Introduction and Preface

Introduction

ALONE is Richard E. Byrd's story of the five months he spent in absolute isolation at Advance Base, a tiny hut far south of Little America in Antarctica. Unquestionably, ALONE has achieved a permanent place on the pinnacle of truly great accounts of human bravery and endurance. Its record of discovery and exploration encompasses more than geographical investigation; ALONE is the courageous journey into the dark unknown of man's unconquerable human spirit. Moving, intimate, crowded with the dangers of death and deprivation, Admiral Byrd's fascinating story points the way toward an inner strength and fortitude the world needs now more than ever.

(from the introduction to the Ace Books reprint)

Little America

The principal U.S. base in Antarctica, lies on the northeastern edge of Ross Ice Shelf near Kainan Bay. First set up in 1928 as the headquarters for the polar explorations of Commander Richard E. Byrd, it was reused and enlarged by Byrd on his return expedition in 1933-35. In 1940 Byrd established a camp 7 miles (11 kilometers) northeast (later named Little America III) that served as the west base for a government-sponsored exploration of Marie Byrd Land before World War II. After the war, Little America IV, consisting of an airstrip and 60 tents, was set up nearby as a headquarters for Operation High Jump, a scientific expedition having political overtones (namely, extending U.S. sovereignty to Antarctica). It served as the base from which more than 100 flights photographed the Antarctic coast and charted an area estimated at 350,000 square miles (905,000 sq km). When an expedition next returned (1956) in preparation for International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), parts of the earlier Little America camps were found to have vanished because of calving of the ice shelf. Consequently, Little America V was set up several miles northeast (near Kainan Bay) to serve as a supply base and terminus of a 630-mile-long «highway» to Byrd Station in the continent's interior.

(From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition)

Preface

This book is the account of a personal experience — so personal that for four years I could not bring myself to write it. It is different from anything else I have ever written. My other books have been factual, impersonal narratives of my expeditions and flights. This book, on the other hand, is the story of an experience which was in considerable part subjective. I very nearly died before it was over. And, since my sufferings bulked so large in it and since a man's instinct is to keep such things to himself, I did not see how I could write about Advance Base and still escape making an unseemly show of my feelings. Also, I was a long time recovering from the effects of my stay at Latitude 80 degrees 08 minutes South, and the whole business was so intimate in memory that I doubted that I could approach it with the proper detachment.

But in this decision my friends would not let me be. Wherever I went, they asked me questions. And finally, in December, 1937, some of my closest friends, whom I happened to be with one evening in New York, persuaded my to write the book while the facts were vivid in my mind. I agreed, but with reluctance.

I foresaw that a number of difficulties would rise to plague me once I started to write. For one thing, I knew that it could not be other than harrowing to relive again some of the bitter moments of Advance Base; and, for another, I appreciated that I should be obliged to discuss matters of personal moment in a way that would be distasteful. But, encouraged by the enthusiasm of my friends and the urgings of my publishers, I shut out the doubts and agreed to go ahead.

As the writing progressed, my earlier misgivings were confirmed. Indeed, there were times when I was on the verge of giving up the book entirely, and would have done so had there been any honorable way out. For there were aspects of this situation which I would rather not mention at all, since they involve that queer business called self-respect. Nevertheless, I finished what I started out to do, and this book represents the simple truth about myself and my affairs during that time.

The original intention was to use my diary, which was very detailed and voluminous, as the prime ingredient in the book; but I soon discovered that it was almost impossible to maintain an intelligible sequence and proportion by relying on the diary alone, since it was inescapably full of repetitious matter, cryptic references to things meaningful only to myself, and random jottings; besides, there were many very personal things directed to my family which I did not wish to include. In consequence, though I have used considerable sections and many excepts, I have used them only where I felt they were illuminating. No particular effort has been made in the text to indicate whether the entry for a particular day is complete or only an excerpt lifted bodily from the diary; I did not want to clutter up the book with bibliographical apparatus. However, the diary, as well as numerous notes which I made on my meteorological forms, the calendar, and loose sheets of paper, have been an excellent means of refreshing my memory.

Now, this book is called Alone; but obviously no one man could have done what I did without the loyal and sympathetic support of many other men. That support was one of the fine things of the whole experience; and it was especially manifested after my return from Advance Base, when the fifty-five men at Little America did everything possible to lighten the burden of leadership. One debt which I am happy to acknowledge in this connection is to my old shipmate, George Noville, the Executive Officer, who cared for me unsparingly until we reached New Zealand.

R.E.B. Boston, Massachusetts, October, 1938.

Chapter One — 1933: The Idea

Bolling Advance Weather Base, which I manned alone during the Antarctic winter night of 1934, was planted in the dark immensity of the Ross Ice Barrier, on a line between Little America and the South Pole. It was the first inland station ever occupied in the world's southernmost continent. My decision to winter there was harder, perhaps, than even some of the men at Little America appreciated. For the original plan had been to staff the base with several men; but, as we shall presently see, this had proved impossible. In consequence, I had to choose whether to give up the Base entirely — and the scientific mission with it — or to man it by myself. I could not bring myself to give it up.

This much should be understood from the beginning: that above everything else, and beyond the solid worth of weather and auroral observations in the hitherto unoccupied interior of Antarctica and my interest in these studies, I really wanted to go for the experience's sake. So the motive was in part personal. Aside form the meteorological and auroral work, I had no important purposes. There was nothing of that sort. Nothing whatever, except one man's desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are.

It was all that simple. And it is something, I believe, that people beset by the complexities of modern life will understand instinctively. We are caught up in the winds that flow every which way. And in the hullabaloo the thinking man in driven to ponder where he is being blown and to long desperately for some quiet place where he can reason undisturbed and take inventory. It may be that I exaggerate the need for occasional sanctuary, but I do not think so — at least speaking for myself, since it has always taken me longer than the average person to think things out. By that I do not mean to imply that, before I went to Advance Base, my private life had not been extraordinarily happy; actually, it had been happier than I had had right to expect. Nevertheless, a crowding confusion had pushed in. For fourteen years or so various expeditions, one succeeding the other, had occupied my time and thoughts, to the exclusion of nearly everything else. In 1919 it was the Navy's transatlantic flight; in 1925, Greenland, in 1926, the North Pole; in 1927, the Atlantic Ocean; 1928-30, the South Pole, and 1933-35, the Antarctic again. In between there was no rest. An expedition was hardly finished before I was engaged in putting a new one together; and meanwhile I was lecturing from one end of the country to the other in order to make a living and pay off the debts of the completed expedition, or else scurrying around to solicit money and supplies for a new one.

You might think that a man whose life carries him into remote places would have no special need for quietude. Whoever thinks that has little knowledge of expeditions. Most of the time they move in fearful congestion and uproar, and always under the lash of time. Nor will they ever be different, so long as explorers are not rich men and so long as exploration itself deals with uncertainties. No doubt the world thinks it is a fine thing to reach one pole, or both poles, for that matter. Thousands of men have devoted the best part of their lifetimes to reaching one pole or the other, and a good many have died on the way. But among the handful who have actually attained Latitude 90 degrees, whether North or South, I doubt that even one found the sight of the pole itself particularly inspiring. For there is little enough to see: at one end of the earth a mathematical spot in the center of a vast and empty ocean, and at the other end an equally imaginary spot in the middle of a vast and windy plateau. It's not getting to the pole that counts. It's what you learn of scientific value on the way. Plus the fact that you get there and back without being killed.

Now, I had been to both poles. In prospect this had promised to be a satisfying achievement. And in a large sense it had been — principally because the poles had been the means of enabling me to enlist public support for the full-scale scientific program which was my real interest. The books of clippings which my family kept up grew fat, and most of them said good things. These were among the tangibles of success, at least in my profession; these, plus goodwill, were the visible assets, although I should point out that the wisest among us, like conservative accountants, seldom carry the latter item in excess of $1.

But for me there was little sense of true achievement. Rather, when I finished the stocktaking, I was conscious of a certain aimlessness. This feeling centered on small but increasingly lamentable omissions. For example, books. There was no end to the books that I was forever promising myself to read; but, when it came to reading them, I seemed never to have the time or the patience. With music, too, it was the same way; the love for it — and I suppose the indefinable need — was also there, but not the will or opportunity to interrupt for it more than momentarily the routine which most of us come to cherish as existence.

This was true of other matters: new ideas, new concepts, and new developments about which I knew little or nothing. It seemed a restricted way to live. One might ask: Why not try to bring these things into daily existence? Must you go off and bury yourself in the middle of polar cold and darkness just to be alone? After all, a stranger walking down Fifth Avenue can be just as lonely as a traveler wandering in the desert. All of which I grant, but with the contention that no man can hope to be completely free who lingers within reach of familiar habits and urgencies. Least of all a man in my position, who must go to the public for support and render a perpetual accounting of his stewardship. Now, it is undeniably true that our civilization has evolved a marvelous system for safeguarding individual privacy; but those of us who must live in the limelight are outside its protection.

Now, I wanted something more than just privacy in the geographical sense. I wanted to sink roots into some replenishing philosophy. An so it occurred to me, as the situation surrounding Advance Base evolved, that here was the opportunity. Out there on the South Polar barrier, in cold and darkness as complete as that of the Pleistocene, I should have time to catch up, to study and think and listen to the phonograph; and, for maybe seven months, remote from all but the simplest distractions, I should be able to live exactly as I chose, obedient to no necessities but those imposed by wind and night and cold, and to no man's laws but my own.

That was the way I saw it. There may have been more than that. At this distance I cannot be sure; but, perhaps, the desire was also in my mind to try a more rigorous existence than any I had known. Much of my adult life had been spent in aviation. The man who flies achieves his destiny sitting down. Conflict, when it rises between the ship and the medium, comes to him indirectly, softened and stepped down by the mechanical advantage of the controls; when the conflict reaches the ultimate decision, the whole business is transacted one way or another in a matter of hours, even minutes and seconds. Where I was going, I should be physically and spiritually on my own. Where Advance Base was finally planted, conditions are not very different from what they were when the first men came groping out of the twilight of the last Ice Age.

That risks were involved, all of us knew; but none, so far as we could foresee, that were too great. Otherwise, as leader of a big polar expedition, and subject to all the responsibilities implicit in command, I could not have gone. That I miscalculated is proved by the fact that I nearly lost my life. Yet, I do not regret going. For I read my books — if not as many as I had counted on reading; and listened to my phonograph records — even when they seemed only to intensify my suffering; and meditated — though not always as cheerfully as I had hoped. All this was good, and it is mine. What I had not counted on was discovering how closely a man could come to dying and still not die, or want to die. That, too, was mine; and it also is to the good. For that experience resolved proportions and relationships for me as nothing else could have done; and it is surprising, approaching the final enlightenment, how little one really has to know or feel sure about.

* * *

Now, I have started out in this vein because a misunderstanding arose in some quarters concerning my reasons for occupying Advance Base alone. Indeed, some people disputed my right to do what I did. What people think about you is not supposed to matter much, so long as you yourself know where the truth lies; but I have found out, as have others who move in and out of newspaper headlines, that on occasion it can matter a good deal. For once you enter the world of headlines you learn there is not one truth but two: the one which you know from the facts; and the one which the public, or at any rate a highly imaginative part of the public, acquires by osmosis. It isn't often that the one person centrally involved ever hears about the second kind; his friends see to that. Nevertheless, I happen to be privy to several of the gospel truths circulated about Advance Base. God knows, there may be others, but these could hardly be improved upon. One is that I was exiled by my own men. Another is that I went out there to do some quiet but serious drinking. In the past such tales would have shocked me; most certainly they would have made me mad. But not now.

The one criticism that might have given me pause was disposed of by my friend, Charles J.V. Murphy, a member of the expedition. Before leaving for Advance Base, I asked him to look out for my affairs in collaboration with the Second-in-Command, Dr. Thomas C. Poulter. My announcement that I would occupy Advance Base alone was not wirelessed to the United States until I was actually established there. It said simply that I was going because I wanted to go. My friends received the news with different emotions. Radio messages poured into Little America during the next forty-eight hours. Most of them were from men whose judgment I value. Considering the little that they had to go on, I must say that they were surpassingly fair. And yet, for every message of approval, there were three of puzzlement or forthright disapproval. I was urged — virtually ordered — to reconsider. My going off, they said, must end in disaster, almost certainly for myself and probably for the fifty-five men presumed to be left leaderless at Little America. The head of a great geographical institution warned that, if anything went wrong at Little America during my absence, my disgrace would be worse than that of Nobile, whose crime lay in leaving his shattered dirigible before all of his men were taken off. A banker friend said flatly that the whole idea was a reckless whim and that any shame in withdrawing would be more than offset by the escape from the consequences which must flow from my decision, if persisted in.

All of these messages were addressed directly to me, but they went to Charlie Murphy. He was in a tough spot. The winter night was coming on, the cold was deepening, and I know that he himself was troubled on my account. He knew how close was my friendship with these men in America. To each man he replied that I was where I was for a deliberate and useful purpose; that the tractors were on their way from Advance Base back to Little America and a return trip would expose other men to considerable risks; that in his opinion I was irrevocably resolved on my course; and that, because my psychological burdens were already heavy enough, he did not propose to add to them by informing over the radio that my friends were in a panic. Therefore the messages were being filed at Little America for my return in October. Then it was March. And six months of darkness and cold would meanwhile intervene.

But of all this, of course, I had not even a hint. I am glad this was so; for I was human enough not to want to be misunderstood, at least by my friends — I wasn't big enough for that. In his radio conversations with me at the time Murphy was always cheerful; he never mentioned what had happened. And, for that matter, I never asked him what my friends thought, for the reason that I didn't want to know. I suspected, of course, that there would be criticism; but I couldn't do anything about that; my bridges were burned behind me. Whether I could have been persuaded to turn back if Murphy had passed those messages on is a matter I shall not undertake to answer. It would be stupid to do so. Hindsight has a way of inventing different compensations and motives. My only purpose in bringing the matter up now is to illustrate some of the misunderstandings that attended the manning of Advance Base and the different pulls that rise inevitably to deter the man who tries something out of the ordinary.

* * *

Advance Base was no reckless whim. It was the outcome of four years of planning. The original idea came out of my first expedition to the Antarctic, and was an indirect by-product of my interest in polar meteorology. Of all the different branches of science served by a soundly constituted polar expedition (on the last we served twenty-two branches) none to the popular mind has a more practical value than meteorology. The framer whose livelihood comes from crops, the people whose stomachs are kept full by these crops, the speculators who gamble in them, the industrialist whose factories depend upon the farmer's purchasing power, the sailor on the seas — all these and others, even to the casual holiday tourist, have a vital stake in weather. But few of them appreciate the extent to which the poles enter into their local schemes.

Most of us have a schoolboy's understanding of the theory of simple circulation: a cold current of air flowing inexhaustibly from the poles to the equator, a counter current of warm air returning poleward above it; and the two together creating the breathing of the globe. The extent to which the poles influence the weather is still a subject for speculation. Some authorities go so far as to say that each pole is the true weather maker in its respective hemisphere. This latter belief has been formulated in Bjerknes' theory of the polar front, which undertakes to explain atmospheric circulation in terms of the effects produced by the interaction of masses of polar-cooled air, the so-called polar fronts, with the masses of warm equatorial air into which they intrude.

Although a knowledge of polar meteorology is indispensable for enlightened long-range forecasting, we really know very little about it. And, because of the need for more information about the general laws of circulation, the first concern of an expedition leader is to see that his meteorological department is strongly staffed. This obligation has been earnestly met by most expeditions. The results, nevertheless, have been meager; for Antarctica has been under scientific investigation for less than half a century; and, so far as weather data are concerned, the bulk of the knowledge is represented by the work of perhaps a dozen well-found expeditions.

For a continent having an estimated area of 4,500,000 square miles, this is not much of a showing. Or so it seemed to me. In the course of my first Antarctic expedition, I was struck by the thought that the most valuable source of meteorological data was still left untouched. What data existed had for the most part been collected at fixed bases on the Antarctic coast or on islands adjacent to the coast; by ships exploring contiguous waters; and by field parties poorly equipped for research making fast summer dashes inland. Meteorologically, the interior of Antarctica was a blank. No fixed stations had ever been advanced inland; no winter observations had ever been made beyond the coast; and the fragmentary data collected by sledging parties covered only the comparatively mild summer months. Yet, inland, beyond the moderating influence of the seas which surround the continent, was the coldest cold on the face of the earth. It was there one must look for typical continental conditions. And it was there that I proposed to plant Advance Base. There, where weather is manufactured. The data accumulated by a station like Advance Base when correlated with data gathered simultaneous at Little America, ought to throw a highly revealing light on the facts of atmospheric phenomena in high southern latitudes. Why should a civilization as technologically alert as ours continue to tolerate a situation that allows ruinous storms, kindled long before at remote storm centers, to break without adequate warning upon the civilized parts of the world? Only recently Mr. Willis R. Gregg, chief of the United States Weather Bureau, predicted the establishment in the polar regions of robot observers which would flash data by wireless to stations in lower latitudes. That way, meteorologists could watch conditions as they develop in the main amphitheaters of meteorological action, and plot their charts accordingly.

I rather wish I had thought of that myself, because Advance Base was intended to be the pilot station for a polarwide system of similar outposts except that it was to be manned by flesh and blood instead of a mechanical brain untroubled by cold and darkness and memory. Our original plan was decidedly a daring one. In the preliminary discussions with Bill Haines, then, as on the second expedition, my Senior Meteorologist, I never pretended that the idea was more than speculative. In other words — great stuff, if we could do it. Where we finally decided to aim for was the foot of the Queen Maud Mountains. Even with that, we realized that we were probably over-reaching ourselves. It meant hauling tons of supplies some 400 miles across the crevasse-ridden Ross Ice Barrier and relying upon tractors whose capacities on Barrier surface would have to be determined by guess and by God.

In all aspects, particularly the psychological, the risks surrounding the project were very real. Whoever should elect to inhabit such a spot must reconcile themselves to enduring the bitterest temperatures in nature, a long night as black as that on the dark side of the moon, and an isolation which no power on earth could lift for at least six months. Now, against cold the explorer has simple but ample defenses. Against the accidents which are the most serious risks of isolation he has inbred resourcefulness and ingenuity. But against darkness, nothing much but his own dignity.

In the kind of station we had in mind the normal risks of a polar base would be intensified a thousand fold. The difficulties would be great. The amount of supplies that could be advanced would be small, and, therefore, only very few men could occupy it. The men would be jammed together at arm's length in a tiny shack buried in the snow. Wind and cold would keep them from ever leaving it for more than a few hours a day. Change in the sense that we know it, without which life is scarcely tolerable, would be nonexistent. The party would be dedicated to an iron routine. The day would be the repeated pattern of the hour; the week, the repeated pattern of the day; and one would scarcely be distinguishable from the other, even as an interval in time. Where there is no growth or change outside, men are driven deeper and deeper inside themselves for materials of replenishment. An on these hidden levels of self-replenishment, which might be called the pay levels of philosophy, would depend the ability of any group of men to outlast such an ordeal and not come to hate each other.

My idea was that three men — preferably two weather observers and a radio operator — should man the Base. The difficulties of hauling supplies into the Antarctic interior made three the maximum; and the risks, especially those of a psychological order, argued forcefully against less than three. Three is a classic number. Three men would balance each other like the legs of a tripod. With three men as compared to two, the chances for temperamental harmony seemed infinitely increased, since, in the nature of human relations, one man would constantly be present in the stabilizing role of a neutral judge, a court of appeal. Instead of hearing one voice everlastingly and seeing one face and being confronted with one pattern of habits and idiosyncrasies, a man would have two aspects and personalities constantly facing him.

Under such conditions it doesn't take two men long to find each other out. And, inevitably, this is what they do, whether they will it or not, if only because once the simple tasks of the day are finished there is little else to do but take each other's measure. Not deliberately. Not maliciously. But the time comes when one has nothing left to reveal to the other; when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool, and the way he blows out a pressure lamp or drops his boots on the floor or eats his food becomes a rasping annoyance. and this could happen between the best of friends. Men who have lived in the Canadian bush know well what happens to trappers paired off this way; and, mindful of these facts, I resolved from the beginning not to have Advance Base a two-man project.

Even at Little America I knew of bunkmates who quit speaking because each suspected the other of inching his gear into the other's allotted space; and I knew of one who could not eat unless he could find a place in the mess hall out of sight of the Fletcherist who solemnly chewed his food twenty-eight times before swallowing. In a polar camp, little things like that have the power to drive even disciplined men to the edge of insanity. During my first winter at Little America I walked for hours with a man who was on the verge of murder or suicide over imaginary persecutions by another man who had been his devoted friend. For there is no escape anywhere. You are hemmed in on every side by your own inadequacies and the crowding pressures of your associates. The ones who survive with a measure of happiness are those who can live profoundly off their intellectual resources, as hibernating animals live off their fat. Occupied by three men of this sort, Advance Base should not be too difficult a place. So I reasoned, in all events.

* * *

During the months that followed the return of the first expedition the idea was continually challenging my imagination. Since the idea wouldn't down, I made a serious study of the practical possibilities. Well in advance of the mobilization of the second expedition late in 1933, four of us started working on the Base. One man was Victor Czegka, a Warrant Officer assigned to me by the Marine Corps. Another was Paul Siple. Both had served on the first expedition and knew the problems to be overcome. Czegka's job was to design the shack which would be the Base, and Siple's was to study and collect the essential materials required for it. The actual building of the shack was done by Ivor Tinglof, a cabinetmaker, in a Boston loft. And when the Jacob Ruppert, flagship of my second expedition, put out from Boston in October, 1933, she carried secreted in the hold the cunningly contrived knockdown sections of a three-man shack. In the hold, also, were four tractors, which would be available for lugging the Base into the interior.

Except for Haines, the builders, and myself, nobody else aboard had more than a dim suspicion of what that shack was for. I had said little about it, experience having taught me that the polar regions sooner or later will chasten the best-laid plans. While I had a number of men under consideration for the base, including several whose quality I knew well from the first stay at Little America, I had actually decided on none. The 15,000-mile sea voyage (by the course we had set) would provide ample opportunity to study and weigh the candidates. As for myself, time and circumstances would decide. At first I rather thought I had no right to put my own name in nomination. Having whipped an expedition together in the midst of the depression, naturally I owed a whale of a lot of money; I was in command of two ships, four airplanes, and a hundred men; so the chances of my being able to drop responsibilities did not look promising. On the other hand, it was hard to see how a leader could ask three other men to volunteer for a risk he was not prepared to take himself.

* * *

Of the long voyage to Little America I shall not attempt to write. It has been adequately described, I think, in Discovery, my general account of the expedition. After a sortie into the ice-strewn and fog-bound seas off the still-undiscovered coasts to the eastward of Little America, we finally steamed into the Bay of Whales on January 17, 1934. There we had our first glimpse of the appalling ice conditions that were to have a profound bearing upon all our proposed operations. Although masses of loose, broken ice jammed the spacious entrance to the bay, we were able to push the ship to within three miles of Little America. Three miles, that is, as the skua gull flies. But in between, following the eastern shore of the bay, was a mile-wide belt of pressure ice, with wave upon wave of upheaved and broken ice, shot through with deep crevasses, pits, and open water leads with bottom 350 fathoms down. Unless you have seen pressure, you cannot imagine what it is like. The belt which blocked us off from Little America made me think of a hurricane-whipped sea petrified at the height of the blow. It was forty feet from the crests of some of the waves to the troughs. If that were all, the situation might not have been half bad. But the tides and currents were ceaselessly working on the ice. You could hear it groaning and heaving in a dozen different places; and a spot that would offer safe transit one day would be a gaping crevasse by the next. After surveying the region, both by airplane and with exploring parties on skis, we came to the gloomy conclusion that not even the dog teams, much less the tractors, could safely pass through to Little America. Indeed, we were on the verge of abandoning Little America entirely and building a new base on the west shore of the Bay of Whales when a skiing party returned with the news that they had charted a passage through, though it was a good seven miles long and full of potential hazards.

That passage we took, dreading the alternative of building a new main base on the other side of the bay. Misery Trail was the name we gave it; and the name was an understatement. For two whole months, twenty-four hours a day, we flogged between ships and Little America, shifting the passage to meet the rapidly altering ice conditions, throwing bridges across the worse crevasses, while the sea pounded the ice at our backs. Some days the midnight sun, making its unhurried round of the sky, was with us all the time; then it was warm enough for the men to strip to the waist, while the dogs, of which we had 150, suffered from the heat and floundered waist deep in snow turned soft. But most of the time it was not like that at all. The blizzards came shouting in, filling the air with drift, and blinding the tractor drivers and sledges, who felt their way along the range flags marking the transit. Almost always there was fog, the pale, mischievous fog of the Bay of Whales, which is like no other fog I have ever seen; almost milky in consistency, but turning the snow and atmosphere into a flat plane where all proportions are horribly twisted and imparting to a traveler the queer feeling that he is treading the bottom of a heaving ocean.

But of Misery Trail I shall write no more. How we hauled 650 tons of supplies into Little America has been described in Discovery, though you may read the chapters without ever feeling the utter exhaustion that claimed us, an exhaustion so deep that it sent men stumbling on errands they could not remember when they reached their objectives and reddened their eyes with sleeplessness and numbed their bodies against cold and dropped them in their tracks from exhaustion. Anyhow, after a long time, the ships went away; then one midnight the sun popped for an instant below the horizon and each night thereafter set a little bit earlier; then the caches on the trail were empty; then Little America was being rebuilt and reoccupied; and for the first time in what seemed a thousand years I was able to give thought to the matter of Advance Base. By then it was almost too late. March had come, the winter was close upon us, the unbroken night was scarcely six weeks away, and I was surrounded by men whose strength had been sapped almost to the limit.

* * *

All this time the Advance Base shack, transported with the utmost care through the pressure, had been standing in the center of Little America. Paul Siple had taken possession to test out the ventilating and heating equipment. Now that I had time for serious reconsideration, it did not take long to reach one conclusion, which was that, wherever we did finally succeed in planting the base, it would not be at the foot of the Queen Mauds or anywhere near it. First, time was running against us. Here it was March, with the temperature dropping through the minus 20's, 30's, and even 40's; in March your Antarctic field parties are normally swinging toward home, racing the oncoming night. Secondly, the four tractors which we were relying upon to advance the base had been driven almost to wrack and ruin on Misery Trail, and a thoroughgoing overhaul was in order before the fleet could be sent out on the Barrier. Dogs were of no use to us in this journey. The pick of the pack had gone with Captain Innes-Taylor on a base-laying journey for next season's southern operations; but, even if the remaining dogs had been in good shape, they still could not have transported unaided the seven tons of material and stores needed for the base.

Airplanes might have been used as freighters, but that idea went by the board when the Fokker crashed on a test hop and was washed out completely. That left us with two planes capable of carrying any sort of load — the twin-engined Condor and a single-engined Pilgrim. I wouldn't use the Condor; if anything happened to her, our entire exploration program might be ruined. The Pilgrim I tried to use for relaying lighter loads, but, after emergency rations and equipment had been stowed aboard for the flight crew and a safe margin of gas included, the payload was too slight to be of much use. Even so, I might have used the ship for what she was worth, had not the weather turned bad; the crew, returning from an experimental flight, got lost in a fog, very narrowly missing a crash; and it took a whole day to find them. After that experience I determined not to risk any more men in the air, nor the one airplane available for reserve duties.

Therefore, if Advance Base was to be advanced a foot beyond Little America, it would have to be by tractors. How far the tractors could push would depend in turn on how quickly Demas was able to complete the overhauling of the engines and the caterpillar mechanisms, besides rebuilding one machine which had been partially destroyed by fire. I, for one, was not particularly optimistic as to the outcome. Three of these machines were 10–2 °Citroens, acquired in France; the runs over Misery Trail had demonstrated that they were definitely underpowered for day-in and day-out Barrier travel. The fourth was a 20–4 °Cletrac, made in the United States. All were short; all, particularly the six-ton Cletrac, were heavy, which shortcomings made them vulnerable to crevasses.

So the trip was a gamble, no matter how I looked at it. This was the first serious attempt to operate automotive equipment in the Antarctic; the risks were the inevitable risks of pioneering. No one could tell how well the engines would function in temperatures down to 60 degrees below zero or how the caterpillar treads would work on a snow surface which cold granulates to the fineness of sand or whether the machines could penetrate crevassed areas. If the fleet made a southing of 200 miles, it would be performing a miracle, I decided. And I was ready to settle for 150 miles — less, if necessary, so long as the journey could be made without undue hardships for the men.

Yet, we were not allowed to prepare in peace. When I recall the events that preceded the start, I wonder that we came off with a little damage as we did. Young John Dyer, Chief Radio Engineer, plunged forty-five feet from the top of an antenna pole, with no worse hurt than a barked shin. Rawson, the Navigator, had to be operated on for a streptococcus throat infection. Then Pelter, the Aerial Photographer, came down with appendicitis; this meant another hasty operation under conditions made melodramatic by the doctor's unwitting act. Knocking over a lamp, he set fire to the cache in which all the surgical instruments were stored; all hands were wildly mustered to save the instruments and a dozen sleeping men who were in danger of being trapped in the adjoining shack. And this happened just a day or so after the Fokker had crashed in full view of the camp, and four men, stunned but otherwise unhurt, had crawled out from the wreckage.

Breaking rapidly one on top of the other, these incidents, any one of which might have been fatal, rasped nerves already drawn taut by the exhausting demands of Misery Trail. We were ready to find anything under the bed. In this mood we jumped one day to the grim conclusion that Little America was on the verge of breaking loose from the Antarctic Continent and drifting into the Ross Sea as a calving iceberg.

Little America is actually a city on a raft. The 300-foot thickness of ice on which it rests is pocketed in the coastal reach of the Ross Ice Barrier, whose sheer cliffs in places rise to 150 feet above sea level. Partly floating free, partly resting on deep submarine reefs and shoals, and elsewhere riding over the land, this gigantic Barrier fronts the ocean for 400 miles and also extends inland clear to the foot of the Queen Maud Mountains. It is not fixed in the sense that land is fixed. It is, in effect, an enormous glacier, wide enough to blanket the Atlantic seaboard States, and, like a glacier, it is forever creeping toward the sea. Propelled from behind by the massive rivers of ice pouring down through the mountain passes from the polar plateau, the coastal edges tend to bulge out over the sea, until the sheer weight of the projecting shelf or the violent pressures of tide and storm cause great strips to break off.

In this way the vast fleets of icebergs which patrol the ocean approaches to Antarctica are created. We had seen these products of continental disintegration. In the course of the voyage through the Devil's Graveyard, far to the north and east of Little America, we had counted no less than 8,000 bergs in a single day, some of them twenty miles long. I don't think that any of us will ever forget what it was like in the Devil's Graveyard: the sunless corridors of waste waters; the fog that sometimes thinned but never lifted; the crash of the gales, and occasionally over that uproar the heavier sound of bergs capsizing in the storm; and everywhere those stricken fleets of ice, bigger by far than all the navies in the world, wandering hopelessly through a smoking gloom. Through this ambush the ship groped and side-stepped, like a lost creature, harried by enemies her lookouts rarely saw full view, but only as dark and monstrous shadows sliding through the fog. The engine-room telegraph bells never stopped ringing, and months after some of us would start out of a sound sleep, braced for the impact which we could not forever expect to avoid. With the spell of that region upon us, the realization that Little America might itself be destined to join the ghost fleets to the north was enough to shake us out of our weariness; for Little America was barely three-quarters of a mile from the water's edge.

Ever since our arrival in January, the new, or bay, ice in the Bay of Whales had been breaking up with unprecedented speed. Toward the end of February, when from experience we had reason to expect a freeze, the pace of the break-up quickened instead. The pressure ice started to go; and with it went the ice cementing which held that stretch of Barrier in position. Huge cracks opened up all around Little America. Each day they gaped a little wider. At night, when everything was quiet, one could sometimes feel the floor of one's shack heave gently from the swell pulsing against the ice basement hundreds of feet underneath. Fierce storms in the ocean to the north were apparently responsible. The waves continually smashing against the coast were breaking up the old ice and the new ice as fast as it formed. With Dr. Poulter, Senior Scientist, I took a long trip in a tractor along the Barrier crest to the north and east. The sound of the seas sixty feet below us was like thunder; and at least once, when the car was stopped, we heard far off the tremendous whoosh of a huge stretch of Barrier giving way.

We were worried, make no mistake about that. We were worried because we honestly didn't know what was coming, and couldn't stop it if it did come. So I did an extraordinary thing. I summoned the entire winter party into the mess hall, where I laid before them the facts, inviting every man to have his say on the steps, if any, which we should take. The outcome was a decision to continue as we were on the assumption that Little America would last; but at the same time to move approximately one-third of our stores to high Barrier, a mile or so to the southeast. If Little America did go out, we should then have a handy place to scramble to, with enough supplies cached to carry us through a winter. And if it didn't go out, there wouldn't be too much stuff to haul back. So for a couple of days we forgot everything else to haul gasoline, coal, food, clothing, and other gear to Retreat Camp. To hurry it up, I had Demas' tractors hauled out of the repair shop and pressed into service.

All this had a bearing upon the fate of Advance Base. Time was lost that could not be redeemed, and the energies of the men were depleted by that much more. The pity is that it seemed like so much labor lost. No sooner were we done than the seas abated, the outrush of the ice ceased, and the freeze-up set in almost at once.

Wearily the tractor men returned to their preparations. At midnight on February 15th, by the light of gasoline flares, the Advance Base shack was dismantled; and the sections were piled on two tractor sledges. Next afternoon, the four tractors moved out of Little America in echelon; trundling behind each was a string of sledges loaded down with food and fuel and meteorological gear and books and clothes and tools and all the other countless things required to defend existence in a place which offers nothing to man but air to breathe. Ahead of them ran a 178-mile life line through the heart of the Barrier, which had been flagged and scouted by Innes-Taylor's Southern Party, then making ready for the turn-around and homeward journey.

Nine men made up the party, including Siple and Tinglof, the carpenter who had built the hut in Boston. June and Demas were in joint command. Both were optimistic — I was not. Watching the column creep up the long white slope to the south, I was conscious only of misgivings. Although the sledges were loaded to the gunwales, a careful inventory of the supplied that were leaving showed that they were insufficient for three men and that, unless a second round trip could be made before the winter night, our plans for manning the Base would have to be drastically changed. But before committing myself to any decision I would wait and see.

Chapter Two — March: The Decision

Thereafter from the tractor fleet came an almost continuous stream of radio reports, mostly discouraging. Vexed by cold and drift and blizzards, and reduced to low gear on loose, newly fallen snow, the machines made slow going of it. About twenty-four miles south of Little America two cars narrowly escaped disaster in an unsuspected crevassed region; and about fifty miles out in a bowl-like depression named the Valley of Crevasses the party was compelled to take a long detour eastward to avoid blind crevasses whose roofs had been strong enough to pass Innes-Taylor's dog teams, but not the heavily loaded machines. On this jog, sixty-seven miles out of Little America, the Cletrac gave out entirely: a crankshaft pin, made brittle by the cold, sheared off; and, the necessary repairs being beyond the party's resources, the machine was abandoned. With it was lost 50 percent of the party's carrying capacity. Redistributing the loads as best they could, June and Demas pushed south in the other three tractors. Any chance of an extended southing was gone. The three surviving Citroens, June advised, had all developed mechanical trouble of one sort or another. The generators — even the spares — were worn out, the radiators were leaking, the anti-freeze solution had been lost, the drivers were cramming snow down the radiators to keep going, and one car was without headlights.

More vividly than the terse radio bulletins described, I knew what the men were up against. The sledgers, at Little America, hating the break with tradition, sneered at tractor travel as «limousine exploring.» But, so far as discomforts went, there was little to choose between the two ways of travel. You could go faster and haul more in a tractor, and certainly you could do your exploring sitting down. But tractoring had its own punishing hardships, not the least of which was waiting exasperating hours for the blowtorches to thaw out the lubricants in the crankcase, rear end and the transmission, which the cold congealed to a rubbery toughness after the engine stopped. And sucking frozen condensation from the gas lines. And melting snow in the food cookers to make water for radiators that leaked like sieves. And leaving the flesh of your fingers on metal parts too delicate to be handled with clumsy mittens. And sitting as if trapped in a moving cab, waiting for the awful lurch, and the whroom of slithering tons of snow to warn you that a crevasse roof was letting go under the treads.

Even a demanding leadership can ask only so much of flesh and blood. The evening of March 21st, the tractor party reported that it was at a depot put down by Innes-Taylor's Southern Party 123 miles by trail from Little America. Almost at the same time Innes-Taylor wheeled in from the south, with just one day's dog rations on the sledges and a story of bitter cold and blizzards. That, I decided, was far enough. Let Advance Base be planted alongside this depot at Latitude 80 degrees 08' South, Longitude 163 degrees 57' West, just a hairbreadth off the Little America meridian. The distance was sufficient, the meteorologists decided, to permit satisfactory correlations. June was instructed to retrace his tracks and pick up the remnants of the Cletrac's load in the morning. The temperature where he was dropped meanwhile to 52 degrees below zero.

That night, between the hours June arrived at, and went from, Latitude 80 degrees 08' South, I made my decision. Advance Base would be occupied and, inevitably, by one man. With the tractors crippled and the sun due to quit us in less than a month, neither the means nor the time remained to stock it for three men as planned. The alternative of two men I again rejected for the same reasons I had rejected it before: that is, on the logic of temperamental harmony. The truth is that I myself did not dare to go as one of a two-man team. The other man might turn out badly, as indeed might I, in his eyes. Hating or being hated by a man whom you couldn't avoid would be a degrading experience leaving the mark of Cain in the heart. Feeling as strongly as I did, I certainly couldn't very well ask two other men to do what I wouldn't risk myself. It had to be one man, and that one myself, if for no other reason than that here again I could not bring myself to ask a subordinate to take the job.

The idea of letting Advance Base go by default was never seriously entertained. The expedition had planned too long and endured too much on its account for me to give up so easily, even though we had failed to push the base as far south as the meteorologists might have wished. Moreover, as I said at the outset, I was anxious for the opportunity to go. This was an experience I hungered for, as soon as I grasped the possibilities. But apart from that, I was better equipped, perhaps, than anyone else in camp to handle the job. The Base was my scheme. I had wet-nursed it from birth; and nearly everything about the shack, from the insulation to the double-action trapdoor, represented some pet notion. From Dyer, who had instructed me in radio, I had picked up enough primer information to enable me to keep in touch with the main base; and Haines had taught me how to take care of the meteorological instruments, which were mostly automatic, anyway.

As for the practical matters of existence, I felt that my service as an explorer had made me self-reliant. I don't claim that, like Thoreau, when he retired to his lonely hut at Walden, I was all prepared to build a house, lay a chimney, survey a field, and manufacture pencils. The fact is that I was not nearly as handy as I had imagined; but, for all my clumsiness, there were one or two improvisations at Advance Base that would have done credit to that scholarly experimenter and even to that inspired artificer Robinson Crusoe.

I was up all night rearranging my affairs. It was not as easy as I pretended. My break with the interlocking conveniences and practices of normal life would be clean and sharp and irrevocable. I had moments of heart-sinking doubt, particularly when I visualized what might happen to my family if I should fail. And this alone gave me pause. As to the moral aspects of my leaving fifty-five men leaderless at Little America, that did not trouble me a bit. My officers had a comprehensive idea of what was expected of them during my absence. We talked almost steadily from midnight to dawn. In charge, with the title of Second-in-Command, I put Dr. Poulter, the Senior Scientist. He is a physical giant of a man. Though attuned to the quiet of the university campus, he had the practical judgment and intellectual balance which are indispensable for the leadership of men who like to call themselves men of action — as if by that they put themselves beyond the penalties of rashness.

Poulter would have under him a hard-bitten crew who were well able to take care of themselves. Misery Trail had toughened and schooled the new men as no other experience could have done; with them was a hard core of veterans of my other expeditions. Haines, the Third-in-Command, was serving on his third polar expedition, as was Demas. Noville, the executive officer, had served under D'Annunzio during the war, had been Superintendent of the Air Mail, and had been with me on the North Pole affair and the transatlantic flight. June, whom I appointed Chief of Staff, had flown with me across the South Pole. Bowlin, the Second Pilot, had been in the Navy sixteen years. Innes-Taylor had dueled with Zeppelins in London's war-time skies, and trekked the Yukon for the Royal Canadian Police. Siple, who was a scientists and trail party leader, and Petersen, who was a first-rate photographer, radio man, and skier, had proved their worth on the previous expedition. Von der Wall, another Navy man, knew what it was like to be torpedoed in the Atlantic Ocean, and Bob Young, another veteran as well as a retired British naval rating, had fought in the Battle of Jutland. And Rawson, though the youngest of the lot, knew what it was all about from four voyages into the Arctic. There were these and others like them.

To these men I could entrust the winter destinies of Little America without fear. For one thing, the winter night is ordinarily tranquil. No parties are in the field; the men are fully occupied in making preparations for the spring campaigns; and, secure from the blizzards and cold, life finds new and easy ruts underground. Moreover, I expected to keep in fairly close touch with them by radio. Hence, except for some special instructions to Poulter, I did not feel it necessary to draft a complicated set of regulations. My last general order to the camp, which was primarily intended to announce the line of command, covered less than three typewritten pages. It was a simple appeal to work industriously, conserve supplies, abide by the safety rules, and respect discipline. In conclusion, I said: «Every man in this camp has a right to be treated fairly and squarely, and the officers are requested to hold this fact in mind. In a sense our status is primitive… We have no class distinctions as in civilization. What a man is back home does not count at Little America. He who may have failed back there has his chance to make good here; and he will not be judged by the position he holds so much as by the way he plays the game and does his job, however humble it may be…»

* * *

This order I finished on the morning of March 22nd, just before I flew to Advance Base. I did not have time to post it. Somebody read it to the men after I left. Noville, who had shared his quarters with me, helped me pack a few personal things — several dozen books, a sextant, a couple of fine chronometers, a fine and rather elegant fur flying suit that a friend had given, a shaving kit, my own set of phonograph records, and various odds and ends. There was no ceremony about it whatever, if only because Byrd expeditions never stand on ceremony. The cook shouted cheerily, «Remember, Admiral, no class distinctions at Advance Base!»

Bowlin and Bailey were fretting in the Pilgrim. Although hot oil had just been poured into the engine, it chilled rapidly; the temperature was 43 degrees below zero and dropping. I remember glancing at my wristwatch as we left the ground. The time was 10:35 a.m. (180th meridian time). Bowlin, as if sympathizing with my mood, made a banking turn around Little America before squaring away for the south. I took in every detail. If I had created anything tangible and unique in life, it was the sprawling, smoke-spewing, half-buried city called Little America, pocketed within the eastern heights of the Bay of Whales. It heartened me just to look at the place. The job of reoccupation was nearly finished, and I need have no further worries on that score.

A quick glance to the north confirmed what I already knew: that the Ross Sea was frozen to the horizon, and any danger to Little America from further disintegration of the Barrier had passed. Beyond Amundsen Arm, where the Bay of Whales curves in behind, and to the south of, Little America, we picked up the tractor tracks, the crimp marks of the caterpillar treads standing out clearly on the white, virginal flesh of the Barrier. Every third of a mile was an orange trail flag; and every twenty-five miles was a tall snow beacon, surmounted by a big orange banner on a bamboo pole, with a line of burgee and pennant flags running to the west and east. These were depots in which Innes-Taylor had cached rations for the main spring journeys: the markers — the Antarctic equivalent of roadside stands and route signs — on the Advance Base road. Sixty-seven miles out, Bowlin dropped low over the foundered Cletrac. Demas and Hill, who were still slaving over the engine, crawled from under a canvas apron and waved a greeting. Not long afterwards a dark speck on the horizon resolved itself into a cluster of tents — Advance Base.

Where Advance Base lay, the Ross Ice Barrier was as flat as the Kansas Plains. Snow rolled on forever to meet the sky in a round of unbroken horizon. Here was the spaciousness of the desert; the spaciousness, you might say, of the raw materials of creation. Against it the huddled clump of tents, tractors, dogs, and men was just a pinprick in infinity. Although this was all familiar stuff to me, it was not until then that I had an intimation of what I was in for. On the verge of starting a dangerous task, I suppose that even the most unimaginative man must know that instant of premonition when the last unresolved forebodings come swimming out of nowhere. Whatever it was, I dismissed it before the skis touched. Innes-Taylor and Siple were coming forward to meet me; and Bowlin was impatient to be off, lest the cold stop his engine. Fifteen minutes later the plane was in the air. The vapor from the exhaust trailed behind like an enormous banner, which hung long after the plane had vanished into the lusterless, low-swinging sun.

«How's the shack coming?» I asked Siple.

«Slowly,» he said. And, looking at him and at the other men who came up to say hello, I saw that their faces were yellowed by frostbites, and the cracked lips within the parka hoods wore mirthless grins.

«Everybody but Black,» Innes-Taylor said. «He's got a bum knee. But, if it's all right with you and if we can get this shack up fast, I'd like to get my party out of here in a day or two.»

«We'll see,» I said. I knew, without being told, what was in Innes-Taylor's mind. He and his three men — Paine, Ronne, and Black — had been on the trail over three weeks, enduring temperatures exceeding 50 degrees below zero. I gathered that they had had a rough time of it, largely on account of defective zippers on the sleeping bags. Ice had gathered in the bags. To sleep more than a few minutes at a time was almost impossible; and lying still meant freezing to death. Hence, as the party still faced a five-day journey back to Little America, I promised Innes-Taylor that I would not hold him any longer than was absolutely necessary. Not alone for the men's own sakes, but also out of consideration for the dogs, of which he had two dozen tethered around his tents.

June, with six men and two tractors, was somewhere on the trail, making for the Cletrac. So eight of us were available for the preliminary work on the base — Innes-Taylor's party, myself, and Siple, Tinglof, and Petersen from the tractor group. A pit fifteen feet long, eleven wide, and eight deep — big enough to take the shack bodily — had already been dug before I arrived. Sunk in the snow this wise, the shack would be out of the wind and the drift, which mounts with the speed of a tide around any upraised object.

Luckily for us, the shack had been designed for quick assembly. Tinglof and Siple were laying the floor sections when I took charge. Putting up the walls was a simple matter of heaving the numbered sections into the right places and bolting or spiking them together. Afraid that a blizzard might strike during the night and fill up the pit, we worked like hell. That afternoon the temperature sagged through the minus 50's, and our breaths made a continuous fog in the pit. We watched each other's faces for the dead-white patches of frostbite. «A blossom on your nose, Petersen,» somebody would say. Petersen, until then unaware of the danger, would mold the flesh with his finger tips, his fingers stinging the instant they left the warmth of the gloves; then the blood would come surging back into the affected spot with stabs of pain. «Jesus,» he would say. Then back to work.

Hard as we pushed, the shack was still unroofed when the night rushed down from the South Pole at 5 o'clock. By then the temperature was 61 degrees below zero. We worked on by the light of pressure lanterns and the heat of primus stoves. Then the lights died when the kerosene froze; and a flashlight, the battery frozen, went out in my hand, leaving us in darkness. Tinglof stumbled and fumbled in the caches until he found two gasoline blow torches which June had left behind; by their feeble glow and with the heat from the flame near our legs, we carried on.

It was verging on cruelty to drive so hard, but we had to have shelter before we could sleep. Tinglof's mittens were filled with ice; when he bared his had to tip in a spike, I saw that the skin was covered with puffy yellow blisters. It was the same with Siple, who was putting the stove together. Before the bolts would turn, he had to close his mittens over the metal to take the frost out; his hands became swollen lumps, and again and again I saw him, biting his lips against the pain, slip them under his parka to snatch at the body's heat. Paine's face and helmet looked like a solid lump of ice. Ronnie's lips were cracked and bloodied. All of us were coughing, not from colds but from the super-chilled air that tortured the lungs as we breathed more deeply from exertion.

No exaggeration, it was brutal work. I climbed out of the pit to fetch a piece of meteorological equipment from one of the caches. While I was ransacking the pile, my nose and cheeks froze. I stood up a moment, kneading the flesh. A ghastly blue reflection showed over the excavation, and the way smoke from the torches and freezing breaths spiraled up through the unsteady light made me think of that terrible frozen pit in the Divine Comedy, which leads down past Lucifer to the lost souls. A low moan came out of the darkness. I reached into the chest pocket of my parka for the flashlight. Nothing happened when I flipped the switch; the batteries were still frozen. But ringing me were dozens of anxious eyes, glittering with ravenous light and framed within the restive shadows of the wolf dogs. My heart really bled; for they had to sit and wait, spaced out on the steel tethering line. But I could do nothing for them, except promise myself to start Innes-Taylor north just as soon as I could.

The single door of the shack was made to face west — for no reason at all, so far as I can remember, except that after the pit was sunk, the hut simply had to face west to fit. The pit was dug overly wide to accommodate what I was pleased to call my «veranda,» created by projecting the roof some two feet past the wall on the west side. This would give me access to a tunnel system and to a trapdoor set in one corner of the projection and reached by a ladder. If I do say so myself, the hatch was a clever double-action arrangement. You could open it by pushing up; or, if the drift was packed too tightly overhead, you could pull it down by removing two pegs. «Look, Admiral,» Czegka had exclaimed, when he first demonstrated the door, «Push him up. Push him down. No danger, now, of being buried alive in a big blizzard.»

It was nearly 1 o'clock in the morning and 63 degrees below zero when we were done with securing the roof. The job was infernally complicated as a result of several sections' having been warped in transit from Little America. The door, which had been made to shut tight on bevels, just as on an ice box, now couldn't be made to latch at all. (Nor did I ever succeed in closing it entirely during the seven months I occupied Advance Base). I was worried, too, finding that we had blundered in calculating the depth of the pit. Instead of being flush with the surface, the roof stuck up a good two feet above it. That would make for troublesome drift. The mistake was past remedy, however; so I let is pass. Siple had the stove rigged up and burning; and though it would be a long time before the chill would go out of the shack, we all went below to enjoy the little warmth it gave off. None too soon, at that. Innes-Taylor remarked casually that he thought one of his feet was frozen. And indeed it was, as we saw as soon as he peeled off his mukluks (boots). I tried warming the foot with my hands and working the flesh gently, but without effect. That superstitious business of massaging the skin with snow isn't done in the Antarctic. At sixty below, snow takes on a hard, crystalline structure; you might as well use sandpaper. What we tried in this case was a method familiar to all polar travelers. Paine, I think it was, unbuttoned his shirt, and let Innes-Taylor slip the foot against the warmth of his stomach. He held it there fifteen or twenty minutes, until the circulation revived with a pounding pain that brought sweat to Innes-Taylor's forehead.

* * *

That night, after Innes-Taylor, Paine, and Ronne had repaired to their own tents, which were pitched just a few yards from the roof of the shack, five of us stretched out our sleeping bags on the Advance Base floor. The instant the fire went out the cold settled with the force of a blow. «You'll freeze to death in this dungeon,» Petersen remarked cheerfully from his bag. But, having lived in the shack at Little America, I knew otherwise; it would be comfortable enough as soon as the frost went out of the walls. The shack was as tidily built as a watch. Although enclosing over 800 cubic feet of space, it weighed only 1,500 pounds; the hut and everything about it had been kept as light as possible to make for easier transportation. Fine white pine stiffened the frame and flooring, but the rest was mostly shell. The walls were only four inches thick. A three-ply veneer, one-eight inch thick and composed of a layer of wood between two strips of cardboard, sheathed the outer and inner walls. Loosely wadded in the hollow between was insulation of kapok which resembles raw cotton. Tacked to the inside walls was a green fire-proof canvas fabric. The ceiling and the upper walls were a bright aluminum, to reflect light and heat. Czegka had remembered everything. And that night, sleeping for the first time at Advance Base, I had reason to think well of what he and Tinglof had created.

Next morning we were roused by the beep-beep of the tractor horns; June and Demas were back with the Cletrac's load. Considering the night they had spent on the open Barrier, the crew were in an astonishingly cheerful mood.

«It's amazing,» young Joe Hill observed, «the way these jalopies keep moving. Even when they're falling apart.»

«He means,» Skinner interrupted, «the way you can get 'em started after they've stopped. Every time the engine dies, you think it's the finish. But if you tinker long enough, damned if they don't turn over again.»

Although spoken in jest, the news was disturbing. The return trip to Little America would be difficult enough at best; and considering the present killing temperatures, the chance that mechanical breakdowns might maroon some 20 percent of the expedition's personnel on the trail was one I found hard to accept. I had only to look at the men to visualize what they had been through. They were like scarecrows, the way the torn windproofs, caked with frozen oil, fluttered about their legs. Their hands were eloquent, Demas' and Hill's particularly. The flesh had been burned and shriveled by the frost in the metal which they were forever handling; the nails had turned black and were rotting away; and blood was oozing from sodden blisters.

June and Demas, however, were reassuring. «I'm not worried,» Demas said. «With a break, we'll have all three cars in Little America twenty-four hours after leaving here.» If anything did go wrong, plenty of help was available at Little America; and, anyhow, Innes-Taylor's party would be bringing up the rear. Nevertheless, the situation was not to my taste; for at that season in the Antarctic the line between safety and a major mishap is hair-thin. «It's too damn cold for men to be in the trail,» I said. «I want all of you out of here within forty-eight hours.»

Actually only one big job remained to be done: cutting out and stocking two supply tunnels, one for fuel, the other for food and miscellaneous stores. The tunnels were laid out in parallel, running west from the opposite ends of the veranda. With fourteen men to help, the job didn't take long. They were each about thirty-five feet long, about three feet wide, and deep enough for me to walk erect. The food tunnel was to the south. To make this we mined out a subterranean passage, leaving a vaulted roofing of snow about two and a half feet thick. Here provision boxes were stacked in recesses along both walls, one box on top of the other, with the marked sides facing out so that I should be able to tell the contents at a glance. At the far end we dug a hole for a toilet, which was distinguished, in Petersen's phrase, for «the open plumbing.» Into the other tunnel went the drums of fuel, which were rolled into alcoves let into the sides. As soon as the drums were underground, we roofed this tunnel with coarse paper laid across wooden slats, and anchored with snow blocks. The rest of the supplies were dumped through the hatch into the veranda.

As the stuff dropped underground, Siple and I made a rough check. The variety of things was really amazing: 350 candles, 10 boxes of meta tablets, 3 flashlights, and 30 batteries, 425 boxes of matches (safety and wax), 2 kerosene lanterns, a 300-candle-power gasoline pressure lantern, 2 sleeping bags (one fur and one eiderdown), 2 primus stoves. Also a single folding chair with an air cushion which the tractor men generously donated, 9 fire bombs and a Pyrene fire extinguisher, 3 aluminum buckets, 2 wash basins, 2 mirrors, a calendar, a small fireproof rug, 2 candle holders, 2 whisk brooms (for brushing snow off my clothes), 3 dozen pencils, a 5-gallon can stuffed with toilet paper, 400 paper napkins, a box of thumbtacks, and one of rubber bands. Also, 2 reams of writing paper, 3 boxes of soap and laundry chips, a thermos jug, 2 decks of playing cards, 4 yards of oilcloth, pieces of asbestos, 2 packets of tooth picks. Altogether, the food supplies comprised approximately 360 pounds of meat, 792 pounds of vegetables, 73 pounds of soup, 176 pounds of canned fruit, 90 pounds of dried fruit, 56 pounds of desserts, and half a ton of various staples, including cereals. There were these things, and a good deal more besides.

While the rest of us were hurriedly stocking the tunnels and shack, Waite was rigging the radio antenna, which was about two hundred feet long and strung on four fifteen-foot bamboo poles. He finished in midafternoon; then he installed the transmitter and receiver. With Siple's help I personally set up the meteorological equipment, of which there was a great deal. «My God,» remarked Dustin, pausing in fascination, «that's going to a lot of trouble to find out what my feet keep telling me: that it's a damn cold place.»

The end of the second day — March 23rd — saw Advance Base just about ready to take over its job as the world's southernmost weather station. That night we had a farewell banquet for Innes-Taylor's party, which was scheduled to head north in the morning. And, because this was made to seem a gala occasion, my guests managed to talk me out of the choicest delicacies in my larder — a turkey and a couple of chickens which Corey, the supply officer, had contributed out of the goodness of his heart, thinking I might like to celebrate one or two holidays. The meat was rigid as armor plate with frost, but the hard-boiled tractor men were prepared to deal with that: they thawed it out with blow torches. Elected chef by acclamation, Innes-Taylor presided over five primus stoves. Nine men sat cross-legged on the floor; and five, who couldn't find room to sit, ate standing up. Judging by the belching of the dog drivers, the meal must have been a satisfying change from the soupy hoosh which they had lived on for nearly a month. «It's just having something sticking to your ribs that makes the difference,» Paine remarked. «And for my third helping I'll take the neck, Captain, if that isn't your dirty thumb that I see.»

* * *

The dinner, as it turned out, was premature. During the night an easterly came rustling through the cold; and when we awakened, it was making into a blizzard. You couldn't see fifty yards, and the wind's edge, at 28 degrees below, was sharp as a knife's. Because travel was out of the question, Innes-Taylor decided to stay another day. That night, as the night before, ten men slept in my shack. Tinglof was stretched out under a table; Black was curled up behind the stove; Waite was sprawled under my bunk; June went to sleep sitting up in a corner; and the others, laid out like mummies in the sleeping bags, covered the floor from one wall to the other. I shall never forget that night. My guests set up such a racket of snoring that I was finally driven out of the shack. So I went topside to see how the sledges were faring.

The blizzard was slackening, but the wind was still high, and my flashlight made only a blotch of light in the thick drift. But off to one side I could hear the sides of the tents cracking like wet sails in a gale; and I groped in that direction until I came to the tents. Paine was muttering something in his sleep, and Innes-Taylor moaned and twisted away from the beam of light as it fell across his eyes; but Ronne was sleeping the full sleep of a good Norwegian. As I was drawing tight the pucker thong closing the sleeve-like entrance, something brought me erect. It was a sound breaking taut and vibrant over the voice of the wind. Then it swelled again, keyed to the gale, but richer and compounded of many voices. The dogs, of course.

I floundered until I found them — three teams in parallel files, each spaced out on a tethering cable between gee poles rammed deep into the crust. The dogs fell quiet when I came through the smother. Perhaps the knowledge that human beings were still about reassured them. As I went down the tethering lines, playing the flashlight, I found each dog curled in a tight ball, with his back to the wind, his muzzle tucked against his belly, and the drift making a wall around him. It did not seem the part of mercy to keep them on the Barrier this late in the season. Yet, wait they must until the weather improved. A lull came in the wind; and for an instant, as the drive of the drift slackened, I saw clear sky swarming with stars directly overhead. Yes, the weather might be mending. In that case, the Southern Party would be homeward bound in the morning.

Maybe Paine's great leader, Jack, guessed that, too. For he heaved suddenly to his feet, shook the snow off his back; and then I heard the indescribably wandering cry of the husky. In an instant all twenty-four were up and joining in; they filled the Barrier with a melancholy wail that was not the melancholy of sadness but rather of hunger and lust. Yes, indeed, there would be a run to the sledges on the morrow.

Sunday the 25th came on clear, still, and cold. «Well, she's certainly covered now,» Tinglof reported after peering from the hatch. A foot of drift lay over the roof, and little light came through the three skylights set in the ceiling. The thermometers stood at 48 degrees below, and Waite said, «They lie in their tongues.» Innes-Taylor finally got off; and later in the day Demas, Hill, and Skinner left in one of the Citroens to make a last effort to salvage the Cletrac, leaving June, Siple, Waite, Petersen, Black, and Dustin, with two tractors, still at Advance Base. They lingered only long enough to make everything shipshape. Waite finished his test radio contacts with Little America; Siple was through tinkering with the stove; the meteorological equipment was already spinning out its tale of wind and cold; and finally, Monday noon, in the middle of lunch, June remarked quizzically, «Well, we've done just about everything that needs doing, and a lot of things, I suspect, that needed no doing at all; so I guess it's time to shove off.» As simply as that he disposed of a problem in polar etiquette for which the rest of us could not find the right meaningless phrase.

Directly after the noon stand-up meal, the tractor crews made ready to leave. The temperature was 64 degrees below zero. Both cars were half buried in drift, and we were a long time digging them out. Even with blow torches playing on the crankcases and canvas aprons draped around the chassis to hold in the heat, it was two hours before the engines would turn over. The party made a false start at 5 o'clock, only to come limping back two hours later. I was underground when I heard the sound of the treads reverberating through the snow. It gave me a nasty turn because I was desperately anxious to have them on their way to Little America. But, when they returned to the shack and told what had happened, I understood that they had made the wisest choice. Three or four miles out the radiator froze in June's car, and in unscrewing the cap he scalded one hand in the geyser that spouted up and froze the other trying to nurse it. So he decided to return and give his hand a chance to heal in the warmth of the shack. The party stayed all night, sleeping in their clothes. The engines never stopped running, and Waite and Dustin were up all night to tend to them. «If you let them stop,» Demas snapped, «you may be here all winter.» I didn't bother to go asleep, but wandered around with the two men on night watch.

Wednesday the 28th, at high noon, the cars put out again; this time they did not come back. In some respects the departure had been as casual as speeding the departing weekend guests. Whatever of importance required saying had been said long before. The one afterthought that had bothered me after quitting Little America was the possibility that I might not have been emphatic enough in my instruction that no rescue efforts were to be made on my behalf in the event of radio failure. This order I impressed again upon the Advance Base party. «I don't know much about radio,» I said. «The chances are that I shall lose communication for short periods, maybe for good. Don't let that worry you. No matter what happens, remember that I'm a lot better off in this shack than you are apt to be on the Barrier, and I give you a hard-and-fast order not to come for me until a month after the sun returns. I've got an abiding respect for the Barrier, and I don't want any act of mine to put you in jeopardy from it during the winter darkness.» And to make sure that there was no mistaking my earnestness, I repeated the gist of this before they started out afresh.

Siple and Waite lingered behind after the others had boarded the tractors. If they meant to say something they never got it out. An impatient voice snapped, «For Christ's sake, get going»; and first Siple, then Waite, after mumbling an unintelligible amenity, hurried off.

I stood at the trapdoor and watched the two Citroens move away. Their red hoods and rounded canvas superstructures made a jaunty picture. June headed due north into the noon sun, so big and swollen, and so low in the sky, that it could well have passed for a setting sun. In the cold air (the temperature was 50 degrees below zero) the exhaust vapor puffed up like a smoke screen, which a gentle northerly wind fanned out until much of the eastern horizon was obscured. I went below, intending to busy myself with the wind-speed records; but the errand was a piece of self-deception which I could not quite bring off. For perhaps the only moment in my adult life I was conscious of being utterly at loose ends. The shack, which had seemed bright and cheery, now was neither. And obeying an impulse which I had no time to be ashamed of, I rushed up the hatch ladder. Just why, I don't know even now; perhaps for a last look at something alive and moving. Although the cars were by then some distance away, I could still hear the beep beep of the horns and the clatter of the treads, so clearly do sounds carry in that crystal air.

I watched until the noise died out; until the receding specks had dropped for good behind a roll in the Barrier; until only the vanishing exhalations of the vapor remained.

With that the things of the world shrank to nothing. In the southern sky, opposite the waning sun, the night, already settled over the pole, was pushing forth a bulging shadow, blue-black and threatening as a storm sky. Did I see in it the first nervous movements of the aurora australis? I couldn't be sure. A frozen nose and cheeks sent me below before I had time to find out. But, as I slid down the ladder, I was sure of something else, which gave me a bad turn; and that was that in helping the tractor men stow the sledges I had fallen and wrenched my shoulder. The right one was hurting like the devil.

* * *

In the shack I stood for a long minute, rubbing the shoulder. Bad business, I reproached myself. Here you're starting the biggest job of your life, and yet, you've blundered and crippled yourself. For things were in an awful mess. The tunnels were a jumble of boxes and fuel drums, and I should be weeks putting them straight. Doubtless they looked shipshape to the tractor men. Hardened to the fearful disorder of their vehicles, they did their house cleaning by booting anything offensive out of the way. So long as there was room to squat, they were content. Well, I couldn't live that way at Advance Base. But only one pair of shoulders was available for all the lifting and moving and shoveling; and they were 50 percent out of commission.

I couldn't just sit and mope. Using one arm as best I could, I started to clean up my own Augean Stable. Absorbed in the task, I forgot the ache in my shoulder. The hours melted away; it was past midnight before I thought of stopping. I paused only long enough to brew a pot of tea and to munch a few crackers. Although I had little to show for the day's work, I could at last move around in the tunnels without tripping over duffel bags, food tins, and bundles of bamboo marker poles. Tomorrow I would commence unpacking the books and racking the medical stores in a handy place. Later on, I would put the food and fuel tunnels in order. The main responsibility, after all, was the meteorological instruments, which, so far, were running smoothly. Every hour I took time out to inspect them, a practice I wanted to become a habit. Already I was regarding them with the warm, covert look reserved for good companions.

The day's work done, I took the luxury of a meditative inventory; and what I saw was good. The means of a secure and profound existence were all handy, in a world I could span in four strides going one way and in three strides going the other. It was not a bright world. The storm lantern hanging from a nail over my bunk burned dimly; and the gasoline pressure lamp, suspended from the ceiling, seemed to concentrate its brilliance all in one patch, making the shadows seem all the darker. But the dimness was rather to my liking. It gave depth to the room, and, somehow, made my possessions seem bigger.

My bunk, fastened to the north wall, was about three feet off the floor, with the head flush against the eastern wall. At the foot of the bunk, on a small table, was the register, a glass-enclosed mechanism of revolving drum and pens which automatically recorded wind direction and velocity as reported by the wind vane and anemometer cups to which it was electrically connected. The dry cells powering the pens and driving the drum were racked underneath. Across the room, in the southeast corner, was a triangular shelf holding the main combination radio transmitter and receiver, with a key fastened near the edge. The transmitter was a neatly constructed, 50-watt, self-excited oscillator which Dyer had assembled himself, and which was powered by a 350-watt, gasoline-driven generator weighing only 35 pounds. The receiver was a superheterodyne of standard make. Above this shelf was a smaller one holding the emergency radio equipment, consisting of two 10-watt transmitters powered by hand-cranked generators, plus two small battery receivers, each good for about a hundred hours. These were stand-by equipment. And above this shelf was a still smaller shelf holding spare parts for the radio.

The east wall, between the head of the bunk and the radio corner, was all shelves — six, to be exact. The lower ones were stocked with food, tools, books, and other odds and ends. On the top shelves were instruments and chronometers, all placed high and some wrapped in cotton. On the south wall my windproofs, fur mukluks, parka, and pants hung drying from tenpenny nails. Pushed against the middle of the same wall was a food box on which was a portable victrola in a battered green case. The table was also the family board. On the floor in the southwest corner was a box which I called the ice box, since anything put into it would stay frozen. Among other things it then contained were two Virginia hams which my mother had sent me.

The stove was a foot or so out from the west wall, about midway between the door and the triple register. It was an ordinary two-lid, coal-burning caboose stove, except that this one had been converted into an oil burner by fitting a round burner over the grate and rigging a three-gallon gravity tank to feed it. It burned Stoddard solvent, ranking midway between kerosene and gasoline among the petroleum distillates. A liquid fuel was chosen instead of coal because coal was too bulky to haul. From the stove the stack went straight up to within two feet of the ceiling, where it bent and ran along the wall before passing through a vent above the foot of the bunk. By carrying the pipe across the room this way, we thought we were providing the equivalent of a radiator; but the scheme was a clumsy makeshift. Two or three pipe sections were lost on the trail, somewhere between Little America and Advance Base; and, the only reserve sections being of a different size, we had used empty five-gallon tins as joints, cut open at the ends to fit. Ingenious as they were, the connections were scarcely air tight. This crude, inoffensive-looking heating plant held for me the power life and death. Innocent in every rude line, it would nearly kill me a few months hence. And the time would come when I should wonder how I could have been such a fool as not to see what was in plain sight for me to see.

The heating and ventilation of the shack had been a problem from the first. At Little America, where we had given the shack a six weeks' «trial run,» both Charlie Murphy and Siple had complained about being made ill by the fumes while they occupied it. This was a warning, since the shack, then above ground, was much better ventilated than it would be underground. Glad for having detected that «bug» in time, I had had the machinist make a new burner. During the month I had lived in the shack at Little America, it had worked fine. Yet, Petersen, the second night at Advance Base, had had a headache and had felt nauseated when he stayed too long inside. But, as nobody else had complained of feeling funny, I had decided that his sickness probably had come from an upset stomach. True, a queer, sickish, oil smell — the smell peculiar to any oil stove — was always in the air; and now it was somewhat more noticeable as a result of fumes seeping from the ill-fitting pipe joints. But Siple and I were pretty certain that the ventilation system would eliminate any danger from these fumes. The intake system consisted of a U-shaped pipe, of which one arm stood about three and a half feet above the shack roof. This arm came down outside the west wall, passed under the shack, and rose through a vent in the floor. The inside arm of the U, which was enclosed in a square wooden insulating pillar, rose straight in the middle of the room and opened within a foot or so of the ceiling. The idea was that the cold air, flowing into the shack under gravity, would mix with the warm air at the ceiling and circulate naturally. Otherwise it would lie stagnant on the floor. A three-and-a-half-inch galvanized pipe, cut into the roof, disposed of spent air. I had rather wanted to enlarge this exhaust hole, but didn't dare, remember that the suction effect of a gale always pulls air out of a shack, and probably would pull the noxious fumes from the stove directly into the room as well.

If this setup held the seeds of misfortune, they were not in evidence during my first day alone. On the contrary, I thought the pipe was drawing well. When I put my hand over the end, I could feel a steady flow pouring from it.

* * *

About 1 o'clock in the morning, just before turning in, I went topside for a look around. The night was spacious and fine. Numberless stars crowded the sky. I had never seen so many. You had only to reach up and fill your hands with the bright pebbles. Earlier, a monstrous red moon had climbed into the northern quadrant, but it was gone by then. The stars were everywhere. A sailor's sky, I thought, commanded by the Southern Cross and the wheeling constellations of Hydrus, Orion, and Triangulum drifting ever so slowly. It was a lovely motion to watch. And all this was mine: the stars, the constellations, even the earth as it turned on its axis. If great inward peace and exhilaration can exist together, then this, I decided my first night alone, was what should posses the senses.

No, it wasn't going to be half bad. A man had no need of the world here — certainly not the world of commonplace manners and accustomed security. The Barrier, austere as platinum, was world enough; and onto it I had trespassed but little. The only things of mine that showed were the radio antenna, the twelve-foot anemometer pole surmounted by the silver weather vane, and the aluminum wind cups, the beehive instrument shelter for the thermometers and recording barograph, and the ventilator pipes and stove-pipe sticking above the shack roof. Without taking more than a few steps, I could touch them all; and a traveler on a darkish night might pass at twenty yards and miss them entirely. Yet, wasn't this really enough? It occurred to me then that half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.

That night, anyway, I had no consciousness of missing conventional sounds and stirrings. I was as methodical as any family man following his ordinary routine. I turned off the valve in the stove and put out the fire. Then I undressed, draping my clothes over a chair. I remember cussing inwardly when my bare feet touched the floor, and certainly I stepped lively in crossing the shack to open the door for ventilation and in leaping into the sleeping bag before the inflowing cold blast overtook me. The bag at first was cold, as it always was, from accumulated body moisture. And, while I waited for it to warm up to a tolerable temperature and massaged the protesting shoulder and felt around to make sure that I hadn't forgotten the flashlight in case I had to get up, my mind was wondering whether my family was all right and about the things I'd do in the morning. But, most of all, it kept dropping back to the tractor crew somewhere between me and Little America, and I couldn't help reproaching myself for having kept them so long.

Out of these rambling notions sprang an awful thought. Although I had been through all the gear, I couldn't recall seeing either the cook book or the alarm clock. «Good God!» I exclaimed, and the explosive echo of the words, the first spoken aloud since the tractors had left, almost brought me out of the bunk. In all the planning, the scrutinizing of every detail, the checking and the double checking, could we have forgotten these two common but indispensable tools? Telling the time was no problem. I had three chronometers, plus a wrist watch. What worried me was getting up in the morning for the 8 o'clock weather observations, now that the winter night was coming, and the twenty-four hours of the day would all be nearly the same. As for the cook book, I could do without it; yes, indeed. But maybe not. Although I upended my memory, I couldn't remember ever attempting anything more elaborate than ham and eggs over the kitchen range, or a steak over a camp fire, or pemmican hoosh on the trail. A civilized man, a city-dweller used to servants, an explorer accustomed to a camp cook at least — or what passed for one — I might have to choose between starving to death or slowly going mad on a diet of cereal and canned corn beef. Thank heaven, there was no lack of can openers. Corey had included at least a dozen, and they were scattered among the stores to avoid any chance of their being lost all at once.

So why, I asked myself, weary the mind with small reproaches? Sufficient unto the day was the evil. The assets, after all, were many. Remembering the toilet some thirty-five feet down the food tunnel, I drew comfort from the fact that my kidneys were sound.

Chapter Three — April I: God of 2.5

During the four and a half months I occupied Advance Base alone, I kept a fairly complete diary. Nearly every night, before turning in, I sat down and wrote a thoroughgoing account of the day's doings. Yet, I have been surprised and puzzled, on reading the entries four years later to find that not more of the emotions and circumstances which I have always associated with the first few days alone were actually committed to paper. For afterwards, it seemed that I was never busier. Although I was up mornings before 8 o'clock and rarely went to bed before midnight, the days weren't half long enough for me to accomplish the things I set out to do. A fagged mind in the midst of a task had little patience with autobiographical trifles. As witness:

March 29

. . Last night, when I finished writing, I noticed a dark patch spreading over the floor from under the stove. A bad leak had opened up the fuel line. Worried about the fire risk, I shut off the stove and searched all through my gear for a spare line. I couldn't find one, which annoyed me; but I finally succeeded in stopping the leak with adhesive tape borrowed from the medical chest. Result: I was up until 4 o'clock this morning, most of the time damned cold, what with the fire out and the temperature at 58 degrees below zero. The cold metal stripped the flesh from three fingers of one hand. (Later) This being the twenty-second anniversary of the death of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, I have been reading again his immortal diary. He died on this same Barrier, at approximately the same latitude as that of Advance Base. I admire him as I admire few other men; better than most, perhaps, I can appreciate what he went through. .

March 30

There will be no peace until I know that the tractor party has reached Little America safely. I blame myself for having kept them here so long. Well, the radio schedule two days hence will tell the story. I've been principally occupied with putting the tunnels to rights, and not succeeding very well on account of my shoulder, which maddens me not so much from pain as from its uselessness. A fearful amount of lifting remains to be done. So far, I've managed with one hand by using my hip as a fulcrum. .

March 31

. . It's been a deuce of a job to wake up without an alarm clock. And this is puzzling, because I've always been able to fix my mind the time at which I should awaken, and wake up at that time, almost to the minute. I was born with that gift, and it has stood me in good stead when I dash around the country on lecture tours, leaping from hotels to trains on split-second schedules. But now the gift has simply vanished, perhaps because I am putting too much pressure on it. At night, in the sleeping bag, I whisper to myself: Seven-thirty. Seven-thirty. That's the time you must get up. Seven-thirty. But I've been missing it cleanly — yesterday by nearly an hour, and this morning by half an hour.

I was not long in discovering one thing: that, if anything was eventually to regularize the rhythm by which I should live at Advance Base, it would not be the weather so much as the weather instruments themselves. I had eight in continuous operation. One was the register, already described, which kept a continuous record of wind velocities and directions. The electrical circuit, connecting with the weather vane and wind cups on the anemometer pole topside, was powered by nine dry cell batteries; and the brass drum with the recording sheet was turned by a clock-work mechanism which I had to wind daily. The sheet was lined at intervals corresponding to five minutes in time; and between these lines two pens, one representing the speed of the wind and the other its direction, wrote steadily from noon of one day to noon of the next.

Two other instruments were thermographs, which recorded temperature changes. The so-called inside thermograph was a fairly new invention, whose unique virtue was that it could be housed inside the shack. A metal tube filled with alcohol projected through the roof, and the expansions and contractions of the liquid in the tube drove a pen up and down over a rotating sheet set in a clock-faced dial hanging from the wall, just over the emergency radio set. The sheet, marked with twenty-four spokes for the hours and with concentric circles for the degrees of temperature, made one rotation in twenty-four hours; it would record accurately down to 85 degrees below zero. The outside thermograph was a compact little mechanism which served the same function, except that it stood in the instrument shelter topside and the sheets needed changing only once a week.

Besides these instruments, I had a barograph to record atmospheric pressure, which was kept in a leather case in the food tunnel. Plus a hygrometer employing a human hair, for measuring humidity (not very reliable, though, at cold temperatures). Plus a minimum thermometer, which measured the lowest temperature. In it was a tiny pin which was dropped by the contraction of alcohol in the column. Alcohol was used instead of mercury because mercury freezes at -38 degrees whereas, pure grain alcohol will still flow at -179 degrees. This instrument was useful as a check on the thermographs. It was kept in the instrument shelter, a boxlike structure set on four legs, which stood shoulder high, close to the hatch. The sides were overlapping slats spaced an inch apart to allow air to circulate freely and yet keep out drift.

If I had had any illusions as to being master in my own house, they were soon dispelled. The instruments were masters, not I; and the fact that I knew none too much about them only intensified my humility. There was scarcely an hour in the living day of which a part was not devoted to them or observations connected with them.

Every morning at 8 o'clock sharp — and again at 8 o'clock in the evening — I had to climb topside and note the minimum temperature reading, after which I would shake the thermometer hard to put the pin back into the fluid. Then, standing five minutes or so at the hatch, I would consult the sky, the horizon, and the Barrier, noting on a piece of scratch paper the percentage of cloudiness, the mistiness or clarity, the amount of drift, the direction and speed of the wind (a visual check on the register), and anything particularly interesting about the weather. All of these data were dutifully entered on Form No. 1083, U.S. Weather Bureau.

Every day, between 12 o'clock and 1 o'clock, I changed the recording sheets on the register and the inside thermograph. The pens and the pads supplying them always needed inking, and the thermograph clock had to be wound. Mondays I performed the same service for the outside thermograph and the barograph.

* * *

April came in on Easter Sunday. It came in blowing and snowing, bringing a southeaster which laced the air with drift but shot the temperature up from -48 degrees to -25 degrees before the day was done. Not a pleasant day, but decidedly on the warmish side, after March's cold. In the morning at 10 o'clock, I attempted the first radio contact with Little America. Considering my inexperience, the fact that it was successful — at least in that I managed to make myself understood — set me up enormously. For, if any contingency truly disturbed me, it was the chance of my losing radio contact with Little America. Not on my account, but on the expedition's account generally. In spite of the orders I had given and the promises made to respect them, I knew in my own heart that both might be ignored if Little America was out of touch with me for long. And, if Little America chose to act, an appalling tragedy might easily result. Realizing how much depended upon my ability to hold communication, I was oppressed by the thought I might fail through sheer ignorance. Dyer had shown me how to make repairs, and Waite had coached me in operating the set; but, whenever I looked at the complications of tubes, switches, and coils, my heart misgave me. I scarcely knew the Morse code. Fortunately Little America could talk to me by radio telephone. So I wasn't obliged to decipher hot outpourings of dots and dashes from skillful operators. But reply I must in dots and dashes, and that I doubted I could do.

Two hours before the schedule I made ready. The gasoline-driven generator which powered the transmitter stood in an alcove, about halfway down the food tunnel, from which a six-inch ventilator pipe went through to the surface. Of course, it couldn't be run in the shack on account of the fumes. To drive the chill out of the metal I brought the engine indoors and put it on the chair, close to the stove. There the engine stood for an hour and a half, dripping with moisture. Then I filled the tank with a mixture of gasoline and lubricating oil, hurried the engine back to the alcove and tried to start it before the metal chilled. I cranked it after the fashion of an outboard motor, using a cord with a wooden handle at one end and a knot at the other. The knot slipped into a notch in the small flywheel; and, after taking a couple of turns around the wheel, I'd pull hard, spinning the engine. That morning it started off on the first spin. By then it was nearly 10 o'clock, and I had to leg it back into the hut to meet the schedule on time.

The receiver was tuned for 100 meters. The tubes glowed when I threw the switch, and the dial readings showed that everything was as it should be. I waited five minutes or so for the tubes to warm up. Precisely at 10 o'clock, as I clamped on the headphones, I heard Dyer's clear, modulated voice saying: «KFZ calling KFY. This is KFZ calling KFY. Will you please come in?» Excited, as nervous as a student pilot on his first solo hop, I cut in the transmitter and keyed: «OK, KFZ. All well. How are trail parties?» Or at least that was what I tried to spell out. The dot-dash equivalents were as confusing and unfamiliar as Arabic, and in the middle of a sentence I forgot completely what I was supposed to be sending.

Nevertheless, Charles Murphy came on a moment later with the news that both the Advance Base crew and Innes-Taylor's party were safely at Little America. «All hands are well,» he continued. After a few more remarks I heard him say, «Is everything all right with you?»

I was encouraged to make a more elaborate answer. «Great, working hard. Wind here thirty miles. Snowing. Think blow coming.»

Murphy chuckled, «I think John got most of that. No snow here as yet, but an easterly is making with lots of drift.»

The contact lasted only twenty minutes. The schedule days were confirmed: Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, at 10 o'clock, with daily emergency schedules to take effect at the same hour whenever my regular schedule was missed. Just before we signed off, Charlie said, «Dyer rates you D minus on your debut, but I think you deserve better than that.»

To this I retorted, «Yes, world's finest radio operator south of Lat. 80 degrees.»

That night I wrote in my diary: ". . The fact that the tractor party and Innes-Taylor's party are safely at Little America has raised my spirits to a new high. This is wonderful news. For the first time, after the months of struggle and anxiety, Little America is at last buttoned up for the winter, and so am I. If we both obey our common sense, nothing untoward need happen. I am free to take stock of my own situation and to make the most of the experience that is to be mine. I realize at this moment more than ever before how much I have been wanting something like this. I must confess feeling a tremendous exhilaration.»

Now I could relax temporarily and suffer the blow to come on. Monday the 2nd, the wind blew some more, after backing into the east. Tuesday it hiked into the north and blew a little harder. The bottom dropped out of the barometer. Utterly fascinated, I followed the purple trace as it sank on the barograph. In the space of sixteen hours the pressure dropped two-thirds of an inch. About 5:30 o'clock in the afternoon the trace ran right off the bottom of the sheet. The outside barometer finally fell to 27.82 inches. At home a reading of that order would have presaged a hurricane more violent than the great Florida blow. All the portents of an earth-rending uproar were in the air. The wind rasped on the roof. The clacking of the anemometer cups settled into a hum. Drift sifted down through the intake ventilator, making a cold heap on the floor. When I went topside for the last observation, I could scarcely lift the trapdoor against the wind's push; and the drift funneled down the hole with force enough to take the breath away.

But the barometric portent, as so often it is in high latitudes, was a mumbling lie. Consulting the wind record next morning, I found that the velocity had not risen over thirty-five miles per hour during the night. Wednesday the 4th was still windy, but the barometer rose again. That day I found the roof of the fuel tunnel caving under the accumulating weight of drift. The roofing canvas was bulging between the supporting planks, and two planks had already given way. Fearful that the whole tunnel might cave in and that, with my crippled arm, I should never be able to dig it out before the next blizzard, I shored it up as best I could with boxes and two-by-four timbers. The cold following the quieting of the gale would in time anneal the new, light snowflakes into a hard bridge over the tunnel; but to hasten the process I spent hours melting snow on the stove, carrying the water topside, and pouring it over the weak spots. The temperature was 6 degrees above zero, which should have seemed positively warm, compared to the -60 degrees weather I had become acclimatized to in March. The wind, however, cut to the bone; and my nose and cheeks were raw from frostbite. I went without hot food, preferring to use the stove continuously for melting snow; that night I slipped into the bunk an exhausted man.

April 5

This morning, when I awakened, I could tell by the sound that the wind had dropped, though drift was still sifting through the outlet ventilator and past the stovepipe. I dressed rapidly and hurried up the ladder to take the 8 a.m. «ob.» But, when I heaved with my good shoulder against the trapdoor, it refused to give. Half-asleep and stiff with cold, I continued to push as hard as I could. Still the panel would not budge. Remembering then the thick, double-action feature, I yanked out the restraining pegs and tried pulling down. This didn't work, either. Even when I kicked loose from the ladder and swung out, clinging to the handle with my left hand, the door did not stir. This was serious. I let go and dropped in a heap to the veranda floor, and the thought broke through my numbed senses: You're caught now. You're really caught, double-action and all.

With the flashlight, which I usually carried suspended from a cord looped around my neck, I located a long two-by-four under a jumble of gear in the veranda. Using my good arm to drive and the other to balance, I manipulated the timber as a vertical battering ram. Fifteen or twenty minutes of hard pounding served to crack the door a little; and, by bracing myself on the ladder and throwing the strength of my back against the panel, I finally succeeded in wedging an opening wide enough to wiggle through. Once on the surface, I quickly found the cause of the trouble. The day before, while I was working in the food tunnel, the shack door had been open a long time. The warm air had evidently softened the snow around the hatch; and, after the warmth was cut off, this melted margin had solidified into hard ice, which had wedged the door shut.

However, ice was not alone to blame. A full two and a half feet of drift lay packed over the trapdoor. This accumulation, I noticed, had built up behind the ventilator pipe and instrument shelter, which, in an easterly gale, stood to windward with respect to the trapdoor. Moreover, I observed further that the shack's not having been sunk quite enough was causing a thick shell of hard snow to come over the roof. Since the trapdoor was on the west side of the shack, it had naturally caught the brunt of the drift, which always fans out to leeward of any upraised object in the pattern of a ship's wake.

* * *

All that day, when not otherwise occupied with my observations, I hacked and dug and sawed at the offending mound, endeavoring to level off the surface round the shack. The day came off fine, but the spent wind still tossed up clouds of drift, and I did not want to go through another experience like yesterday's. The failure of my pet door had impressed me with the necessity of having an alternative hatch, against similar emergencies. Indeed, I had already planned such a one, had, in fact, worked on it intermittently during the blizzard.

My idea was to breach a hole in the west-pointing food tunnel and mine at right angles to it a new south-pointing passageway. The direction was selected after careful study. From experience with Antarctic weather I knew that the prevailing winds are easterly; the easterlies are the strong, snow-making, drift-making winds. Since I was powerless to prevent the drift from building up in the lee of the stovepipe and ventilator pipes, instrument shelter, and the shack itself, and therefore, over the food and fuel tunnels, the logical move was to drive a third tunnel out of the drift zone. Even this would not give complete security as a norther or a souther might come along presently and build up new drift ridges at right angles to those already cast up. Queerly, there is little actual increment from snowfall. Most of it blows away; yet, if the Empire State Building were standing in the Antarctic, it would eventually be smothered in drift.

I started the tunnel about midway down the food tunnel, directly opposite the recess in which the radio engine sat. It was to be from thirty to thirty-five feet long, about six feet high, and four feet wide. I proposed to carry it two or three feet below the surface, and, at the far end, to hole out a little shaft which would come within a foot of the surface. This thin shell could then be punctured whenever the other exit was blocked off. However, a foot a day, I decided, would be all I could do. «Even a foot means hard work,» my diary observes, «because I can use only my left arm. I saw the blocks out, then carry them to the hatch, where I hoist them to the surface, load them aboard a small man-hauling sledge, and haul them some distance to leeward.»

Unless you know something about the character of Antarctic snow, the reference to sawing it out in blocks may be puzzling. Except that it has been fused by cold, rather than heat, the Barrier snow is like a kind of sandstone. It is hard and brittle. You can't make snowballs with it. When you rub it, tiny icelike globules shred off. The color is the whitest white you ever saw; it has none of the smoothness and transparency of ice. After cold has coalesced the crystals of newly fallen snow, you can walk over it and not leave an impress. At times skis will slide helplessly as on slick glacier ice. You can't shovel that kind of snow. A shovel rings when it strikes as it might against rock. I used a two-foot hand saw. With this I cut out blocks, which could be pried clear with a shovel, leaving nice straight lines and debris easy to handle.

As a matter of fact, the escape tunnel was no wasted effort against a distant contingency. It became my water supply. All I had to do was to saw the blocks to a size suitable for the water bucket, and stack them in the veranda like cordwood. Yet, melting snow was an unmitigated nuisance; I loathed it. Two gallons of snow wielded barely two quarts of water after several hours on the stove. The water bucket was almost never off the stove; and, while it was there, little room was available for anything else. I came to hate its soot-blackened, dented sides; its greedy, ever-gaping maw; and once, when it careened to the floor and spilled all the water accumulated for supper, I cheerfully booted the bucket across the shack. Stooping to retrieve it, I caught my reflection in the shaving mirror. I was actually grinning.

April 6

I am sleeping fairly well, which is a blessing. But I still can't seem to wake up when I want to — missed by three quarters of an hour this morning — which is a nuisance. I don't know why I've lost the faculty; I'll have to regain it somehow. When the long night comes, I shall have no light to awaken me. I'm keeping the skylights cleared of snow to enjoy what little daylight remains. But all three are frosted over most of the time. When the temperature at the ceiling passes freezing, the frost melts; and the drip-drip-drip makes little ice stalagmites on the floor, which is always cold. I've proved, with a thermometer, that when I'm sitting down the temperature at the level of my feet is anywhere from 10 degrees to 30 degrees colder than at my head. .

April 7

The six months' day is slowly dying, and the darkness is descending very gently. Even at midday the sun is only several times its diameter above the horizon. It is cold and dull. At its brightest it scarcely gives light enough to throw a shadow. A funeral gloom hangs in the twilight sky. This is the period between life and death. This is the way the world will look to the last man when it dies.

April 8

Were it not for my lame shoulder and the difficulties caused by the weather instruments (which were designed for a warmer place), I should be making much better progress in preparing myself for the oncoming darkness. Unpredictable things, small but often annoying, make continuous demands upon my time. For example, I find that even when there is no drift, the three-and-one-half inch outlet ventilator fills every three or four days with ice (or rather with what looks like neve, which is between snow and ice). It's due, I think, to condensation. Anyhow, I've got to watch that. Good ventilation I must have at any cost. The pipe being held in place by friction, I just pull it out of the hole, carry it below, and lay it on the stove to thaw. The icy stuff won't pound out. It has to be melted.

Just to complicate matters, the same trouble is developing in the topside end of the stovepipe. Around dinner time (or whenever the stove is running hot) the ice melts, and the water runs through a hole in the elbow. Luckily, the register, which stands directly underneath, has a glass top; otherwise it would have been out of commission long ago. I have tied a can under the elbow to catch the water. Nevertheless, I'm rather worried about the blockage in the pipe; unless the fumes from the stove escape to the surface. I shall have trouble. .

* * *

Thus the first part of April hurried like a man on an errand. I was occupied with all kinds of small projects. Aside from the Escape Tunnel, the hardest task was putting the food and fuel tunnels to rights. These two parallel corridors, it will be remembered, ran out from the veranda and were separated by a three-foot wall of snow. Both were dark as dungeons; whenever I worked in them it was by the light of a storm lantern or flashlight. In the artificial light, though, they acquired a breathless radiance. The ice crystals, which were thickening on the canvas roofing, glistened like candelabra; and the walls glowed with a sharp, blue nakedness.

In the fuel tunnel were four fifty-gallon kerosene drums, weighing about five hundred pounds each, which we set in individual recesses. Besides this, I had 360 gallons of Stoddard solvent for the stove, which came in handy twelve-gallon drums weighing about ninety pounds each. In addition I had about ninety gallons of gasoline for the radio generator, in two large drums at the far end of the tunnel. Except for the fact that the drums all stood upright so as to prevent leakage from the bungs, the place used to remind me sometimes of a French wine cellar, especially the shadows cast by my figure as I moved about in front of the lantern.

The food tunnel, which opened directly in front of the door, was a different sort of place. There the walls were formed by the boxes of foodstuffs themselves. Wanting something, I simply had to pry open the sides with a chisel and take out whatever I needed, leaving the empty box as a permanent wall. What disturbed me was the haphazard manner in which the boxes had been stowed. Here and there the walls were bulging out; the beans were hopelessly mixed with the canned meats, tomato juice, and boxes of odds and ends; and the roof was caving in. All this offended my growing sense of neatness. During my spare time I set about rearranging the whole setup.

I didn't try to rush the job. If the polar regions have taught me anything, it is patience. I rarely spent more than an hour on any one job, preferring to shift to something else. In that way I was able to show a little progress each day on all the important jobs, and at the same time keep from becoming bored with any one. This was a way of bringing variety into an existence which would be basically monotonous.

* * *

Not that the materials for variety were ever lacking to a mind capable of forgetting what civilization was like. The sheer rigorousness of the Barrier took care of that. At times I felt as if I were the last survivor of an Ice Age, striving to hold on with the flimsy tools bequeathed by an easy-going, temperate world. Cold does queer things. At 50 degrees below zero a flashlight dies out in your hand. At -55 degrees kerosene will freeze, and the flame will dry up on the wick. At -60 degrees rubber turns brittle. One day, I remember, the antenna wire snapped in my hands when I tried to bend it to make a new connection. Below -60 degrees cold will find the last microscopic touch of oil in an instrument and stop it dead. If there is the slightest breeze, you can hear your breath freeze as it floats away, making a sound like that of Chinese firecrackers. As does the morning dew, rime coats every exposed object. And if you work too hard and breathe too deeply, your lungs will sometimes feel as if they were on fire.

Cold — even April's relatively moderate cold — gave me plenty to think about. The novocaine in my medical kit froze and shattered the glass tubes. So did the chemicals in the fire bombs. Two cases of tomato juice shattered their bottles. Whenever I brought canned food inside the shack I had to let it stand all day near the stove to thaw. On very cold days the kerosene and Stoddard solvent flowed like cylinder oil; I dug a deep hole in the tunnel floor for my can to lengthen the drop in the rubber hose which I used as a syphon. Frost was forever collecting on the electrical contact points of the wind vane and wind cups. Some days I climbed the twelve-foot anemometer pole two and three times to clean them. It was a bitter job, especially on blustery nights. With my legs twined around the slender pole, my arms flung over the cleats, and my free hands trying to scrape the contact point clean with a knife and at the same time hold a flashlight to see, I qualified for the world's coldest flagpole sitter. I seldom came down from that pole without a frozen finger, toe, nose, or cheek.

The shack was always freezingly cold in the morning. I slept with the door open. When I arose the inside temperature (depending upon the surface weather) might be anywhere from 10 degrees to 40 degrees below zero. Frost coated the sleeping bag where my breath had condensed during the night; my socks and boots, when I picked them up, were so stiff with frozen sweat that I first had to work them between my hands. A pair of silk gloves hung from a nail over the bunk, where I could grab them the first thing. Yet, even with their protection, my fingers would sting and burn from the touch of the lamp and stove as I lighted them. The old flesh had sloughed off the tips, and the new flesh for a while was insufferably tender. So I had my troubles. Some came from my own inadequacies. At first I had a devil of a time with the weather instruments. The traces became horribly blotched, the pens stuck, and the instruments themselves stopped without rhyme or reason. But, one way or another, I usually managed to contrive a cure. I learned how to thin the ink with glycerine to keep it from freezing, and how to cut the oil in the instruments with gasoline and rub the delicate parts with graphite which wasn't affected so much by the cold.

Yet, in playing Admirable Crichton to myself, I was far from distinguished. Many of my Advance Base concoctions wouldn't have passed Captain's Inspection. In the Navy phrase, they were generally no better than «lash-up.» As to that, I plead nolo contendere and throw myself on the court's mercy. An officer, I was learning to do things again with my hands. My standards were humble. If anything, I was again a worshipping disciple of the God of 2.5 of Naval Academy days, the god of the hairsbreadth passing grade, as personified by Tecumseh, at whose bust we midshipmen used to chip penny offerings as we marched to examinations. By Academy standards, I should have «bilged out» of Advance Base on cooking alone.

Breakfast didn't count. I rarely took more than tea and a whole-wheat biscuit. Lunch was habitually an out-of-the-can affair, consisting usually of tomato juice, Eskimo biscuits, and frequently a cold meat or fish — either corned beef, tongue, or sardines. These I prepared in masterly fashion. But supper, by rights the high spot in an explorer's day, the hot meal toward which a cold and hungry man looks with mounting anticipation — this meal for a while was a daily fiasco.

I have only to close my eyes to witness again the succession of culinary disasters. Consider what my diary designated as The Corn Meal Incident. Into a boiler I dumped what seemed a moderate quantity of meal, added a little water, and stood it on the stove to boil. That simple formula gave birth to a Hydra-headed monster. The stuff began to swell and dry up, swell and dry up, with fearful blowing and sucking noises. All innocently I added water, more water, and still more water. Whereupon the boiler erupted like Vesuvius. All the pots and pans within reach couldn't begin to contain the corn meal that overflowed. It oozed over the stove. It spattered the ceiling. It covered me from head to foot. If I hadn't acted resolutely, I might have been drowned in corn meal. Seizing the container in my mittened hands, I rushed it to the door and hurled it far into the food tunnel. There it continued to give off deadly golden lava until the cold finally stilled the crater.

There were other disasters of the same order. There was the Dried Lima Beans Incident of April 10th. («It's amazing,» the diary reports soberly, «how much water lima beans can absorb, and how long it takes them to cook. At supper time I had enough half-cooked lima beans to feed a ship's company.») My first jelly dessert bounced like a rubber ball under my knife; the flapjacks had to be scraped from the pan with a chisel. («And you, the man who sat at a thousand banquets,» goes the accusing entry of April 12th.) I dreaded banquets before I went to Advance Base; and I have come to dread them since. But in April's dark hours I ransacked my memory, trying to remember what they were like. All that I could recall was filet mignon spiced and darkened to the color of an old cavalry boot; or lobster thermidor; or squabs perched on triangles of toast; or chicken salad heaped on billowing lettuce. All these were far beyond the simple foods in my larder. When I did experiment, the results filled the shack with pungent burning smells and coated the skillets with awful gummy residues. But, in spite of the missing cook book, the record was not one of unmitigated failure. Resolved to make a last stand, I took the surviving chicken, hung it for two days from a nail over the stove to thaw, boiled it all one day, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and served. The soup, which was an unexpected by-product, was delicious; that night I broached a bottle of cider and drank a toast to Escoffier.

* * *

Thus April moved along. Each night, as the last formal act of the day, I crossed off another date on the big calendar on the wall, and each morning consulted the calendar the first thing, to make sure that I hadn't forgotten. Above me the day was dying; the night was rising in its place. Ever since late in February, when the sun had rolled down from its lofty twenty-four-hour circuit around the sky, it had been setting a little earlier at night, rising a little later in the morning. Now, with less than a fortnight of daylight left in this latitude, it was just a monstrous ball which could barely hoist itself free from the horizon. It would wheel along for a few hours, obscured by mist, then sink out of sight in the north not long after noon. I found myself watching it as one might watch a departing lover.

April 9

. . I have just seen (at 9 p.m.) a curious phenomenon. At first it appeared to be a ball of fire, which was smaller and redder than the sun. It bore about 205 degrees true. I couldn't identify it. Going below, I got the field glasses and kept watching it. It changed from deep red to silver, and every now and then blanked out. It was astonishing how big it looked at first. But after long study I finally figured out that it consisted of four brilliant stars, very close together in a vertical line. However, they may not have been four stars but one having three images of itself refracted by ice crystals. .

April 12

. . It has been crystal clear, with a temperature of about 50 degrees below zero, and a whispering southerly wind that set fire to the skin. Each day more light drains from the sky. The storm-blue bulge of darkness pushing out from the South Pole is now nearly overhead at noon. The sun rose this morning at about 9:30 o'clock, but never really left the horizon. Huge and red and solemn, it rolled like a wheel along the Barrier edge for about two and a half hours, when the sunrise met the sunset at noon. For another two and a half hours it rolled along the horizon, gradually sinking past it until nothing was left but a blood-red incandescence. The whole effect was something like that witnessed during an eclipse. An unearthly twilight spread over the Barrier, lit by flames thrown up as from a vast pit, and the snow flamed with liquid color.

At home I am used to seeing the sun leap straight out of the east, cross the sky overhead, and set in a line perpendicular to the western horizon. Here the sun swings to a different law. It lives by extremes. In the spring it rises for the first time at noon and for the last time at midnight. As in the fall, it rises and sets daily for a month and a half. Then for four months and a half it never sets at all, never crosses directly overhead, but instead wheels around the horizon, nearly parallel to it and never rising higher than 331/2 degrees. In the fall it sets for the first time at midnight, and sets for good at noon. Then for four and a half months it does not rise at all, but instead sinks gradually below the horizon to a depth of 131/2 degrees before it begins to lift again. This is the period I am approaching now; a period when the day seems to be holding its breath.

Thus the coming of the polar night is not the spectacular rush that some imagine it to be. The day is not abruptly walled off; the night does not drop suddenly. Rather, the effect is a gradual accumulation, like that of an infinitely prolonged tide. Each day the darkness, which is the tide, washes in a little farther and stays a little longer; each time the day, which is a beach, contracts a little more, until at last it is covered. The onlooker is not conscious of haste. On the contrary, he is sensible of something of incalculable importance being accomplished with timeless patience. The going of the day is a gradual process, modulated by the intervention of twilight. You look up, and it is gone. But not completely. Long after the horizon has interposed itself, the sun continues to cast up a pale and dwindling imitation of the day. You can trace its progress by the glow thrown up as it makes its round just below the horizon.

These are the best times, the times when neglected senses expand to an exquisite sensitivity. You stand on the Barrier, and simply look and listen and feel. The morning may be compounded of an unfathomable, tantalizing fog in which you stumble over sastrugi you can't see, and detour past obstructions that don't exist, and take your bearings from tiny bamboo markers that loom as big as telephone poles and hang suspended in space. On such a day, I could swear that the instrument shelter was as big as an ocean liner. On one such day I saw the blank northeastern sky become filled with the most magnificent Barrier coast I have ever seen, true in every line and faced with cliffs several thousand feet tall. A mirage, of course. Yet a man who had never seen such things would have taken oath that it was real. The afternoon may be so clear that you dare not make a sound, lest it fall in pieces. And on such a day I have seen the sky shatter like a broken goblet, and dissolve into iridescent tipsy fragments — ice crystals falling across the face of the sun. And once in the golden downpour a slender column of platinum leaped up from the horizon, clean through the sun's core; a second luminous shadow formed horizontally through the sun, making a perfect cross. Presently two miniature suns, green and yellow in color, flipped simultaneously to the ends of each arm. These are parhelia, the most dramatic of all refraction phenomena; nothing is lovelier.

April 14

. . Took my daily walk at 4 p.m. today, in 89 degrees of frost. The sun had dropped below the horizon, and a blue — of a richness I've never seen anywhere else — flooded in, extinguishing all but the dying embers of the sunset.

Due west, halfway to the zenith, Venus was an unblinking diamond; and opposite her, in the eastern sky, was a brilliant twinkling star set off exquisitely, as was Venus, in the sea of blue. In the northeast a silver-green-serpentine aurora pulsed and quivered gently. In places the Barrier's whiteness had the appearance of dull platinum. It was all delicate and illusive. The colors were subdued and not numerous; the jewels few; the setting simple. But the way these things went together showed a master's touch.

I paused to listen to the silence. My breath, crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead.

The day was dying, the night being born — but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence — a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.

It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance — that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.

Chapter Four — April II: The Night

April 15

I have been cooking some dried lima beans for two hours in the hottest water I can manage. It is now 9 o'clock, and they are still granite-hard. By the great horn spoon, I am going to find out their softening point if it takes all night.

. . This morning I had another radio contact with Little America. As were the two preceding affairs, it was a major operation; therefore, as with everything else important, I am trying to systematize the operation as best I can. . The fact that I haven't mastered the Morse code complicates the business infernally. Even though I have a conversion alphabet tacked to the table next to the key, I find it terribly difficult to think in terms of dots and dashes; and my thumb and forefinger are clumsy executing them with the key.

So this is what I'm doing: While the engine is heating on the stove, I sit down at the desk and write out on a sheet of paper whatever messages I have in mind. I spell them out vertically down the page — that is, Chinese fashion, with the letters one under each other; then, opposite each letter, I write the equivalent dots and dashes. This is fine, as far as it goes. The trouble comes afterwards, when Charlie Murphy takes up some expedition matter or else is in a mood just to make conversation. Then I become as frantic as a tongue-tied Latin being interrogated in a strait jacket, who can't form the words in his mouth or use his hands to gesticulate. Yet, somehow, Dyer manages to follow me — he must have learned mind-reading along with his engineering. .

My first question today was, «How is Ken Rawson?» Charlie Murphy came on and said that Rawson's neck was still giving trouble. Aside from that, all's well at Little America.

Charles gave me a digest of Little America weather; and, as we anticipated, it averages 15 degrees to 20 degrees warmer than here.

It's really comforting to talk this way with Little America, and yet in my heart I wish very much that I didn't have to have the radio. It connects me with places where speeches are made and with the importunities of the outer world. But at least I myself can't broadcast over this set, thank heaven. It won't carry voice; and, moreover, I haven't enough generator fuel to be sending long messages in code. Charlie Murphy will see to it that my friends understand the situation. But I know that some day, out of pure curiosity, I shall be tempted to ask how the stock market is going or what's happening in Washington. And, in view of my precarious finances, any news will probably bring restlessness and discontent.

After the schedule I found that the ventilator pipe in the generator alcove was half filled with ice from the condensation of the hot gases, and sickening fumes filled the tunnel. Although I don't like this at all, I can't seem to find a remedy. The temperature today held between 50 degrees and 60 degrees below.

April 17

A momentous day. I found the cook book! Going through a homemade canvas bag full of navigational gear and various odds and ends, I came upon the precious volume early this morning. The whoop of joy I uttered sounded so loud that I was actually embarrassed; it was the first sound to pass my lips, I realized, in twenty days.

No book washed ashore to a castaway could have been more avidly studied. I regret to say, though, that it doesn't solve all the mysteries of cooking. It doesn't tell me how to keep flapjacks from sticking to the pan. So I took advantage of the radio schedule today to ask Charlie Murphy if anyone in camp knew the answer. Greasing the pan, I explained, did no good. Charlie's reply came floating back. «You've got me there,» he said. «I've never cooked a thing in my life. Maybe you'd better change your diet.»

«Ask cook,» I spelled out laboriously.

«Dick, if you were starving to death,» my friend replied, «I still wouldn't trust that cleaver-wielding Marine.»

«Ask somebody,» I persisted.

«I'll tell you what,» said Charlie. «I'll send a message to Oscar of the Waldorf. In a serious matter like this, we don't want to take any chances.» [Fourteen days later, as he had promised, Charlie joyfully read a treatise by Oscar himself, the gist of which was buttering the pan. I gave up then, and resigned myself to continuing with the chisel.]

Another important event occurred today. The sun departed for good. It peeped above the horizon at noon, and with that hasty gesture set for the last time. I am feeling no particular reaction over the loss of the sun — not even envy for the men at Little America, who have an appreciably shorter winter night. Wondering why, I concluded that the long period of preparation — the lingering twilight, the lengthening nights — had put me in the mood for the change. If you hadn't lost the sun, I told myself, you would have had something serious to think about, since that would mean that the earth's axis was pointing the wrong way, and the entire solar system was running amok.

April 18

Worked topside several hours today, leveling snow and getting rid of snow blocks from the Escape Tunnel. Slipped once and fell heavily on the bad shoulder; it hurt like the deuce. I was puffing a bit while I worked and apparently got a touch of frost in the lungs, because tonight, when I breathe, I noticed a burning sensation. The temperature was 60 degrees below. My lantern froze and went out when I went topside on the last inspection trip. . This morning I found more ice in the stovepipe. I'll have to do something about that. The ice was incredibly hard. I was a long time breaking it out.

A day or two later, having meanwhile given serious thought to the whole problem of ventilation, I decided to change the position of the ventilator pipe in the center of the room. This, it will be recalled, was a U-shaped duct, one arm of which passed from a point three feet or so above the surface, down the outside of the hut, swung under the floor, and discharged the gravity-borne, fresh air into the shack through a riser housed in a tall wooden pillar extending nearly to the ceiling. Although the arrangement had promised well, a month's trial had convinced me that it ought to be changed. For one thing, the pillar was always in the way. It stood right in the middle of the shack. If I collided with it once, I collided with it a hundred times. That, however, was only an inconvenience. My real objection was that the apparatus was failing to do its job. Mornings, the cold in the room lay like a congealed liquid. By midafternoon, when the stove was running hot, the air around my head would turn warm, though the floor and the corners stayed icy. A step or two carried me from equatorial warmth to polar cold. I wanted a more equable distribution of temperature, if I could get it; but more than anything else I wanted plenty of air in the place.

My theory was that I could get much better circulation if I brought the outlet arm of that duct close to the stove; the vacuum effect caused by the heating of the air in the pipe would pull more air into the shack. Lacking pipe joints, and having no other tools than a hammer, saw, and wrench, I solved the problem, finally, in a simple way. After taking down the wooden pillar and pipe, I sawed off seven inches of the wooden housing, and nailed it over the vent in the middle of the floor. Over this I nailed a piece of heavy canvas, thus making a box. Then I let into the side of it a piece of pipe, which ran across the floor to the foot of the bunk. Here an empty five-gallon gasoline tin, pierced through one side and the top, was made to serve as a second joint. Into the top of the can I fitted a stand of pipe and leaned the top part of it against the horizontal section of the stovepipe near the ceiling.

I didn't finish until 3 o'clock in the morning; and, while the result was hardly a new advance in the technics of air conditioning, an improvement in my ventilation was noticeable. A piece of tissue paper held over the outlet fluttered convincingly. And now that the awkward pillar had been eliminated from the middle of the room, the shack seemed twice as large. However, the dispensation was limited; for, instead of bumping against the pipe, I was now tripping over it; but the increased elbow room was adequate compensation. Next morning, when I got up, the inside temperature was 30 degrees below zero. The new arrangement was working quite nicely indeed.

* * *

Although the day was gone, the twilight lingered in the sun's wake. At noon the northern horizon continued to erupt with explosive reds and yellows and greens. There were still several hours on either side of noon when I could work and travel on the Barrier without a light. But the mornings and afternoons were dark as night; and I found that my routine was being regulated imperceptibly by the darkness, even as the daylight had regulated it before. In addition to the weather observations I now had to make five auroral observations every day. They came at 10 o'clock in the morning, then at 1 o'clock, 4 o'clock, 7 o'clock, and the last at 10 o'clock. The aurora occurs in complicated patterns, called rays, arcs, curtains, bands, and coronas. Standing at the hatch, I would identify the structure, and note other relevant information, such as the bearing and estimated altitude of the center and the termini. These data were entered in a special book; and the auroral observations, like the meteorological observations, were timed to coincide with simultaneous observations at Little America to make for true correlations later on. A day broken up in this wise could never be a spacious day. Until I became used to it, my life seemed to be made up of busy, unrelated little fragments which I seldom succeeded in piecing together.

Now, I had always been a somewhat casual person, governed by moods as often as by necessities, and given to working at odd hours. My footless habits were practically ruinous to those who had to live with me. An explorer's home is his office, recruiting station, headquarters, and main cache. Mine was the mobilization and demobilization point of all my expeditions. The telephone used to ring at all hours. People tramped in and out as if it were a public place. Mukluks and sleeping bags and pemmican samples and sun compasses cluttered up the living room, the bedrooms, the closets — every nook, in fact, where I could find room to dump them. And meals were never on time because Daddy was (1) on the long-distance telephone; or (2) spinning yarns with an old shipmate; or (3) preparing a talk; or (4) getting ready to go off somewhere. Remembering the way it all was, I still wonder how my wife ever succeeded in bringing up four such splendid children as ours, wise each in his or her way, and each one as orderly as Father almost never was. Certainly it has been done in spite of the example set by that haphazard man who came and went at 9 Brimmer Street. However, I have often explained to the children how lucky they were to have in their mother one parent who offered a perfect example of what to do, and in their father another who was an example of what not to do.

Out at Advance Base I made a heroic effort to mend my ways. Not from conscience but from necessity. From the beginning I had recognized that an orderly, harmonious routine was the only lasting defense against my special circumstances. The brain-cracking loneliness of solitary confinement is the loneliness of a futile routine. I tried to keep my days crowded; and yet, at the same time, I, the most unsystematic of mortals, endeavored to be systematic. At night, before blowing out the lantern, I formed the habit of blocking out the morrow's work. Once the tunnels were cleared up and the shack was made shipshape, I could afford to be more leisurely. In drafting the day's agenda, I seldom set up any special objectives. It was a case of assigning myself an hour, say, to the Escape Tunnel, half an hour to leveling drift, an hour to straightening up the fuel drums, an hour to cutting bookshelves in the walls of the food tunnel, and two hours to renewing a broken bridge in the man-hauling sledge.

If the time was not sufficient, well and good; let the job be resumed another day. It was wonderful to be able to dole out time in this way. It brought me an extraordinary sense of command over myself and simultaneously freighted my simplest doings with significance. Without that or an equivalent, the days would have been without purpose; and without purpose they would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration.

April 21

The morning is the hardest time. It is hard enough anywhere for a man to begin the day's work in darkness; where I am it is doubly difficult. One may be a long time realizing it, but cold and darkness deplete the body gradually; the mind turns sluggish; and the nervous system slows up in its responses. This morning I had to admit to myself that I was lonely. Try as I may, I find I can't take my loneliness casually; it is too big. But I must not dwell on it. Otherwise I am undone.

At home I usually awaken instantly, in full possession of my faculties. But that's not the case here. It takes me some minutes to collect my wits; I seem to be groping in cold reaches of interstellar space, lost and bewildered. The room is a non-dimensional darkness, without shadow or substance; even after all these days I sometimes ask myself: Where am I? What am I doing here? I discover myself straining, as if trying to hear something in a place where no sound could possibly exist. Ah, yes. Tick-tick, tick-tick-tick, tick. The busy, friendly voices of the register and thermograph on the shelves, each distinct and dramatic — sounds I can understand and follow, even as a mariner emerging from the darkness of the boundless ocean can recognize and follow a coast by the bell buoys offshore.

As I dread getting up, I just lie and listen to these sharp, clean beats, letting them form little conversations, little rhythms, even short stories in my mind. They have a pleasant, narcotizing effect. The slightest move, disturbing the nice temperature balance in the sleeping bag, sends a blast of frosty air down my back or stomach. My skin crawls at the thought of touching foot to the deck. But up I must for the 8 a.m. observation; and so I lie there, mustering resolve for a wrenching heave into the dark. Clear of the bag, I feel around on the shelf at the head of the bunk until I locate the silk gloves which I wear to protect my fingers while handling cold metal. After putting these on, I light the lantern, which hangs from a nail over the bunk. The wick, hard with frost, seldom takes fire easily. The flame catches and goes out, catches and goes out. Then, as it steadies on the wick, the light gradually pushes a liquid arc into the room, bringing my possessions one by one into its wavering yellow orbit. I suppose it is really a gloomy light. Things on the opposite wall are scarcely touched by it. But to me that feeble burning is a daily miracle. With light the day begins, the mind escapes from darkness, and numbness leaves the body. I sleep in my underclothes, with my pants and shirt and socks heaped upon the table. Needless to say, I dress faster than a fireman. .

Thus the Advance Base day began. The next day, exactly a month after I flew from Little America, I sat down and wrote — at odd moments during the day — exactly what I did from waking to sleeping. The whole entry ran close to 3,500 words. The day happened to be a Sunday, but the flow of the hours at Advance Base was no different from that of any other day. Since the entry describes a typical day, at least for this period, I have decided to include it, except for slight editing against repetition:

April 22

. . After dressing, the first thing I do, of course, and that right lively, is to start the stove. The fuel is usually somewhat congealed, and it takes ten minutes or so for enough to run from the tank to fill the burner. I crave hot tea in the morning; for, rather than wait for the stove to warm up, I heat a quart of water (ice, of course) with meta tablets, which are inch-long wafers of solidified alcohol. I dump half a dozen of these in a can, and set the pan of ice in a metal rack over the hot blue flame.

The silence during these first minutes of the day is always depressing. It seems real, as if a gloomy critic were brooding in the shadows, on the verge of saying something unpleasant. Sharing his mood, I merely grunt a good morning. My exercises help to snap me out of this. Stretched out flat on the bunk, I go through fifteen minutes of various kinds of muscle stretchings. By the time I've finished, the water is hot. I brew about a pint of tea in a big porcelain cup, and dump in lots of sugar and powdered milk. After a sip or two, I put the cup over the flame, and hold it there until it gets piping hot; so hot, in fact, that it burns the mouth and throat. Thus fortified, I am ready for the observation.

A few minutes before 8 o'clock, I noted the barometric pressure (28.79 inches). A quick glance at the inside thermograph, just before I buttoned on my canvas windbreaker, showed a topside temperature in the minus forties. I heated the flashlight a minute or two over the stove; that would keep the batteries from freezing. Without bothering to turn the switch, I went into the pitch-black veranda, and up the ladder. That little route I knew by heart: a step past the door, two to the left, six rungs up.

The trapdoor stuck a little. The violence of my second heave sent a shower of crystals down my neck, making me shiver. It was still very dark, but an impalpable fog lay close to the surface, giving the day a gray look; and a relentless flutter of snow was in my face. I still use the words «day» and «night» having no equivalents for the divisions whose differences are only in time; «day» seems a meaningless description of the soggy pall which this morning lay over the Barrier. As I looked about, I was conscious only of solitude and my own forlornness.

The thermograph in the shelter showed a minimum temperature of 48.5 degrees below zero and a maximum of -46 degrees since the last observation. I reset the pin in the minimum thermometer and brushed out the rime and snow with a whisk broom which I carried in my pocket. Altogether I was not on the surface more than five minutes, counting the time spent taking notes on cloudiness, mist, drift, precipitation, and the rest of it; but it was long enough for me to decide that a blow was in the making.

Although the fire had not yet driven the cold out of the room, the place seemed snug and pleasant when I returned. The first thing I did was to light a candle, which I put on the table to brighten the middle of the room. While still standing up with my coat on, I jotted down on a piece of scratch paper the data I had gathered topside — I felt too cold to sit down. Meanwhile I polished off another pint of tea. Except for a biscuit, which was hard as rock, this was my breakfast.

8:30 o'clock. some of the ice in the water bucket had melted; before I fetched in another snow block from the veranda, I poured enough water into a basin to wash my hands. Now was the time to decide what to have for supper and to begin thawing it. My choice was pea soup, seal meat, and stewed corn. From the meat box I took a five-inch slab of seal, black and unappetizing, which I hung from a nail over the stove to thaw. The can of corn I lifted from the cold deck to the shelf close behind the stove. The four-gallon gravity tank on the stove needs filling every three days; today is a filling day. I shut off the flame, unshipped the tank, and carried it into the fuel tunnel, a matter of thirty-five feet or so to the farthest drum. A stick driven into the wall served as a peg for the lantern. By its dim light I found the rubber siphon coiled over one of the drums. I had to suck on this for dear life to start the flow; and, while waiting for the tank to fill, I examined the roof to make sure that it wasn't caving again. Everything was holding nicely.

Just about 9 o'clock, I commenced the usual rigamarole of preparations for the radio schedule. I finished barely in time to pop topside for the 10 a.m. auroral «ob.» Nothing doing — heavy clouds still. As I tuned in the receiver, Dyer was calling KFY. Today's was an interesting conversation. The general objectives of the big exploration campaign in the spring had been set up before I left Little America, but certain revisions in the plan seemed desirable after closer scrutiny; and these Charlie Murphy took up, after discussions with Poulter, June, Innes-Taylor, Rawson, Siple, and the scientific staff. With the suggested revisions I was in accord.

Just before we shut down, Dyer gave me a time tick, which he had picked up from either the U.S. Naval Observatory or Greenwich, I've forgotten which. «When I say 'now,' " Dyer warned, «it will be 10:53 o'clock. You have thirty-five seconds to go. . Twenty seconds. . Ten seconds. . Now.» One chronometer, I found, was running 2 minutes, 10 seconds fast, the other 31 seconds fast, the third was 1 minute 20 seconds slow. I noted the facts in my records. I must know the exact time in order to synchronize my observations with those at Little America. After that I carefully wound all three chronometers.

After the schedule I had an hour to devote to the Escape Tunnel. It's just about a third done — thirteen feet, to be exact. I'm far behind my schedule of a foot a day, but my lame shoulder has been something of a handicap. This morning I finished cutting shelves in the sides for superfluous books. Later on I expect to build alcoves in the tunnel for other gear. There isn't an inch of blank space anywhere in the shack. That's because I've been bringing in so much stuff from the boxes in the tunnel. Looking around, I was almost horrified at the amount of clothing, food, tools, gear, and other things it takes to support even one man and a scientific station here. Much of the stuff could just as well remain outside; but I suppose I get bored trotting in and out every time I want something. .

* * *

The hour between 12 and 1 o'clock was, as always, the busiest. Exactly at noon I inked the register pens, changed the sheet, and wound the clock (the tracing had turned irregular, which meant that the contact points were foul).

So, topside, armed with a flashlight looped around my neck, a whisk broom, and an open knife in the chest pocket of my parka. Reaching the top of the pole, I whipped off the reindeer-skin mittens, which were also on a cord around my neck, and fell to work on the wind vane. I lifted it off its seat, brushed the snow out of the cups, and scraped the contact points clean, all the while cursing the cold torturing my fingers and face.

My wrist watch showed 1 o'clock. No necessity for an auroral observation — still overcast. But time to wind the inside thermograph and change the recording sheet. After that, lunch. I am half through Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, and I read a chapter of that as I ate. A meal eaten alone and in silence is no pleasure. So I fell into the habit of reading while I ate. In that way I can lose myself completely for a time. The days I don't read I feel like a barbarian brooding over a chunk of meat.

A moment ago there came a tremendous boom, as if tons of dynamite had exploded in the Barrier. [From seismic soundings taken the following summer we learned that Advance Base was underlaid by a stratum of ice and snow about seven hundred feet thick. The presence of this perpetual carapace of ice throughout most of Antarctica is one of the principle features which differentiate it from the Arctic, where, with few exceptions, the ground in uncovered during the summer.] The sound was muffled by distance; yet, it was inherently ominous breaking through the silence. But I confess that any sound which interrupts the evenness of this place is welcome. I had the feeling that the Barrier was moving slightly. The handle of the lantern rattled against the tin base. The flashlight, hanging from a nail on a shelf in front of me, seemed to sway a little. This is what is known as a Barrier quake — a subsidence of great areas of snow contracting from cold.

Half an hour of shoveling drift was on the afternoon program. Before I went topside, I picked up the slop pail, already half frozen from standing on the floor. I was careful to dump it to leeward so that a mound wouldn't be formed to catch drift. Put in my half hour leveling off the snow around the shack. Not so difficult today. The snow lies a couple feet deep on the roof, but for the time being does not seem to be deepening. After finishing that I pulled the ventilator up through the roof, and carried it below to thaw on the stove. For once it was fairly free of ice. After a few minutes on the stove, the ice loosened; and I was able to jar it out with a hammer. The chunk of seal over the stove was steadily dripping drops of blood and water.

Then I had an hour to myself. I spent part of it entering my rough meteorological notes on U.S. Weather Bureau form Number 1083. Then I tinkered with the handle of the victrola, which had come unscrewed the night before. Just before 4 o'clock I put on my windproofs and went topside for the auroral «ob.» The overcast had thinned a little, and the snow had stopped; but, beyond a pale, trembling glow in the dark edging of cloud, there was no sign of the aurora. A quiet day for the auroral department, I said to myself, and went walking.

Because of the fog and the threat of blizzard in the air, I decided not to go very far. It is my practice to walk between an hour and two hours a day — when I have time. The walk gives me change and it also provides another means of exercise. Starting out, I usually stop every few steps and do a knee bend or stoop or any one of a dozen exercises I enjoy. Today, however, I favored myself. My lungs hurt a little when I breathe, and I may have frosted them on the 18th a little more than I realized.

The last half of the walk is the best part of the day, the time when I am most nearly at peace with myself and circumstances. Thoughts of life and the nature of things flow smoothly and so naturally as to create an illusion that one is swimming harmoniously in the broad current of the cosmos. During this hour I undergo a sort of intellectual levitation, although my thinking is usually on earthy, practical matters. Last night, before turning in, I read, in Santayana's Soliloquies in England, an essay on friendship. I thought of that and the structure of social relationships and the mechanics of friendship as they have operated in my life. The negative aspects — the betrayals, the disappointments, and the bitternesses — I shut out entirely. Only by ruthlessly exorcising the disillusioning and unpleasant thoughts can I maintain any feeling of real detachment, any sense of being wholly apart from selfish concerns.

I made many turns back and forth before I decided to go below. It was very dark then, too dark to see the upperworks of the hut or even the anemometer pole until I was hard by; so I finished the walk by flashlight. On the way down the ladder, I noticed that one of the rungs had sprung, and made a mental note to fix that tomorrow. After getting rid of my heavy clothes, I set about the afternoon ritual of lighting the gasoline pressure lamp. Anyhow, I have made it a ritual. Its light is twice as strong as that of the storm lantern; it reaches every corner of the room. But I have forced myself to use it sparingly because it consumes a lot of gasoline, and, also, because it gives off certain disagreeable fumes. But I find that I crave light as a thirsting man craves water; and just the fact of having this lantern alive in the night hours makes an immense difference. I feel like a rich man.

The water in the bucket was hot when I dipped my finger — just right for the soup. Making a great clatter of pans and whistling out of tune anything that came to my lips, I got the supper ready: hot pea soup (made from a stick of dried peas, called erbswurst); fried young seal, which was very tender; plus corn, tea, powdered milk, and canned peaches for dessert. Excellent, all of it. Just before dessert I went topside for the 7 p.m. auroral «ob.» Sky had cleared quite a bit. A vague, luminous belt lay sprawled through the northeast and southwest quarters of the sky, but it had little color or life. The data were dutifully entered in the records; structure H.A. (made up of homogeneous quiet arcs); intensity 2; altitude, about 35 degrees above the horizon. Slight glow about 10 degrees to the right, in the direction of Little America.

When I had finished the peaches, I pushed my book and the dishes to one side, got out the deck of cards, and played two or three hands of Canfield. No luck. At a dollar a point, I lost $15 to my imaginary banker. And then my only real luxury — music. I wound up the battered green victrola, slipped on a Strauss waltz, «Wine, Women and Song,» released the brake, and jumped simultaneously for the dishes. The idea is to finish the dishes before the phonograph runs down. The machine has a double-length spring, and I've rigged a rude sort of repeater which plays a small record four or five times on one winding. Tonight, though, no sound came out. Cause: frozen oil in the works. I stood the machine on a corner of the stove. In a little while the record began to turn, very slowly at first, making lugubrious notes, then faster and faster. I transferred it to the table and fell to on the dishes, going like mad. Tonight they outlasted the record by fifteen seconds: a very poor showing indeed, although I credit the defeat to the head start the phonograph got while it was warming up on the stove.

While adding to this diary, I suddenly realized that I had almost forgotten the 8 p.m. «ob.» Hurriedly threw on a coat, cap, and mittens, and scrambled topside. Still cloudy; the pin in the minimum thermometer stood at 50 degrees below zero; the wind was still in the northwest and very light. But I could still smell a blizzard. I was glad to return to the snugness of the shack.

Except for the 10 p.m. auroral «ob,» my day's work was finished. I spent the few remaining hours playing the phonograph and completing this entry. . The day is about to end. I have just finished my nightly bath, or, rather, third of a bath; for each night I wash a different third of my body. I don't know how I came to decide upon that arbitrary division, unless it was that I discovered my conscience could be placated by performing the ritual in installments. Anyhow, I started bathing this way during my first stay at Little America, and have found it satisfactory. I really don't get dirty. The Barrier is as clean as the top of Mount Everest, but habits must be satisfied, and the truth is that I find the bath a diversion. And my body always feels refreshed afterwards.

It is now close to midnight. In a moment I shall go to bed. I know exactly what I shall do. With a pencil stroke, I shall cross this day off the calendar; then fetch snow and alcohol tablets for the morning tea, and, finally, make sure that the instruments are functioning properly. This inspection over, I shall take a quick glance from the hatch to see whether anything unusual is happening in the auroral department. After battening down the trapdoor, I shall undress, turn down the pressure lantern, put out the fire, open the door, and jump for the sleeping bag, leaving the storm lantern burning over my head. That part of the routine is automatic. As long as heat remains in the shack, I shall read; tonight it will be the second volume of the Life of Alexander, which I've nearly finished. That part is by choice. When my hands turn numb, I'll reach up and blow out the lantern, but not until I have first made sure that the flashlight is somewhere in the sleeping bag, where my body will keep the battery warm.

I don't try to force myself to sleep, as I sometimes do at home. My whole life here in a sense is an experiment in harmony, and I let the bodily processes achieve a natural equilibrium. As a rule, it doesn't take me long to go to sleep. But a man can live a lifetime in a few half-dreaming moments of introspection between going to bed and falling asleep: a lifetime reordered and edited to satisfy the ever-changing demands of the mind.

* * *

As predicted, Monday the 23rd brought a blizzard. I was aroused in the morning by the rattling of the anemometer cups. When I pushed back the trapdoor, the wind swooped down, and the drift came in a white smother. The wind sucked the heat out of the shack so that I couldn't keep warm; the stove flickered from the draft. The open outlet ventilator alone wasn't enough to make the difference; the perviousness of the snow, I decided, had a lot to do with it. Although the hatch was battened down and two feet of closely packed snow insulated me from the surface, a strong draft moved steadily in the tunnels.

April ran out its time like a ship on a close reach. From the 23rd to the 29th the wind blew fairly steadily, though on no occasion did it rise over 27 miles per hour; but, since the wind begins to pick up drift at 15 miles per hour, and at 20 miles an hour is thick with it, the conditions topside were not very pleasant. The raking winds furrowed the Barrier with sastrugi as symmetrical as waves, hard at the crest and soft in the trough, so that walking was difficult. On the days the air was fairly quiet, a cottony gray fog deadened the twilight hours, and a somber red tinge smeared the northern horizon at noon. I continued working on the Escape Tunnel. My right arm was nearly well again. At Little America, I learned on the radio, they were being whaled by continuous blizzards, which had put a stop to outside work. But all was well.

April 30

Today came in fine and clear. So bright was the moonlight at the beginning of my walk that I could read the second hand on the wrist watch. The whole sky was bathed with light, and the Barrier seemed to exhale a soft, internal luminescence of its own. At first there was not a cloud anywhere, and the stars glittered with an unnatural brightness. Overhead, in the shape of a great ellipse, was a brilliant aurora. It ran across the sky from north to south. The short diameter of the ellipse ran east and west from where I stood, and the eastern segment of the curve was at my zenith. Waves of light pulsed rapidly through the structure. Beyond the south end of the ellipse, scintillating in the sky, was what appeared to be a drapery hanging over the South Pole. It hung in folds, like a gigantic curtain, and was composed of brilliant light rays.

The snow was different shades of silver gray (not white as one would suppose) with the brightest gray making a pathway to the moon. And to the eastward was another faint patch of aurora.

The wind blew gently from the pole, and the temperature was between 40 degrees and 50 degrees below. When Antarctica displays her beauty, she seems to give pause to the winds, which at such times are always still.

Overhead the aurora began to change its shape and become a great, lustrous serpent moving slowly across the zenith. The small patch in the eastern sky now expanded and grew brighter; and almost at the same instant the folds in the curtain over the pole began to undulate, as if stirred by a celestial presence.

Star after star disappeared as the serpentine folds covered them. It was like witnessing a tragedy on a cosmic scale; the serpent, representing the forces of evil, was annihilating beauty.

Suddenly the serpent disappeared. Where it had been only a moment before, the sky was once more clear; the stars showed as if they had never been dimmed. When I looked for the luminous patch in the eastern sky, it, too, was gone; and the curtain was lifting over the pole, as if parted by the wind which at that instant came throbbing over the Barrier. I was left with the tingling feeling that I had witnessed a scene denied to all other mortal men.

* * *

Yet, this harmony was mostly of the mind: a temporary peace won by a physically occupied body. But the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. Even in my most exalted moods I never quite lost the feeling of being poised over an undermined footing, like a man negotiating a precipice who pauses to admire the sunset, but takes care where he places his feet. There were few days, even in April, that did not produce a reminder of the varied hazards of isolation. Rime was forever choking the stovepipe, ventilators, even the exhaust duct from the radio generator alcove, hindering the ventilation and making for fumes in the hut. And, though walking had always been my principal relaxation, I almost never dared to get out of sight of the anemometer pole, or the ten-foot snow beacon marking the Southern Party's depot, about seventy-five yards west of the hut. These were the only identifiable landmarks between the Queen Mauds and Little America. If a wind came up suddenly, or fog shut down, I could — and, on occasion, did — lose them in an instant.

The tolerable quality of a dangerous existence is the fact that the human mind cannot remain continuously sensitive to anything. Repetition's dulling impact sees to that. The threat of sudden death can scare a man for only so long; then he dismisses it as he might a mealymouthed beggar. When Bennett and I were on our way to the North Pole, and not quite halfway there, something let go in one of the engines, and ropy streaks of oil, whipped by the wind, coated the cowling. Bennett went white, and into my throat came a choking like that of suffocation. Then the feeling vanished. «Hold your course,» I scratched on the pad which we used for communication. Bennett jerked his thumb down at the broken pack, 2,000 feet below, and made a wry grimace. Although the panic was gone, the leak fascinated us both. My eyes kept straying from the cowling to the oil pressure gauge and back again to see whether the leak was increasing. «Suppose it gets worse,» Bennett yelled into my ear. Knowing that his pilot's instincts had already measured the possibilities, I didn't bother to answer. Either all the oil would trickle away before we managed to regain King's Bay, or it wouldn't; and, whichever happened, the outcome was out of our hands. Presently an angling wind fetched Bennett's attention back to the problem of holding his course, and mine to the drift indicator. And throughout the rest of the flight we paid little more attention to the leak.

Fright and pain are the most transitory of emotions. And, since they are so easily forgotten, I never ceased drilling into the men who served under me the absolute authority of safety rules. «Not just for today or tomorrow; but so long as you are on this expedition,» is the way I'd put it to a new man. Relax once in the polar regions, and the artificial wall of security which you have so painstakingly erected about yourself may give way without warning. That appreciation of discipline I carried with me to Advance Base; and, though at times I had to drive myself to respect it, the necessity was always there.

As I saw it, three risks stood out before all the others. One was fire. Another was getting lost on the Barrier. And the third was being incapacitated, either by injury or illness. Of the three, the last was the most difficult to anticipate and prepare for. Yet, the possibilities were authentic enough, and I had carefully taken them into account. My health was sound. A thoroughgoing medical examination, before I left New Zealand, had confirmed that fact. From disease I had little to fear. Antarctica is a paradise in that respect. It is the germless continent. Vast oceans, frozen most of the time, seal it from the germ-laden civilization to the north; and the refrigerating temperatures of an active Ice Age, which even in the summer — and then only for a few hours — rarely rise from freezing, have reduced the surviving micro-organisms to a largely encysted existence. The only germs are those you bring. In the bitter cold I've seen men shake to the periodic gusts of malarial fever contracted in the tropics; and once, in the winter night, flu laid half of Little America low — the result, according to the doctor, of opening a box of old clothing. I believe that, if any germs did survive at Advance Base, the temperature even in the hut never became warm enough for them to become active.

With the help of a doctor friend, I had equipped the Base with a medical library, containing, among other books, a medical dictionary, Gray's Anatomy, and Strumpell's Practice of Medicine. With these, if I thumbed far enough, I could recognize the symptoms of anything from AAA (a form of hookworm) to caries. A small supply of narcotics and anesthetics (such as novocaine), plus hypodermic needles, was available. These were stored on a shelf in the food tunnel, next to the surgical instruments, of which I had a fairly complete set — complete enough, in all events, for any operation up to a leg amputation. God knows, I had no desire to use any of these instruments, and only the vaguest idea what each one was for; but there they were, shiny and sharp.

But I did not expect anything serious to happen. A man never does. My preparations were of a piece with the methodical, impersonal preparations which I had learned in flying. For example, in taking fuel for the stove, I made a practice of drawing upon the drums at the distant end of the tunnel. Thus, in the event of my ever being crippled to such an extent that I might not be able to move very far or do much carrying, I should be able to struggle along with the nearby drums at the tunnel entrance.

Fire was a serious hazard, and one very much on my mind. I had plenty of liquid fire bombs; but the cold had cracked most of them; and I was afraid that, if the hut ever caught fire, nothing could save it. Stowed at the far end of the fuel tunnel, I had in reserve a complete trail outfit, including tent, sleeping bag, cooker, and primus stove, also a flare and even a kite for signaling. If I ever lost the shack, I could gouge the tunnel a little wider, pitch the tent inside, and get by. But I was careful that this necessity should never arise. Going for a walk, I always shut down the stove before leaving the shack; and at night I put it out before getting into the sleeping bag, knowing the drowsiness that came with books and the temptation to let the fire run until morning.

This filling of cracks and chinks, this constant watchfulness, used to remind me of how my brothers Harry and Tom and I used to play war as children. Although Harry was just old enough to be somewhat contemptuous of games, Tom and I were always building forts. Not just «pretend» forts: flimsy box structures to be brushed away as soon as the game palled, but elaborate earthworks and bastions which transformed the Byrd grounds into an armed city and kept Mother wavering between indignation and terror, since her gardens were ruined, and an innocent step might at any instant bring a blood-chilling imitation of musketry from an unseen ambuscade. No beleaguered city was ever more faithfully defended. Besides the other boys, who liked to shy rocks every now and then to test the garrison, our defenses were menaced by enemies whose numbers, in Tom's phrase, were never less than «annihilatin'.» And, fearing that they might strike when we were supposedly asleep, we'd steal out of the house and man the watch towers, until one of us would softly call that Pop, whom we could see in the library, was putting away his law books, a signal to retreat while the way was still open.

Except that I was now alone, Advance Base was something like this. It, too, was a fort, whose enemies were likewise invisible and often, I suppose, no less imaginary. The daily business of inspecting the defenses, and prying the ice out of the ventilators with a long stick armed with a sharp nail, and storing the scientific records in a safe place in the tunnels, sometimes seemed a ridiculous game. Yet, it was a game I played with deadly seriousness, even in the simple matter of my daily walks. North and south of the shack I marked a path about one hundred yards long, which I called the hurricane deck. Every three paces a two-foot bamboo stick was driven into the crust, and along these poles I ultimately strung a life line. By running my hand over this, blindman fashion, I could feel my way back and forth in the worst weather; and many were the times I did it when the air was so thick with drift that I could not see past the cowling of my windproof, and the line was a thin cord through chaos.

On clear days I could extend my path in any direction. Then I'd tuck a bundle of split bamboo sticks under my arms; and every thirty yards or so, as I went along, I'd prick one of these sticks into the surface. When the bundle was used up, I'd retrace my steps, picking up the sticks on the way, the last stick fetching me hard by my path. The sticks weighed very little, and I could easily carry enough to mark a path a quarter mile long. Although I varied the route often, the change really made no difference. No matter which quarter I faced, an identical sameness met the view. I could have walked 175 miles northeast to the Rockefeller Mountains, or 300 miles south to the Queen Mauds, or 400 miles west to the mountains of South Victoria Land, and not seen anything different.

Yet, I could, with a little imagination, make every walk seem different. One day I would imagine that my path was the Esplanade, on the water side of Beacon Hill in Boston, where, in my mind's eye, I often walked with my wife. I would meet people I knew along the bank, and drink in the perfection of a Boston spring. There was no need for the path's ever becoming a rut. Like a rubber band, it could be stretched to suit my mood; and I could move it forward and backward in time and space, as when, in the midst of reading Yule's Travels of Marco Polo, I divided the path into stages of that miraculous journey, and in six days and eighteen miles wandered from Venice to China, seeing everything that Marco Polo saw. And on occasion the path led back down the eons, while I watched the slow pulsations of the Ice Age, which today grips the once semi-tropical Antarctic Continent even as it once gripped North America.

By speeding up the centuries I could visualize a tidal wave of ice flooding down from the Arctic and crushing everything before it. I could see it surging forward until the advancing edge made a zigzag line from what is now New York to what is now California, blotting out everything but the peaks of the mountains, and forming towering barriers on the margins of the sea. I could see bottomless chasms and enormous ridges thrown up by pressure, and blocks of ice strewn about in endless confusion. And for centuries I could see nothing but the obliterating ice, hear nothing but the wind, and feel nothing but the rigidity of death. But finally, I could see the ice imperceptibly sinking; and the ocean rising as the ice melted; and the land resurrecting under the sun, with the mountains scoured and planed, and the rivers pushed into new courses. And along the edges of the land in Europe and Asia I could see men with primitive tools laying the foundations of history.

Thus it was in the Northern Hemisphere, and so it will some day be in the Antarctic, where the ice still holds mastery over the land. Except, I used to tell myself, that long before the ice rolls back, excursion boats will be steaming down from Sandy Hook and every moraine will have its tourist hotel.

All this was fun. But, if I wasn't careful, it could also be dangerous, as an experience which I went through just about this time will testify. Being in a particularly fine mood, I had decided to take a longer walk than usual. It was drifting a bit, and the Barrier was pretty dark, but that didn't bother me. After parading up and down for half an hour, I turned around to go back. The line of bamboo sticks was nowhere in sight! In my abstraction, I had walked completely past and beyond it; and now, wondering which way to turn, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I had no idea of how far I had walked, nor the direction in which I was heading. On the chance that my footsteps would show, I scanned the Barrier with a flashlight; but my boots had left no marks on the hard sastrugi. It was scary. The first impulse was to run. I quelled that, and soberly took stock of my predicament.

Since it was the one fact I had to work with, I again pulled the flashlight up out of my pants, where I carried it to keep it from freezing, and scratched into the snow with the butt end an arrow in the direction whence I had come. I remembered also, from having glanced at the wind vane as I started, that the wind was in the south. It was then on my left cheek and was still on the same cheek, but that meant little. For the wind might have changed, and subconsciously I might have veered with it. I was lost, and I was sick inside.

In order to keep from wandering still farther from the shack, I made a reference point. I broke off pieces of sastrugi with my heel and heaped them into a little beacon about eighteen inches high at the butt end of the arrow. This took quite a little while. Straightening up and consulting the sky, I discovered two stars were in line with the direction in which I had been walking when I stopped. This was a lucky break, as the sky had been overcast until now and had only cleared in a couple of places. In the navigator's phrase, the stars give me an range and the beacon a departure. So, taking careful steps and with my eyes on the stars, I started forward; after 100 paces I stopped. I swung the flashlight all around and could see nothing but blank Barrier.

Not daring to go farther for fear of losing the snow beacon, I started back, glancing over my shoulder at the two stars to hold my line. At the end of a hundred steps I failed to fetch the beacon. For an instant I was on the edge of panic. Then the flashlight beam picked it up about twenty feet or so on my left hand. That miserable pile of snow was nothing to rejoice over, but at least it kept me from feeling that I was stabbing blindfolded. On the next sortie, I swung the course 30 degrees to the left. And as before, after a hundred steps, I saw nothing.

You're lost now, I told myself. I was appalled. I realized that I should have to lengthen my radius from the beacon; and in lengthening it I might never be able to find the way back to the one certainty. However, there was no alternative unless I preferred to freeze to death, and I could do that just as thoroughly 1,000 yards from the hut as 500. So now I decided to take 30 steps more in the same direction, after scraping a little heap of snow together to mark the 100-pace point. On the 29th step, I picked up the first of the bamboo sticks, not more than 30 feet away. No shipwrecked mariner, sighting a distant sail, could have been more overjoyed.

Chapter Five — May I: The Intimation

The first days of May carried no hint of the calamities that would overtake me at the month's end. On the contrary, they were among the most wonderful days I had ever known. The blizzards departed, the cold moved down from the South Pole, and opposite the moon in a coal-black sky the cast-up light from the departed sun burned like a bonfire. During the first six days the temperature averaged -47.03 degrees; much of the time it was deep in the minus forties and fifties. The winds scarcely blew. And a soundlessness fell over the Barrier. I have never known such utter quiet. Sometimes it lulled and hypnotized, like a waterfall or any other steady, familiar sound. At other times it struck into the consciousness as peremptorily as a sudden noise. It made me think of the fatal emptiness that comes when an airplane engine cuts out abruptly in flight. Up on the Barrier it was taut and immense; and, in spite of myself, I would be straining to listen — for nothing, really, nothing but the sheer excitement of silence. Underground, it became intense and concentrated. In the middle of a task or while reading a book, I was sometimes brought up hard with all my senses alert and suspicious, like a householder who imagines he hears a burglar in the house. Then, the small sounds of the hut — the hiss of the stove, the chatter of the instruments, the overlapping beats of the chronometers — would suddenly leap out against the soundlessness, all seeming self-conscious and hurried. And after a big wind I have been startled out of a sound sleep, without understanding why, until I realized that my subconscious self, which had become attuned to the rattling of the stovepipe and the surflike pounding of the blizzard overhead, had been unsettled by the abrupt calm.

It was a queer business. I felt as though I had been plumped upon another planet or into another geologic horizon of which man had no knowledge or memory. And yet, I thought at the time it was very good for me; I was learning what the philosophers have long been harping on — that a man can live profoundly without masses of things. For all my realism and skepticism there came over me, too powerfully to be denied, that exalted sense of identification — of oneness — with the outer world which is partly mystical but also certainty. I came to understand what Thoreau meant when he said, «My body is all sentient.» There were moments when I felt more alive than at any other time in my life. Freed from materialistic distractions, my senses sharpened in new directions, and the random or commonplace affairs of the sky and the earth and the spirit, which ordinarily I would have ignored if I had noticed them at all, became exciting and portentous. Thus:

May 1

This afternoon, in the lee of the sastrugi formed by the last blow, I discovered some extraordinarily fluffy snow. It was so light that my breath alone was enough to send the crystals scurrying like tumbleweed; so fragile that, when I blew hard, they fell to pieces. I have named it «snow down.» Although most of the crystals were not much bigger around than a quarter, some were as small as marbles and others as big as goose eggs. Apparently they were blown in on this morning's light westerly wind. I scooped up enough to fill a box — no easy task, for even so slight a disturbance as that created by my hands caused the crystals to fly away. The box was half again as big as a shoe box (approximately 600 cubic inches), but the contents, melted in the bucket, yielded barely half a cup of water. .

Later, during my walk, I saw a moon halo, the first since I've been here. I had remarked inwardly that the moon seemed almost unnaturally bright, but thought no more about it until something — perhaps a subtle change in the quality of moonlight — fetched my attention back to the sky. When I glanced up, a haze was spreading over the moon's face; and, as I watched, a system of luminous circles formed themselves gracefully around it. Almost instantly the moon was wholly surrounded by concentric bands of color, and the effect was as if a rainbow had been looped around a huge silver coin. Apple-green was the color of the wide outer band, whose diameter, I estimated, was nineteen times that of the moon itself. The effect lasted only five minutes or so. Then the colors drained from the moon, as they do from a rainbow; and almost simultaneously a dozen massive streamers of crimson-stained aurora, laced together with blackish stripes, seemed to leap straight out from the moon's brow. Then they, too, vanished.

May 3

. . I again saw in the southeast, touching the horizon, a star so bright as to be startling. The first time I saw it several weeks ago I yielded for an instant to the fantastic notion that somebody was trying to signal me; that thought came to me again this afternoon. It's a queer sort of star, which appears and disappears irregularly, like the winking of a light.

The wind vane has been giving quite a bit of trouble lately. I've had to climb the pole once or twice every day to scrape the contact points. The temperature is holding pretty steadily between 50 degrees and 60 degrees below zero; and I must admit that the job is chillier than I bargained for. Freezing my hands, nose, and cheeks, separately or all together every time I mount the pole is an old story by now; today, for a change, I froze my chin. But all this is not as bad as it sounds. .

May 5

This has been a beautiful day. Although the sky was almost cloudless, an impalpable haze hung in the air, doubtless from falling crystals. In midafternoon it disappeared, and the Barrier to the north flooded with a rare pink light, pastel in its delicacy. The horizon line was a long slash of crimson, brighter than blood; and over this welled a straw-yellow ocean whose shores were the boundless blue of the night. I watched the sky a long time, concluding that such beauty was reserved for distant, dangerous places, and that nature has good reason for exacting her own special sacrifices from those determined to witness them. An intimation of my isolation seeped into my mood; this cold but lively afterglow was my compensation for the loss of the sun whose warmth and light were enriching the world beyond the horizon.

That afternoon, for variety's sake, I decided to direct my walk out along the radio antenna, which extended on a line about due east from the shack. The cold was not excessive — somewhere between 50 degrees and 60 degrees below zero — but I was astonished to find how much rime had collected on the wire. It was swollen to many times its natural size; so much so, in fact, that I could just encircle it with my fingers; and the weight of the ice had caused it to sag in great loops between the poles.

A day or so before the sun had departed I had planted a bamboo stick about twenty yards beyond the last antenna pole. This was to serve as a beacon in case I ever happened to miss the pole in fog or storm. On this day I found the marker without difficulty.

I was standing there, thinking about something, when I suddenly remembered that I had left the stove going. So I turned back, making for the last antenna pole, whose shadowy pencil form I could just see. Head screwed down inside the windproof hood out of the wind, I paid no attention to where I was stepping. Then I had a horrible feeling of falling, and at the same time of being hurled sideways. Afterwards I could not remember hearing any sound. When my wits returned, I was sprawled out full length on the snow with one leg dangling over the side of an open crevasse.