Free Antarctica by Gabrielle Walker Page B

doing. If the storm is too strong they start to fly, and can get broken bones.
    â€˜As I was down there, the wind came back, and it was a total whiteout, blowing a hundred knots. I couldn’t really walk but I could crawl and I knew the sub-colonies of those penguins pretty well. We had a little observation hide, about the size of a telephone booth, so I found my way to that on my hands and knees. It had a sleeping bag and C rations—the food that army guys eat. I wouldn’t touch the canned stuff—it’s repulsive—but I ate all the cake. I was in there for about thirty-six hours. Then the whiteout stopped, though the wind was still blowing a hundred knots and I crawled back to the main hut about a kilometre away and . . . lived happily ever after.’
    â€˜Were you scared?’
    â€˜No, just bored.’
    â€˜What about the three other people in the hut? Were they worried about you?’
    â€˜Yep.’
    â€˜But they didn’t come to find you?’
    â€˜They couldn’t see.’
    I digested this for a moment. You are trapped by fierce winds in a box the size of a telephone booth for a day and a half, eating nothing but cake, while your friends can’t come and find out if you are alive or dead because
they can’t see.
The air is so thick with snow and wind that there is nothing anyone can do but wait. This is truly not a continent for the impatient.
    Three members of Scott’s expedition to the Pole had their own horrifying experience of the winds of Cape Crozier, but in their case they went in the winter. I asked David if he knew the story.
    â€˜Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I read it while I was at Crozier. Those guys were out of their minds.’
    He stopped, as if considering fairness, then added: ‘They had no idea what they were getting themselves into. McMurdo is completely different because of the way the wind works around here. When we radioed in, people would never believe us that it was blowing a hundred and forty knots at Crozier. In McMurdo it was a nice day. Those guys had no idea what they would find. If Birdie Bowers hadn’t been there to build that rock igloo, they would all have died.’
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    20 July 1911, Cape Crozier
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I do not know what time it was when I woke up. It was calm, with that absolute silence which can be so soothing or so terrible as circumstances dictate. Then there came a sob of wind, and all was still again. Ten minutes and it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of hysterics. The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar of it all cannot be imagined.
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    This must have seemed like the end. Apsley Cherry-Garrard and his companions, Bill Wilson and Birdie Bowers, had suffered almost unimaginably in the three weeks it had taken them to travel to Cape Crozier. They had nearly died so many times, nobody was bothering to keep score. And just as they had finally reached their goal, built themselves a secure stone igloo, and settled down for an attempt at rest, they had been hit by one of Crozier’s now legendary storms.
    There was worse to come. The next thing Cherry-Garrard heard was a cry from Bowers. ‘The tent has gone!’ The three men had pitched their tent in the lee of the igloo, but the furious winds had ripped it from its moorings. They were more than 100 km from the hut that was currently sheltering Scott and the rest of the expedition, back at Cape Evans. Without their tent, in pitch darkness and the coldest temperatures any human had yet experienced, they now had no hope of returning.
    The three men had come south as part of Scott’s team for his forthcoming attempt on the South Pole. During the winter of preparations, Wilson, a fervent naturalist, asked Scott’s permission to journey out to Cape Crozier and study the emperor penguins there. The reasoning seemed sound. Wilson believed—wrongly as it turned out—that emperors were among the