Into White Silence Read online

  Naturally, the arrival of sixty sled dogs is difficult news to contain and for all Mr Rourke’s efforts in keeping our expedition secret, I am convinced that it is now only a matter of time before the newspapers twig to the real nature of what is being planned here.

  Also aboard the Prometheus were the three remaining members of our party – the two Russian dog-handlers, Ivan Gregorivich and Piotre Dimitri, who will be teaching us how to handle the animals and the sleds, and also ski-instructor Per Petersen, a Norwegian expert in cross-country skiing and survival in the cold.

  With that, the core of our expeditionary party is finalised. Recruiting of the ship’s sailing crew, which Mr Rourke left in the charge of Dick Ryan, is also close to complete, with ten men now living aboard and preparing the Raven to put to sea in just a few short weeks. Tomorrow we begin the slow process of transferring cargo from the warehouse and the crucially important loading. Captain McLaren and Dick Ryan will be responsible for ensuring the safe stowage of everything in its place aboard, and Captain Smythe-Davis and myself will handle the final inventory of equipment as it leaves the warehouse.

  19th November, 1921

  This evening, Mr Rourke gathered the expedition company for the first time and I must say that it seems a very amenable group of men in whose company I shall shortly be embarking. While I have met most of them individually at one point or another during the course of the last couple of months, to see everyone gathered in the one place fills me with confidence as to the eventual success of our undertaking.

  It is to the men’s great credit, and also to that of Captain Smythe-Davis, that we were able to assemble at the warehouse without attracting any undue attention. Indeed, Mr Rourke’s first order of business was to compliment each and every one of the party on the degree to which they have embraced and accepted the need for secrecy. In a city as small as Hobart, this is no mean achievement. To the best of my knowledge, even news of the dogs hasn’t escaped to reach the ears of the local press. How Mr Rourke has achieved this feat I have no idea, but I am assuming that money has changed hands somewhere along the way. George hinted as much to me when I asked him, but wouldn’t give me any more than the broadest indication that this might be the case.

  This morning, I took the opportunity to travel back out to the Raven to see how the loading process was proceeding. I still find her to be a singularly ugly vessel, though now, with a few more men aboard, she is looking more homely than on my last visit. The crew have been busy and the sails are now all bent onto the yards. A steam derrick has been installed on the main deck to enable loading through the main hatchway and when I arrived the Moreton brothers were busily building and installing kennels along the port side of the funnel house.

  Even though less than half of our equipment is aboard, she is already sitting noticeably lower in the water and I do not like to think how much (or little!) freeboard she will have by the time we are fully ready to depart.

  * * *

  FIVE

  MY FIRST EVENING AT CASEY STATION. STEALING FROM LIBRARIES. DELAYS AND MORE DELAYS. AN OUTBURST. A FIGHT. A CRITICAL ACCIDENT.

  It’s a strange sensation, to walk as an outsider into a place where other people live, work and play. My first evening at Casey was such an occasion.

  Modern Antarctic life, while luxurious compared to a century earlier, is still no picnic. For all its pristine beauty, the east coast of Antarctica remains a harsh, dangerous and sometimes lethal place. When the weather changes there, it does so with breathtaking speed and ferocity. In a matter of minutes, from out of a clear sky, a blizzard can come screaming down from the moraine. Two-storey sheds can be buried in hours and the wind is strong enough to drive snow under the heavy rubber seals which surround the doors to every building. Winterers have become lost in blizzards and died within metres of shelter, exhausted and frozen despite layers and layers of fur and thermal wear.

  To live in such a place – to spend the dark months between May and October living so closely in the company of a small handful of others, to rely on that group for companionship, for support, and indeed for your very safety – is to truly understand what community is all about.

  And to walk through the door and into such a community as an outsider, as a physical reminder of that other, distant, almost imaginary world where water doesn’t require enormous amounts of energy to be kept as a liquid and where bills and tax returns fall due with grinding regularity, is an odd experience indeed.

  Even more so when you’re a writer. It’s a strange thing that I’ve noticed across the years. When people discover what you do for a living – make up stories – they tend to regard you with an odd mix of curiosity and suspicion.

  And not without good reason; it’s an absurd profession, and most of us who practise it are like seagulls. We scavenge stories and characters from every available opportunity. We wring the pathos and irony and humanity from every situation in which we find ourselves. Everything is an experience and every experience a story. Writers eavesdrop shamelessly – on trains and in cafes, in checkout queues and at the beach – we can’t help it. We’re addicted to other people’s lives and to what we might do with them and I suspect that, upon meeting a writer, most people understand this at some subconscious level.

  In short, people don’t always relax around writers. And my first evening at Casey was a classic example.

  The main accommodation unit at Casey, the Red Shed as it’s known, is a vast block of a building which sits high on the hill looking out across Newcombe Bay towards the Clarke Peninsula. On a clear summer evening, with the sun low to the horizon, the entire landscape is bathed in shimmering pink light and the view through the shed’s enormous, inch-thick bay windows is close to ethereal.

  By the time we’d made our way up from the wharf, been given a tour of the station and a safety briefing, located our various accommodations and unpacked our gear, the afternoon’s stormy weather had blown itself out and the small handful of us who’d come ashore from the Aurora were free to get on with our visit.

  Some, those who’d come to complete a specific task, got straight to work – heading out to count snow petrel nests on nearby Reeve’s Hill, for example, or photographing the lichens which grow on the rocky outcrops a few hundred metres uphill of the station limits. I found myself at something of a loose end. For a while, I engaged in strained conversation with a few of the current Casey residents, but perhaps owing to my status as an outsider, perhaps as a writer, they demonstrated an unusual reserve around me and in the end I headed upstairs to the station library.

  Another of the occupational hazards of writing, I guess, is a preoccupation with books. Yours, other people’s, new ones, old ones. And libraries – I find it hard to walk past a library, even when visiting a town or suburb, without going in and having a look around, a quick meander between the shelves, without trailing my fingers across at least a couple of spines, or opening and perusing the first lines of some obscure, out-of-print novel.

  That evening at Casey, having exhausted the conversational possibilities at the bar and feeling distinctly out of my element, I naturally gravitated towards the place where I knew I’d find some form of security – the station library.

  One expeditioner, who would prefer not to be named, described life on-station to me as being ‘a weird combination of bloody hard work, bloody boredom, and pure bloody terror …’ Perhaps as a result of the second of these factors, Casey, like all of Australia’s Antarctic bases, boasts an extensive library with a truly eclectic collection of books.

  The area around Newcombe Bay has been occupied by Australians since the mid 1960s and the Americans before that and, over the years, generations of expeditioners have left behind them reading material ranging from first editions of the Biggles books, by Captain W.E. Johns through to the latest Tom Clancy thrillers. Jane Austen and Stephen King, W. Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling – each and every one can be found on the shelves of the Casey library by a reader with enough time and curiosity
.

  The library has also managed, naturally, to accumulate perhaps the most extensive collection of writing on and about Antarctica that I’ve ever come across. Fiction and non-fiction books documenting the early days of exploration there, the tragedy of Robert Falcon Scott, the incredible survival feats of Shackleton and Mawson and the more contemporary but no less incredible accounts of men and women who’ve risked their lives for a winter spent at the bottom of the earth.

  What the library lacks, however, is a librarian.

  The contents of the shelves is, at best, roughly alphabetical, by author’s surname. Fiction and non-fiction are loosely divided. There is a catalogue of sorts, but a modern Antarctic station is a busy place and the people who live there are generally more concerned with their day-to-day survival than with ensuring that the Dewey decimal system is followed, or that books are all accessioned correctly prior to shelving. In short, the Casey library is either a bibliophile’s worst nightmare or a paradise waiting to be explored, depending on your perspective.

  I fall into the latter category and that first evening, to my delight, I had the library all to myself and it was a joy to become lost amid the odd collection of books from every era and genre. For some time I perused a beautifully illustrated guide to the seabirds of the southern sub-polar islands. I read the first two chapters of the manuscript of an awful novel entitled ‘A Dream of Snow’, which had been written during the winter of 1978 by an expeditioner with the unlikely name of Doctor J.H. Hatt, and which commenced with the following line:

  It was not the dream of the Snow that woke Amery from his sleep, nor the howl of the blizzard outside, nor the banging of the loose board on the outside porch, nor the snow-drenched howling of the dogs chained in the snow outside, but something completely different.

  Aside from the good doctor’s proclivity for the word ‘outside’, it seemed inevitable by the end of the second chapter that ‘A Dream of Snow’ was going to end with some variation of ‘… and then I woke up, and it was all a dream!’ After skipping ahead to the final page to confirm that this was indeed the case (it was), I knelt to replace it upon the bottom shelf where I had found it. In the process of kneeling, I was suddenly seized by a fierce cramp in my left calf – a residual effect of a sporting injury sustained during my younger days and which still afflicts me occasionally – and I tumbled to the floor with a complete lack of dignity.

  Years of experience have taught me that the best way to deal with one of these cramps is to lie on the ground on my back and stretch the offending limb upwards against a wall, as close to vertical as possible. Hoping that nobody would enter the library and discover me in such an absurd position, I was lying with my left leg wedged under the sill of one of the library windows and my head upon the carpet-tiles when I noticed a small red book which had slipped down the back of the shelves and now lay hidden in deep shadow on the floor below the lowermost shelf.

  Once my cramp had eased, I rolled over, reached under and retrieved it. It had clearly lain undisturbed for quite some time; its cover was grimy with dust and the red leather was stained and watermarked in a number of places. There was no title, no author either, and I was surprised to find the pages filled not with typeface, but elegant handwriting.

  Curious, I turned back to the beginning and read the inscription inside the front cover: ‘To Will. For safe travels, with love, Elsie.’ And below that, the date: ‘Weatherly, 1921’.

  Of course, at that point I had no intention of stealing the journal. I had no understanding of the power that little red book would come to have over me, or the degree to which it would dominate my thoughts and dreams. Little did I know that within just two hours, the journal would have turned me into a thief and a liar and set me down the path of attempting that most dangerous of writing sins – plagiarism.

  If I had realised in that moment the enormity of the impact of that book in my hand, I wonder if I’d have simply shoved it back into its hiding place.

  Perhaps.

  But probably not.

  * * *

  From the Journal of Lieutenant William Downes

  28th November, 1921

  Hobart, Tasmania

  Some bad business today has left everyone feeling quite unhappy and several of the men apprehensive as to the wisdom of continuing with the expedition.

  Mr Rourke was in a foul mood this morning, having learnt late last night of further problems with the meteorological equipment. According to Alex, some damage to several of the more sensitive pieces of apparatus, including a wind gauge and one of the specially calibrated thermometers, was sustained in the transfer out to the ship. As a result it will be several weeks before replacements can be obtained from Sydney and, on top of the other minor delays we’ve been having, Mr Rourke was not at all pleased to have to push back our departure date. Given, however, the savagery and changeable nature of the weather in the polar regions, and the need for the most accurate forecasts possible in timing our push to the pole, the equipment was deemed essential to the success of our expedition. The breakages, however, turned out to be perhaps the least of the problems that would arise today.

  With Mr Rourke in perhaps the worst mood that I have ever seen him, George and I kept our heads down and proceeded with the tiresome task of planning the ration packs and supply caches for the sledding journey. This is a dull but important job and we had things well in hand when, at about 1030, Mr Rourke rose abruptly from his desk and snapped at us, ‘Can’t the two of you make a bit less bloody noise?’

  Now, neither George nor myself is particularly inclined to accept that sort of address, but given the circumstances of the morning, it seemed more politic to simply murmur some sort of apology and relocate to other duties. George had paperwork to complete and I excused myself to the warehouse to check on the progress of cargo transfer.

  Unfortunately, arriving at the storehouse, I was met at the door by Lawrence, the older of the two Moreton brothers, who greeted me peremptorily.

  ‘I was just comin’ to get you. We got a problem.’

  He and his brother were in the process of checking over the timbers for the hut, prior to their transfer out to the Raven. The hut, which is similar to the one used by Mawson at Commonwealth Bay – square with a steeply raked pyramidal roof to minimise snow build up – had its main timbers pre-cut in Melbourne and was shipped down on the Prometheus.

  Lawrence led me to the back of the warehouse where his brother, Will, was standing beside a large, square beam, each side about ten or eleven inches wide and the whole thing possibly thirty feet in length.

  ‘Look.’ Lawrence pointed and I knelt to examine the timber.

  The problem was immediately apparent. Either during its voyage from Melbourne or while waiting in the warehouse, the beam had become significantly warped, twisting about a third of the way along its length and splitting open in the process. A seven-or eight-foot crack gaped along the middle of one face, the hard wood split almost to the very core of the beam. It was obvious there would be no way of repairing it and the whole beam would need to be replaced.

  ‘What is it for?’ I asked the rat-faced Lawrence, who offered in reply an indifferent shrug.

  ‘Main support joist for the roof.’

  ‘Can we build the hut without it?’ I enquired, which drew from Moreton a stare that was almost insolently patronising.

  ‘Only if we want the whole thing to fall down around us in the first blizzard.’

  As standing and staring at the damaged timber wasn’t going to solve anything, I dispatched Will to continue inventorying and assessing the rest of the hut timbers while Lawrence accompanied me back to Elizabeth Street to explain the situation to Mr Rourke.

  Now, I will confess to not really liking Lawrence Moreton. In the dealings that I have had with him these last few weeks, he has exuded an air of deviousness and cunning that I find difficult to reconcile with the need for dedication to the expedition. There is something in his manner I find disconcerting and which
reminds me of a couple of the more troublesome characters in our company back in France. He never allows his brother to say more than a couple of words before taking over the conversation and he always performs only those tasks that have been specifically allocated to him, and then only to the minimum required degree. Unlike most of the other men, he has never volunteered either himself or his brother to assist with any other aspects of the voyage preparation, or bothered to attend the rare social gatherings that Mr Rourke occasionally permits.

  That said, they both appear to be excellent at what they do. Their carpentry skills are clearly well-honed and practised and even the fact that they tend to keep very much to themselves may turn out to be a blessing, once we’re all trapped in the confines of the ship.

  On our way to the office, as much to make conversation as for any other reason, I enquired about his parents, asking if his father was also a carpenter. Lawrence’s reply was both unexpected and startling.

  ‘Nah. He’s a good-for-nothin’ bugger, my old man. About the only thing he’s any good at is fighting.’

  From his closed stance and the slight increase he added to the pace, it was obvious he didn’t wish to carry the discussion any further and so I made no further attempt to converse.

  At the suite, it became quickly apparent that Mr Rourke’s mood had not improved in the interval since my departure. As we entered, he glanced sharply up from his work.

  ‘The hell is he doing here?’ he snapped, nodding at Lawrence.

  ‘There’s a problem with one of the roof joists. That’s why I’ve brought him,’ I replied, at which, before Moreton or I could elaborate further, Mr Rourke startled us by slamming his pen down hard on the desktop, sending a spray of black ink across the papers on which he’d been working, and swearing loudly – a curse I have no desire to repeat within these pages. Leaping to his feet, he began to berate poor Lawrence in no uncertain terms, calling him a ‘fool’ and an ‘imbecile’ and all manner of other insults.