The Worst Journey in the World Apsley Cherry-Garrard (novel books to read TXT) 📖

coloured. When one of these came up one of us would shout, “Who coloured that,” and another would cry, “Meares,”⁠—then uproar. It was impossible for Ponting to speak. We had a milk punch, when Scott proposed the Eastern Party, and Clissold, the cook, proposed Good Old True Milk. Titus blew away the ball of his gun. “I blew it into the cerulean⁠—how doth Homer have it?⁠—cerulean azure⁠—hence Erebus.” As we turned in he said, “Cherry, are you responsible for your actions?” and when I said Yes, he blew loudly on his whistle, and the last thing I remembered was that he woke up Meares to ask him whether he was fancy free.

It was a magnificent bust.

Five days later and three men, one of whom at any rate is feeling a little frightened, stand panting and sweating out in McMurdo Sound. They have two sledges, one tied behind the other, and these sledges are piled high with sleeping-bags and camping equipment, six weeks’ provisions, and a venesta case full of scientific gear for pickling and preserving. In addition there is a pickaxe, ice-axes, an Alpine rope, a large piece of green Willesden canvas and a bit of board. Scott’s amazed remark when he saw our sledges two hours ago, “Bill, why are you taking all this oil?” pointing to the six cans lashed to the tray on the second sledge, had a bite in it. Our weights for such travelling are enormous⁠—253 lbs. a man.

It is midday but it is pitchy dark, and it is not warm.

As we rested my mind went back to a dusty, dingy office in Victoria Street some fifteen months ago. “I want you to come,” said Wilson to me, and then, “I want to go to Cape Crozier in the winter and work out the embryology of the Emperor penguins, but I’m not saying much about it⁠—it might never come off.” Well! this was better than Victoria Street, where the doctors had nearly refused to let me go because I could only see the people across the road as vague blobs walking. Then Bill went and had a talk with Scott about it, and they said I might come if I was prepared to take the additional risk. At that time I would have taken anything.

After the Depot Journey, at Hut Point, walking over that beastly, slippery, sloping ice-foot which I always imagined would leave me some day in the sea, Bill asked me whether I would go with him⁠—and who else for a third? There can have been little doubt whom we both wanted, and that evening Bowers had been asked. Of course he was mad to come. And here we were. “This winter travel is a new and bold venture,” wrote Scott in the hut that night, “but the right men have gone to attempt it.”

I don’t know. There never could have been any doubt about Bill and Birdie. Probably Lashly would have made the best third, but Bill had a prejudice against seamen for a journey like this⁠—“They don’t take enough care of themselves, and they will not look after their clothes.” But Lashly was wonderful⁠—if Scott had only taken a four-man party and Lashly to the Pole!

What is this venture? Why is the embryo of the Emperor penguin so important to Science? And why should three sane and commonsense explorers be sledging away on a winter’s night to a Cape which has only been visited before in daylight, and then with very great difficulty?

I have explained more fully in the Introduction to this book150 the knowledge the world possessed at this time of the Emperor penguin, mainly due to Wilson. But it is because the Emperor is probably the most primitive bird in existence that the working out of his embryology is so important. The embryo shows remains of the development of an animal in former ages and former states; it recapitulates its former lives. The embryo of an Emperor may prove the missing link between birds and the reptiles from which birds have sprung.

Only one rookery of Emperor penguins had been found at this date, and this was on the sea-ice inside a little bay of the Barrier edge at Cape Crozier, which was guarded by miles of some of the biggest pressure in the Antarctic. Chicks had been found in September, and Wilson reckoned that the eggs must be laid in the beginning of July. And so we started just after midwinter on the weirdest bird’s-nesting expedition that has ever been or ever will be.

Emperors

But the sweat was freezing in our clothing and we moved on. All we could see was a black patch away to our left which was Turk’s Head: when this disappeared we knew that we had passed Glacier Tongue which, unseen by us, eclipsed the rocks behind. And then we camped for lunch.

That first camp only lives in my memory because it began our education of camp work in the dark. Had we now struck the blighting temperature which we were to meet.⁠ ⁠…

There was just enough wind to make us want to hurry: down harness, each man to a strap on the sledge⁠—quick with the floor-cloth⁠—the bags to hold it down⁠—now a good spread with the bamboos and the tent inner lining⁠—hold them, Cherry, and over with the outer covering⁠—snow on to the skirting and inside with the cook with his candle and a box of matches.⁠ ⁠…

That is how we tied it: that is the way we were accustomed to do it, day after day and night after night when the sun was still high or at any rate only setting, sledging on the Barrier in spring and summer and autumn; pulling our hands from our mitts when necessary⁠—plenty of time to warm up afterwards; in the days when we took pride in getting our tea boiling within twenty minutes of throwing off our harness: when the man who wanted to work in