in the rest. His one chance is to be the sole survivor.” It was as though Howe were speaking through her.

“We’ll just have to wait,” I answered stubbornly. “Don’t worry, time and the ice will wear him down. Anyway, I’m not risking anyone’s life, my own included, in some premature attempt to regain control of the stores. I suggest you all get some sleep now.”

When Gerda left, Howe produced an iron stanchion and with a file began working away at the tip of it. The rasp of the file and grinding of the ice seemed to tear at my nerves as I fell asleep.

I won’t attempt to give a day-to-day account of our sojourn on the iceberg. One day was very much like another. Technically I was in command. But it was not an easy command. Only the fact that they were Tönsberg men and believed what Judie had told them about her father’s death kept them with us. Tempering every decision was the fear that some of these men might break away and join Bland. Bland had the boats and the stores. They represented hope and a full belly. The men knew from Bonomi that in Bland’s camp food and tobacco were plentiful. And once the men started to break away, it would become a stampede. Orders became little more than requests, and all the time Judie kept to her tent and refused to speak to me.

I worried about Judie a lot. I worried about Howe too. He took no interest in the work of the camp and made no effort to help. He hardly stirred from the tent. And all the time he whittled away at the iron, working the end to a point with a double edge like a spear. The grating of the file rasped at my nerves till I could stand it no longer. “For God’s sake,” I snapped at him, “stop it! Do you hear?”

He stared at me sullenly and said, “What would you do if Bland had killed your father? “And then, as though he’d been bottling it up all inside him, he started to tell me about Nordahl; how he’d come to see him at Newcastle; how he’d bought him a boat when he was twenty-one; how he’d taken him out to Grytviken for a season. “If I’d been his legitimate son he couldn’t have done more for me. And then, after the war, he gave me this job. Do you think I don’t know what I have to do? I tell you. I’ll kill Bland. I’ll kill the—”

“Shut up, do ye hear!” McPhee shouted, at the end of his patience.

But Howe’s voice went on and on, talking about killing, eternally talking about killing. I fell asleep to the drone of his voice and woke in the morning to the rasp of the file.

I told Gerda what he was up to, but whenever she came into the tent he hid the stanchion under his blankets. When she asked about it, his face puckered up like that of a kid about to cry. He hadn’t wanted her to know. I saw the struggle going on inside him between his love of her and the need to justify his existence by avenging the one man he’d loved. He wasn’t really sane. Every flicker of emotion was mirrored instantly in his features. And when Gerda took the wretched thing away from him, he behaved like a kid whose favorite toy has been confiscated. He had it back by evening, and was filing at it with desperate energy, till the rasp of it drove us nearly crazy and McPhee tore the iron out of his hands and flung it out over the ledge to the ice below.

Howe burst into tears then. But by next day he was at work on another stanchion. By then we were too tired to care, and the rasp of the file seemed to merge with the grinding of the ice as we fell asleep in a coma of exhaustion.

It was on February seventeenth that we established ourselves on the iceberg. A period of fairly good weather followed, and to keep the men constructively occupied and to give them some constant glimmer of hope, however slight, I set them to work cutting steps in the side of the berg.

We maintained a constant watch, and each day this lookout was posted higher and higher as we laboriously cut our way upward, until at last our lookout post was on the flat top of the berg. This was at about 120 feet above the pack.

On February twenty-third shortly before midday I was dragged from my tent by an excited lookout. “There is smoke, Kaptein ,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Vestover,” was his reply.

I climbed the hundred and forty-seven steps to the lookout, and there, just to the south of west, was a great column of smoke. It could have been frost smoke. But that night, when the sun dipped just below the horizon, we could see a red glow under the smoke. The whole camp was in an uproar of excitement. The sudden thought of rescue was in everyone’s mind. It was a hard thing for me to have to tell them that the only thing it could possibly be was the crew of the Southern Cross igniting the oil they had pumped out of the ship, as a guiding beacon to the rescue ships. But even that didn’t damp their spirits. If the survivors of the Southern Cross had decided to make a signal, then it must surely mean I that there were rescue ships in the vicinity.

For two days everyone was cheerful and the talk was all of rescue. Then the gale hit us. It came up out of the southwest and flung itself on us with a banshee howl that drowned the constant thunder of the breaking ice, seeming to pin us by its very weight to the ice walls of the berg.

When the storm broke, our ledge was facing straight into it. Our situation would have been bad enough down on the ice. But up there on an exposed ledge we got the full force of the wind. And with the wind came sleet and snow. It was terrifying — the bitter cold and the constant noise, the inability to breathe outside our tents and the lack of hot food.

No one spoke of rescue any more. In fact, we hardly spoke at all. We were glued to the face of the berg by the weight of the wind, like flies on a flypaper, and the snow piled up round us and froze, so that there was no longer a ledge. Drawing rations from Bland each day became a major expedition. We lost a man during this storm. He went out with two others and never returned. They were Tauer III men, all of them, and though I questioned them later, I never really got to the bottom of it. I think what really happened was that they went down there with the intention of deserting our camp for Bland s, only to find that Bland didn’t want them. That one of them disappeared over the edge was, I believe, an accident. At any rate, the two who came back suddenly became violently anti-Bland and infected their whole tent.

For six days we lay in a coma of cold and hunger, hardly daring to go out, the tents overcrowded, insanitary and wholly covered by a mixture of snow and ice. On the sixth day all was suddenly quiet. The wind had gone. And on that day, the men, led by the two survivors of that trip to the lower camp, complained to me about the amount of rations Bland had issued. They were getting desperate. Bonomi had told them that food was still plentiful in the lower camp. I said I’d go down and talk to Bland himself.

Howe dragged me aside then. “This is what we’ve been waiting for,” he said.

But I knew what that would mean. “If we let them run amok like that,” I said, “they’ll pillage the stores.”

“It’s the chance we’ve been waiting for,” he insisted. His eyes were feverishly bright.