“...Have taken away everybody from there. The large party that Dyke took with him all safe back. They left him Latitude eighty-five degrees south. Dyke going on with two.”
Emmie’s teeth, with retracted lips, began to chatter, and she repeated the words in a whisper. “Dyke going on—Dyke going on with two.”
“I did not meet the Follower. As ordered by Dyke, Follower sailed October last for coast-line Latitude seventy-three degrees south, Longitude twenty degrees west of Greenwich. Gladstone instructed to make food depôts from Latitude seventy-four south, Longitude twenty-two west, to as far south as possible and to meet Dyke. Am refitting in haste to start for Follower’s new station.”
Twining had not seen Dyke’s own ship, the Follower. The Follower was gone—somewhere else. Why? She could not understand. And what was the significance of that instruction to make more food depôts, when all depôts were already provided? On the supply of food from the base camp southwards depended all the security of Dyke’s return journey from the Pole. Was there something wrong with the carefully planned arrangements? Surely this must mean that he intended to come from the Pole by a slightly different line? But then—oh, the danger, the horrible danger of altered plans.
Twining had broken up the original base camp; he had taken everybody away. It could have only one meaning: that Dyke was not coming back exactly the same way that he had gone. It could not mean—no, a thousand times no—that he had been so long that they did not expect him back at all? No, they expected him at this other place. They were to meet him there.
She fell into a fit of shivering as the thought came to her that all this had happened months ago. Twining was speaking of events that were over, done with, for ever. Already Dyke’s journey was a thing of the past. At this hour Dyke and those two were safe, quite out of danger, or—
She threw herself face downwards on the bed, writhing and moaning.
Then after a while she set to work with the map again; trying to locate accurately that last map reference and find the exact point of the coast-line mentioned as the place of the new base camp to be established by the Follower. In spite of all her training, she was still apt to get confused in regard to Longitude. Latitude never troubled her.
Slowly the big map turned in her hands as she followed those thin north and south lines and the tiny numbers on the Antarctic circle; and as if with her weak trembling hands she had pushed the world itself round upon its axis, she stared in horror and amazement. That point to which Dyke had ordered the Follower was two thousand miles, a long sea voyage, away from the old place. It was right across the circle, on the opposite side of the map, facing Cape Horn instead of Australasia. The coast-line was in Coats Land. The new food depôts were to be made on the edge of that vast unknown which stretches from there to the Pole without a single mark on the map to indicate men’s guesses at the secrets that it holds.