CHAPTER XXIII
BEYOND ALL FORMER FOOTSTEPS
On November 18 I imagined that we had reached the windless area of the Pole, for the Barrier was a dead, smooth, white plain, weird beyond description, and, having no land in sight, we felt tiny specks in the immensity around us. It seemed as though we were in some other world, and yet the things that concerned us most were such trifles as split lips and big appetites.
Already the daily meals were all too short, and we wondered what it would be like when we were really hungry. However, we were moving on at a rate of about fifteen miles a day, and every night that we camped we felt that another long step towards our desire had been made.
Soon I discovered that I was wrong in thinking that we had reached the windless area, for all the sastrugi began to point due south, but the whole place and conditions were so unlike anything else in the world of our experience, that it was extremely difficult to make correct forecasts as to what we should next encounter.
At one moment I thought of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner": "Alone, alone; all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea"; and then, when the mazy clouds sprung silently up and, not followed by any wind, drifted quickly across our zenith, the only word to describe my feeling is uncanny.
It was as though we were truly at the world's end, and were bursting in on the birthplace of the clouds and the nesting-home of the four winds, and we could not suppress a feeling that we mortals were being watched with a jealous eye by the forces of nature.
Still, in spite of these sensations, which every one who goes out into the intensely lone places of the world must experience, we were more interested in such things as heavy going and soft surfaces than in anything else, for the surface was all-important to us and played the leading part in our day's work.
On November 20 we met with a terribly soft surface—so bad, in fact, that it sounded the death-knell of poor old Chinaman, who was no longer able to keep up with the others; and so we had to shoot him on the following day.
Let me say again that the killing of the ponies was not pleasant work, and that our only satisfaction was in knowing that they were well fed up to the last, and had suffered no pain. When we had to kill a pony we threw up a snow-mound to leeward of the camp, and took the animal behind this out of sight of the others.
Of necessity we had to eat the meat, and as within a very short time after killing the carcase was frozen solid, we always tried to cut the meat into small pieces before this occurred.