Into the Great Emptiness by David Roberts

Author:David Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Our clothes went hard as soon as we got outside. Most fearful drifts everywhere.

Two miles in five days. It looks as if we shall have to go on till the dog food is finished, then kill off the weaker dogs as food for the others, then—if we find the station—collect Bingham and D’Aeth and manhaul back.

The dogs chewed most of the Lapp thong off [the sledge lashing] last night, which I replaced. They have also eaten all the gut off the snowshoes, which are now useless.

Worst day I’ve ever had. With the sores in my fork [crotch] and frostbitten toes each step is agony. Several times I just couldn’t go on and had to sit down for a few minutes.

Courtauld was having his own problems. His “moccasins” had split open and his feet got dangerously cold. Soon he would develop incipient frostbite in his fingers and toes. The layover days, irksome though they were, provided precious respite from the ordeal of sledging. Inside his tent, Chapman read Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae and Treasure Island. Inside his, Wager immersed himself in Shakespeare’s Richard II and some poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Ever the geologist, he also pondered strata and intrusions. After a rare day that he “thoroughly enjoyed,” he noted in his diary, “I spent the morning thinking over the tectonics of the dyke and plateau basalt formation about Kangerdlugssuaq [sic]. A scheme beginning with thinning of the sial by tension fits the facts pretty well.” In odd moments, Wager seemed disenchanted with the whole journey, complaining on November 19 about “somebody’s remark before we left the wireless that this will be an epic journey—a damned silly one I think in lots of ways.” He did not elaborate on that sour judgment.

Yet all the toil was slowly paying dividends. On November 20, Courtauld wrote in his diary, “Found to our surprise that we had done fifty-six miles from the Big Flag, leaving sixty-two to go.”

After November 20 a new, almost ruthless determination came over the men. Chapman: “It’s just amazing what one can do to these dogs under such conditions. One behaves like an animal and hits them anywhere with any weapon. However they seem quite impervious to punishment either from us or from each other.” On the twenty-first, “Had to kill one of my dogs which was too weak to pull. We can’t afford food for it. Killed it instantaneously with the blunt side of an axe.”

On the twenty-fourth, Tiss, one of Courtauld’s dogs, gave birth to a puppy. The dog’s father licked the snow off it, but “We relentlessly fed it to another team, and the same had to be done with three other puppies which appeared in turn each time we stopped.” Despite having just given birth, Tiss pulled her share of the weight between stops. “Poor brute,” wrote Chapman that evening, “but what else could we do?”

The wretched huskies were ravenous for food, their half-rations finally taking their toll. On November 27 several of them tore

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