This Accursed Land by Lennard Bickel

Author:Lennard Bickel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Diet of Dog

The fight back opened in a strange, spectral scene. An unmoving cloud shut them into a white, hazy capsule through which the night sun glared, hurting their eyes. They trudged each long night — to avoid the drag of soft snow during the day — guessing their westerly path by the south-north alignment of the sastrugi, often buried under coats of snow blown from the plateau. Under the influence of magnetic forces above their heads, and the proximity of the South Magnetic Pole, the compass was useless.

Feeling for the roll of the ice waves, and crossing them at right-angles, was their only guide to the line of march. It made their progress halting.

For three nights they fought these conditions, marching upwards of 12 hours without breaking for refreshment. Mawson aimed at an average of 15 miles a day, a target which demanded iron will, the desperation of famished men fighting for survival.

They were a sorry sight. Two men, strength flagging, slipping and staggering, falling on the hard ice and cursing the bruising, impatiently wiping the snow drift from their goggles, pulling with five matted, scrawny dogs. Mertz headed this dismal procession, a tattered leader with an old undervest wrapped round his head to retain warmth in his saturated woollen helmet, tied by 20 feet of alpine rope to the front trace of the sledge. He wore skis at first, to sniff out their path between ice hummocks and possible crevasse danger, but finally discarded them as too cumbersome among the sastrugi. With his sticks he prodded suspicious ridges and snow rises, he jumped on snow banks, trod into the troughs, feeling forward, hopefully toward the dream of food, warmth, shelter, somewhere in the west.

Mawson trudged in the dog trace, taking George’s place, lugging the sledge through snow and over the ice humps. He walked with his head bent, one eye still bandaged against the attack of snow-blindness — after five applications of cocaine and zinc — concentrating on keeping the sledge in a straight line with the rope attached to Mertz. They moved onwards, at a funereal pace through their weird surroundings, with the swish-swish of the sledge runners, the crunch of boots in crisp snow and the whine of hunger in the panting dogs the only sounds … hour after hour through the nights, long punishing trudging, mile after mile.

Their mouths were parched, their nasal canals dried out; they longed for liquids, but would not stop. To melt the deeply frozen snow would mean lighting the primus which meant erecting the tent … and that was hours out of their time; and in Mawson’s anxious mind hours were miles — and miles were survival. The further they tramped, the more the thought of food intruded, flooded their minds, and — when they rested — dominated their dreams, in vivid, disturbing colour and reality.

They used anticipation as a psychological crutch; they promised themselves a special lunch each seven days — a thin slice of frozen butter, a stick of chocolate, and a boil-up of a tea bag … once a week.

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