Beyond the Great South Wall: The Secret of the Antarctic

by Frank Savile

It was quite certain that the ladies could not face fifteen or twenty days in an open boat. If they could not go, Garlicke and Denvarre wouldn’t. Gerry was in no fit condition to face hardships after his knocking about, no more was I. The man to take charge then was Waller or Janson.

Waller we felt was the man for the job, but on the other hand we had also a strong feeling that bereft of his society and counsel we should be like children without their nurse. We decided to put the case before him, leaving the decision to his own good sense and knowledge.

I did not think the men would refuse a chance to go if it was offered them. I felt confident that a sufficiency of them would prefer a cruise on open water, even in an open boat, to sitting longshore and hauling at hawsers for the entirely unprofessional object (from a seaman’s point of view) of bracing up what had become a land domicile. This especially would be so if the former procedure brought about a hope of eventually coming to a land of civilization, hard food, and good liquor—we had put them on an allowance of both—and away from horrifying fears of unknown and uncouth dragons. For Mr. Parsons had not been idle in his conversational moments, and the details of our adventure in the cañon had been painted by him with an unsparing wealth of imaginative incident.

Waller picked his men, reporting to me that any one of the ship’s company would have jumped at the chance to go. This matter being settled, it remained to arrange the practicalities of the launch. Not only had we to drop our boat handsomely down a hundred feet of sheer cliff, but we had first to transport her bodily up the steep slopes of the basin before us. Looking at the job made it seem no more likeable; but the next morning we rose betimes and flung ourselves upon the business.

First of all we cut down the yacht’s topmasts and sawed them into rollers. We did this with a light heart, well knowing that we could never want to test our ship’s sailing qualities again. Then with levers we inserted them under the cutter’s keel. This done we began to roll her proudly across the smooth rock floor—a transit we performed with consummate ease—and pointed her bows up the steep slope cliffward.

Over the unavailing wretchedness of the next two days I must draw a veil. Shortly, we gave the business a very ample trial, and were thoroughly beaten at the start. Tug as we would the task was entirely beyond us—vanquished us hip and thigh. The angle, which at first was moderate enough, increased to about forty-five degrees. The weight was about ten tons. If you would like to try the experiment we did, and test our physical inferiority, take to yourself a dozen other fools and try to drag a wheelless railway truck up Arthur’s Seat, for instance, on rollers. Then let me have a written statement of your experiences. If it doesn’t give points to many of the foremost writers of the impressionist school I shall be strenuously surprised.

By the evening of the second day we had progressed about two hundred and fifty yards, and the worst was still to come. We had expended enough perspiration to float the boat, and had just paused to shove in the wedges behind the rollers while we rested. We did this carelessly. They slithered on the smooth stone, the rollers revolved smartly, and before we could arrest her progress with levers, the wretched cutter was half-way back to the bottom again, bumping and straining her timbers viciously.

Gerry sat down and voiced the sentiments of the whole company at this point. He explained that to him it was obvious that no less period of time than a century would suffice to see our labor approach completion. As the span of human life was now ordered, we were unlikely, any of us, to attain to this age. Why then waste time that might just as profitably be spent in twiddling our thumbs? He added comprehensive anathemas on any who should attempt to combat this opinion, and then relapsed into surly silence, while the panting crew waited apathetically for further developments.

Then Waller suggested that our present attempt being a failure, the plan for reducing the launch to sections should be tried. This we had resolved to leave as a last resource, from haunting fears that once dismembered, we might well fail to put her together again, the book of explanations supplied by her makers having been lost. I lifted my head wearily to meet his proposal, when my words were checked in the very utterance.

A dull boom, sullen and muffled at first, but swelling with grating intensity to a thunderous crash, rolled and re-echoed down and around the gray rock basin that surrounded us. The cutter swayed and danced, hammering and splintering the rollers under her. We ourselves fell in unstudied helplessness on the hard stone slabs. The earth quivered in our sight as the heat haze quivers in the June sunlight. A current of hot air swept over us, seeming to swamp us in murkiness. The little loose pebbles sang and clattered as they rolled down the slope, running together and leaping upon one another in little swirls and piles. A giant crag fell from the glacier foot. The roar of it slammed across the hollow ponderously, the splinters scattering on the hard flooring of the lake bed, shooting out and across the smooth granite in a thousand chips of glancing, flashing crystal. The sun glistened upon them gloriously in many-hued, rainbow rays. Behind us a great pinnacle of basalt was flung from the peak, falling on the glacier with the crash of an artillery salute. A moan trembled out from the vitals of the riven glacier, as if from a prisoned soul within. The impulse of the crushed ice billowed out a dark spate of water at its foot.