I was a longish time wrapping the asbestos around the pipe. My mittened hands were clumsy and unsure. The pipe, I noticed, was choked with ice. The only opening was a little hole not much bigger than my thumb. Before I was done, my eyelashes froze again; this time I nipped two fingers of the left hand. In my hurry to get out of the cold I slid, rather than climbed, down the ladder. When I removed the mask, the skin came off my cheeks, just below the eyes. I was half an hour bringing life back into my fingers; it returned, finally, with hot rushes of excruciating pain.
Weary as I was, I did not dare turn in without trying to get rid of the ice in the stovepipe. To start the thawing, I filled a soup can with meta tablets and played the flame up and down the sides of the pipe, thus supplying additional heat which the asbestos held. After the water started to run, the heat of the stove was enough to keep the flow going. Before it stopped, I collected a pail of water through the hole in the elbow crook. The thermograph trace was crossing 83 degrees below zero, and the water was freezing on the floor as it struck. I hesitated to shut off the stove lest the instruments — not to mention myself — stop from the cold. I lay in the bag, thinking of warm, tropical places; doing this seemed to make me feel warmer. After a little while I got up and turned off the stove.
* * *
Sunday the 22nd I was nearly frantic with anxiety about the tractor men. When I awakened, the head of the sleeping was a mass of ice. I had to heat up the feed line from the tank with burning alcohol before the kerosene would flow into the stove. Three times — in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening — I tried to raise Little America. Although my hands were in wretched shape, I took the receiver completely apart. But this accomplished nothing. The air was dead. If I raised the trapdoor once to look north, I raised it at least a dozen times. And nearly always I was deceived by tremulous, winking lights which always turned out to be stars. The temperature went up into the minus sixties, but a sixteen-mile wind out of the southeast rose with it. Again the kerosene congealed, and I had to heat up the tunnel, at the expense of the shack.
My hopes died that afternoon; and with them the emotional life which had been generated by the knowledge that my friends were on their way. I was all hollow inside. Everything that was reasonable had been tried, and it had all added up to nothing. The fear grew that Poulter's party had met with tragedy; it was terrible to concede that, but I had no reason to think otherwise. Nevertheless, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon I heaved myself to the surface and fired two cans of gasoline as a signal. Fully a dozen matches went out in my hand before I managed to bring a flame near the fluid. The gasoline caught fire with a violent uprush of light; and, after the dimness to which my eyes had become accustomed, I was momentarily blinded.
The smoke towered high in the sky, leaning on the wind. No beacon light answered from the north. Later on, I set off a magnesium flare which I lashed to a bamboo pole and held aloft. It was brighter by far than the other, making a tremendous blue hole in the night. It burned for about ten minutes. Then the darkness rushed in, and I was sensible of the ultimate meaning of loneliness.
July 23
No word. I've been to the surface again and again; there is nothing to see — nothing except those deceiving, dancing stars. I knew it was useless; but, nonetheless, I fired two more charges of gasoline late in the afternoon. This is the way to midwinter-night madness. I mustn't give in too easily to senseless hopes. But in spite of my despair I found my spirits lifted by the broadening twilight at noon and the suspicion of color from the sun climbing toward the horizon; all this presages the coming day, now only a month off.
The temperature this morning was 73.5 degrees below zero by the inside thermograph. For a while I could not lift myself out of the bunk. I may have been close to freezing. My left cheek was frostbitten, and the flaps of the sleeping bag and even my hair were stiff with frost from my breath.
July 24