The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard [free ebooks for android TXT] 📗

“We must push on all we can, for we are now 6 days behind Shackleton, all due to that wretched storm. So far, since we got among the disturbances we have not seen such alarming crevasses as I had expected; certainly dogs could have come up as far as this.”231

“At lunch we could see big pressure ahead having done first over five miles. Soon after lunch, having gone down a bit, we rose among very rough stuff. We plugged on until 4:30, when ski became quite impossible, and we put them on the sledges and started on foot. We immediately began putting legs down: one step would be on blue ice and the next two feet down into snow: very hard going. The pressure ahead seemed to stretch right into a big glacier next the Keltie Glacier to the east, and so we altered course for a small bluff point about two-thirds of the way along the base of the Cloudmaker. We were to camp at 6, but did not do so until about 6:30, the last 1½ hours in big pressure, crossing big and smaller waves, and hundreds of crevasses which one of us generally found. We are now camped in very big pressure, and with difficulty we found a patch big enough to pitch the tent free from crevasses. We are pretty well past the Keltie Glacier which is a vast tumbled mass: there is a long line of ice falls ahead, and I think there is a hard day ahead of us tomorrow among that pressure which must be enormous. We can’t go farther inshore here, being under the north end of the Cloudmaker, and a fine mountain it is, rising precipitously above us.232

“Sunday, December 17. Nearly 11 miles. Temp. 12.5°. 3,500 feet. We have had an exciting day⁠—this morning was just like the scenic railway at Earl’s Court. We got straight on to the big pressure waves, and headed for the humpy rock at the base of the Cloudmaker. It was a hard plug up the waves, very often standing pulls, and all that we could do for a course was a very varied direction. Going down the other side was the exciting part: all we could do was to set the sledge straight, hang on to the straps, give her a little push and rush down the slope, which was sometimes so sheer that the sledge was in the air. Sometimes there was no chance to brake the sledge, and we all had to get on to the top, and we rushed down with the wind whistling in our ears. After three hours of this it levelled out again a bit, and we took the top of a wave, and ran south along it on blue ice: enormous pressure to our right, largely I think caused by the Keltie Glacier. Then we ascended a rise, snowy and crevassed, and camped after doing just under five miles, with big pressure ahead.”233

“In the afternoon we had a hard surface. Scott started off at a great speed, Teddy [Evans] and I following. There was something wrong with my team or my sledge, as we had a desperate job to keep up at first. We did keep up all right, but were heartily glad when after about 2½ hours Scott stopped for a spell. I rearranged our harness, putting Cherry and myself on the long span again, which we had temporarily discarded in the morning. We were both winded and felt wronged. The rearrangement was a success however, and the remainder of the march was a pleasure instead of a desperate struggle. It finished up on fields of blue rippled ice with sharp knife edges, and snow patches few and far between. We are all camped on a small snow patch in the middle of a pale blue rippled sea, about 3,600 feet above sea level and past the Cloudmaker, which means that we are half way up the Glacier.”234

We had done 12½ miles (statute).

The Beardmore Glacier is twice as large as the Malaspina in Alaska, which was the largest known glacier until Shackleton discovered the Beardmore. Those who knew the Ferrar Glacier professed to find the Beardmore unattractive, but to me at any rate it was grand. Its very vastness, however, tends to dwarf its surroundings, and great tributary glaciers and tumbled icefalls, which anywhere else would have aroused admiration, were almost unnoticed in a stream which stretched in places forty miles from bank to bank. It was only when the theodolite was levelled that we realized how vast were the mountains which surrounded us: one of which we reckoned to be well over twenty thousand feet in height, and many of the others must have approached that measurement. Lieutenant Evans and Bowers were surveying whenever the opportunity offered, whilst Wilson sat on the sledge or on his sleeping-bag, and sketched.

Before leaving on the morning of December 18 we bagged off three half-weekly units and made a depot marked by a red flag on a bamboo which was stuck into a small mound. Unfortunately it began to snow in the night and no bearings were taken until the following morning when only the base of the mountains on the west side was visible. We knew we might have difficulty in picking up this depot again, and certainly we all did.

“It was thick, with low stratus clouds in the morning, and snow was falling in large crystals. Our socks and finnesko, hung out to dry, were covered with most beautiful feathery crystals. In the warm weather one gets fairly saturated with perspiration on the march, and footgear is always wet, except the outside covering which is as a rule more or less frozen according to existing temperature. On camping at