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The men used a compass to maintain a southward trajectory. Their breath smoked and their bodies sweated in the arid cold. After slogging for seven hours, Worsley gave the order to stop for the day. They had covered nearly eight nautical miles. In order to reach the ninety-seven-mile mark on January 9th, the men would need to average between ten and twelve nautical miles per day.
But it was a promising start. As the men ate, they talked about the relatively warm weather—the temperature had reached fourteen degrees. Following supper, the men dipped their toothbrushes in the snow and cleaned their teeth, which Worsley believed was essential to maintaining a sense of humanity. Then, jostling for space, they spread out their sleeping bags. In spite of his aching muscles and the dropping temperature—the sun was now hugging the horizon—he went for an evening walk. He decided to make this a daily ritual, like a mystic who pursues enlightenment through self-abnegation.
The harsh reality of Antarctica had seemed only to deepen his entrancement with it. Outside, he often picked up objects—a fragment of a penguin skull, a small rock—and put them in a pocket, despite the extra weight.
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Within eight days, they had covered more than seventy-five nautical miles. With nothing to stare at but ice, Worsley was becoming a connoisseur of its varieties.
It could be squeaky or powdery or crusty. The wind often sculpted it into waves, known as sastrugi, which rose as high as four feet and sometimes extended, in parallel rows, to the horizon. Because it was more taxing to be up front, breaking track, the men took hourly turns in the lead. They were burning between six thousand and eight thousand calories a day, and periodically paused to consume energy drinks and snack on such fatty foods as salami, nuts, and chocolate; even so, they began to lose weight.
Worsley, knowing that it was imperative to maintain positive thoughts, recalled family holidays and planting vegetables in the garden. He grew accustomed to the paradox of being reduced to irrelevance in the alien landscape while at the same time feeling acutely aware of oneself: every aching muscle, every joint, every breath, every heartbeat.
One day, Adams spotted in the distance something poking from the ice and gleaming in the blinding sun. When they reached it, they realized that it was a meteorological instrument recording such data as temperature and wind speed. A sign indicated that the device belonged to the University of Wisconsin. The men quickly moved on, but for hours Worsley fumed, resenting the intrusion, and he was relieved when he finally glanced back and the instrument had disappeared from view.
T he storm came upon the men suddenly. The temperature was minus twenty-two degrees, and frigid winds whipped up ice that stung the eyes like bits of glass. The men bent forward, but the wind overwhelmed them, and Worsley concluded that they needed to stop for the day. Moments after they unpacked the tent, the wind nearly hurled it into the white oblivion. They fastened its corners with ice screws and buried the flaps under the snow and used their sleds as barricades.
Worsley called the A.
The tempest intensified, the wind hissing at fifty miles per hour. Ice drifted over the tent. When they awoke the next day, the storm was even angrier. The tent was virtually submerged under ice, and inside the air reeked of unwashed bodies and dirty socks and stove fuel. Worsley—whom Gow and Adams now called the General—tried to foster a lighthearted atmosphere.
The men passed the time chatting and reading and playing poker. They had previously named themselves the founding members of the Antarctic Malt Whiskey Appreciation Society; per its bylaws, every Thursday evening the explorers would drink from a flask of whiskey, which Gow had brought with him, and the next morning they would sleep in an extra two hours. Even though it was a Saturday, the men passed around the flask. The liquor warmed them. Worsley, who, in the Army, had honed a gallows humor, joked about their circumstances: if they could make fun of dying, they still had some life in them.
Will is picking his toes and Henry Adams is writing in his diary. Until then, farewell from the Ross Ice Shelf. After two more days, the storm relented. The men unzipped the tent and began hacking through a wall of ice about five feet tall and four feet thick.
They dug for more than an hour, until they emerged into the blinding light, like escaped prisoners. They packed and pressed on, trying to make up time. By the fourth week of their journey, in mid-December, they had made it across the Ross Ice Shelf, to the base of the mountain range. The terrain began to rise, and the surface was scarred with deep fissures, a product of the eternal churning of ice.
The following day, despite the danger, Worsley went on his walkabout, and collected several rock specimens. Hoping to do reconnaissance for the upcoming route, he continued walking for hours, at one point climbing onto a ledge and looking south. Before him, shrouded in mist, rose the Beardmore Glacier. The men gathered their belongings and trekked to the mouth of the glacier.
Others were only a few feet deep, but that was enough for someone to break an ankle or twist a knee. If one of the men were injured, there would be no place for miles for a rescue plane to land. Worsley decided that they could no longer proceed on skis, and so they attached crampons to their boots and put on climbing harnesses, double-checking the screws, slings, and carabiners.
Then the men roped themselves together: Worsley in front, followed by Gow and Adams. As they inched up the glacier, their sleds felt like ship anchors being dragged across an ocean floor. The days were slow and draining.
Before each step, Worsley, who was responsible for finding a path, poked his pole in front of him, to see if the ice was solid. Whenever a hole opened, he leaned over and glimpsed the underworld—a chute swirling into darkness. Or it can take you into the throat of a crevasse in a split second. His leg plunged into the shaft. Adams raced over and yanked him out. Soon, the men encountered something startling beneath their feet: a sheet of blue ice. The result of snow accumulating on a glacier and being compressed over thousands of years, this kind of ice is so dense—so devoid of air bubbles—that it absorbs long-wavelength light, which is why it appears mesmerizingly blue.
Yet, as the men quickly discovered, its beauty is deceptive. Before long, the aluminum spikes of the crampons began to bend and break. The men slipped again and again, their bodies smacking against the ice, their sleds pulling them downhill.
Adams quietly relented. Sometimes they were right, sometimes they were wrong.
But he would make those decisions, having listened and consulted with us, so it made it very easy to follow him. On December 24th, after nine days of climbing, they reached the top of the glacier. On Christmas morning, instead of their usual breakfast of freeze-dried porridge, the team prepared a special meal of sausages, bacon, and beans. Worsley called home and spoke to Joanna and Alicia, wishing them a merry Christmas.
Worsley then called his own father, hoping to share the news that he had reached the top of the glacier. T he following morning, the forty-third day of the expedition, Worsley, Adams, and Gow began the next stage of their journey.
But, as they ascended the Titan Dome, they confronted the most brutal conditions yet: hurricane-force gales, and a wind-chill temperature of minus sixty degrees. Worsley kept a vigilant eye on his companions. They were almost unrecognizable from the young professionals who had set out from London. Their skin clung to their skulls and their eyes were sunken; they had wild beards and untamed hair that gleamed with ice. Because of the whiteouts, Adams was suffering from motion sickness. But by December 31st it was Worsley who was suffering and struggling to keep pace.
His body could not maintain sufficient body fat.