Then turning to me:
“Come, Nick, break away there, and let’s get these wet clothes off while Johnnie’s looking after something extra for dinner. I told you we’d get here in time.”
XXXVIII.
STORM AND STRESS.
Upon our voyage to the north I shall not dwell. I have neither the time nor the willingness to do so. The memory of those days is weird and depressing. I would cover with all speed the place they occupy in this history.
From Bottle Bay we followed the great salt current eastward, as we did not believe it possible to work northward against it. For two days all went well, and we found happiness in our reunion and homeward progress. Then all the joyless misery of Antarctic lands and seas seemed to gather and shut us in.
For five weeks through this blinding fog, crashing ice, and imminent, sleep-destroying peril we crept, and toiled, and struggled, and battled our way toward open water. For days we did not remove our clothing to rest, but lay down ready for instant action, whether to save or desert the ship.
Depression seized upon us all. Edith Gale was ill much of the time and lost her appreciation of the beauties of nature. Even Gale himself found it hard to create cheer through this grim period. During moments of comparative calm he wandered about with his hands in his pockets, trying to whistle, but it was a dismal tune.
As for myself, I despaired utterly. More than ever I realized what I had done in bringing those who had trusted me into so dire a plight. And for what? To prove a theory that was worth nothing to them or to me, after all was told. To seek out a practically inaccessible land, and what now seemed to me a paltry, indolent race that added nothing to the world’s store of wealth or progress—to pay for it with our lives. I had promised a new world, perhaps wealth beyond our wildest dreams. I had found, instead, a land of dreams only, and of shadows. I had brought us all, at last, face to face with privation, suffering—death. Even should we eventually reach home, it seemed to me that I, still a penniless adventurer, could not presume to claim the hand of Edith Gale. Truly I was in the depths.
Whether we kept with the current, or what part it played in our struggles, we could not tell, but we reached at last the easier seas below Cape Horn, and here we were met by what seemed to us the King of All Storms, determined at last to destroy us for having penetrated the depths of his domain.
We were off the South Shetlands again, somewhere near the spot where, twenty years before, my uncle’s vessel had been last seen battling with a mighty tempest, and was supposed to have gone down. I reflected vaguely that it must have been another just such as this, and that it was a curious fate that had brought me with those I loved to find a grave in the same unfriendly waters.