• CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX •

WE TURNED BACK.

We were for so long trapped in our tent by storms that without realizing it, we had drifted far west, far into the Crown Prince Gustav Sea. There was open water everywhere, no route to Axel Heiberg Island, where we had buried the nearest of our caches of food. We had no choice but to go south with the ice. Dr. Cook hoped that we might reach Lancaster Sound and catch a Scottish whaling ship at Port Leopold, to which we were closer than we were to Greenland. But by September, we were near the shore of Baffin Bay, without food, fuel or ammunition.

Every so often, I became convinced that one of the others was missing, only to look around to find that there were still three of them, ahead, beside, behind me. At other times, I was certain that if I looked up from the ice, I would find myself alone, having strayed from or been abandoned by the others while I slept.

Strangest of all was the feeling I sometimes had that a fifth man was walking with us. Once, I was sure I saw him, trudging side by side with Dr. Cook. Sometimes he walked with Ahwelah or Etukishuk, head bowed as their heads were, though his hood was smooth and pointed, cowl-like. I wondered if the others saw him, too, but was afraid to ask, afraid to hear that they saw him at my side.

Death it must be, I thought, a hallucination that, to the others, would be a sign that, for me, the end was near. Yet it was them he was walking with, not me. To confirm this, I looked, when I could not see him, to the left and right, and glanced behind me, relieved that as yet he had not chosen me as his companion.

But I awoke once from my walking sleep to see the other three in front of me, and at my side, visible at what might have been a deferential distance, a form at which I dared not look, keeping time with me inaudibly, the only one of us without a sled. As it seemed the others had done, I ignored him, hoping he would vanish. I dozed, but when I awoke again, this unknown fifth presence was still there, having stayed longer with me, it seemed, than he had with any of the others, as if death had appraised the four of us and chosen me, the youngest and the weakest.

When it seemed certain that he would not leave me, I decided to face him down, address him, convince him that my time had not yet come. The instant I raised my head, he raised his, each of us turning to face the other.

What had been a cowl was now a shawl framing the face of a woman who, though younger than me and looking nothing like “Amelia, the wicked one,” I knew to be my mother. Hers was not the face of an expeditionary. It was not ravaged by the elements or by privation. It was pale, almost translucent, and the eyes were blue. It was otherwise featureless.

She smiled. “You have nothing to fear from me,” she said.

I must have dozed again, though I remember only waking up to find that she was gone. I was too exhausted to dwell on this vision. I kept walking, and from then on saw her only in my mind, her face in its all-but-featureless perfection, smiling at me. I remembered her voice, which had seemed so close it might have been my own, assuring me that I had no need to be afraid.

We went westward to Cape Sparbo, where we decided to spend the polar night in a kind of cave. A centuries-old hubblestone house in the recess of a massive rise of rock, it had a sod-and-whalebone roof. Ahwelah said that his ancestors had built it. We found a ship’s hatch cover and a number of planks, and from these we made harpoons with which we hunted. We lined the house with the skins of muskox and polar bears. Luckily, game was easy to come by. Even when one of their number had just been killed in their midst, the rest of the muskoxen had to be shooed away from the den.

Dr. Cook convinced me to join him in the habit that he had first taken up on the Belgica expedition. We lay outside on the ground at night when the wind was calm. I looked up at the sky through the blowhole in my sleeping bag, from which the vapour of my breath spouted at intervals. Once, I saw Etukishuk and Ahwelah peering out at us from the doorway of the house, clearly wondering if we had lost our minds. All I did as I lay there wide awake was watch the stars.

Sometimes, when the moon was full and especially bright, we went out walking with no practical purpose in mind, which also unnerved the Eskimos, who would scrutinize us all over when we returned, assuming that we had about our persons something we had gone out to retrieve.

I soon stopped thinking of the pole, finding it difficult to think of anything. Even in my dreams, my frostbitten fingers burned. In dreams, heaven was warm and balmy and the other place was cold.

The weather became so bad that we could not go outdoors. If it had come during the polar day, such a storm would have caused a white-out. But at night, we could not even see the snow.

Because the house faced south and the wind blew from the east, no snow came inside when the door was open. Able only to hear the frenzied sifting of the snow, I reached out my hand and drew it back, soaking wet, red with cold. At times, it sounded like the whole house was submerged. The world outside existed only as sound.

For weeks, there was little to do but sleep and, for Dr. Cook and me, read and write. The few books we had with us I read over and over. The wind, because it drowned out all other sounds, became a kind of silence, a roaring monotone that made conversation impossible. We communicated with our hands, pointing, making gestures, drawing pictures in the air.

Eventually, I could neither read nor write, nor even find the energy to eat.

One day when I awoke, it seemed as though the wind had begun to drop. I listened closely. The sound was muffled, as though my hands were covering my ears. I watched as Dr. Cook went to the “porch,” which was really just a crawlspace between the ground and an overhang of hubblestone. He pulled away the frame of fur-draped whalebone that served as our door, and I saw that the opening was blocked by hard-packed snow. He punched it and made but a tiny dent. Etukishuk crawled out of his sleeping bag and gave him his harpoon. Dr. Cook pushed it as far into the snow as he could, but he could not make an airhole.

The remote, muffled sound of the wind was the measure of just how deeply buried we were. Too deep to dig out. Dr. Cook was exhausted by his few minutes of exertion. Like me, Ahwelah had remained in his sleeping bag, watching their frenetic struggle with disinterest. There was nothing for us to do, Dr. Cook said, but get back in our bags and conserve our small supply of air by moving no more than we absolutely had to.

A day later, we were still conscious, so I knew that some air was getting in through the snow, though there was no telling how much longer it would last. I wondered if the whalebone roof would hold. I used my watch, which I feared would not resume its ticking each time I rewound it, to keep track of the days.

The sound of the wind grew ever more faint, until I began to wonder if it was doing so because the snow in which we were entombed was getting deeper or because I was becoming less and less able to attend to sound.

The four of us lived in a perpetual state of drowsiness, unable to resist the urge to sleep, to close our eyes, always waking up with a start, wondering if we were still alive or if we now inhabited some other world.

I assumed that the end would come when I could no longer hear the wind, so I strained to hear it, as if the sound was air, a precious trickle of it seeping in—as if as long as we could hear it, we could breathe.

Then, one day when I woke up, the sound was gone. Dr. Cook, who was lying beside me, took my hand. “Don’t be afraid, Devlin,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Don’t be afraid, my son. Go back to sleep.”

It seemed that the moment the wind came back, we all woke up at once. We shouted as though to someone passing overhead who did not know that we were lost—someone who, if we could only make ourselves heard to him, would dig us out.

The sound began to climb the scale again, growing louder every minute, as if the wind, though blowing with the same force as before, had changed direction and the snow was being swept away. We were never so glad to hear the rising of the wind. We greeted the return of sound as we so often had the return of light.

In less than an hour, the snow within which we had lived for weeks was gone.

The surfeit of fresh air was as unbreathable as water for a while. But even as we coughed and gagged, we smiled at each other like boys who, because of their own recklessness, had got into trouble and survived by the sheer luck for which they were famous.

When the wind subsided, we made our way out. Except for what had made its way inside the crawlspace, there was no loose snow, only frozen crust from before the storm. The dogs, the discontinuation of whose barking I had not noted, were gone. Whether they survived, were claimed as wild by someone else, we never did find out.

We somehow managed to walk from Cape Sparbo to Etah, where we arrived in mid-April and found a hunter named Harry Whitney staying in our box house, having been left by Peary, who the previous summer had set out for the pole.

The box house. Etah. The Eskimos in their tupiks on the hill. How could all this still be here? It was like returning in old age to one’s childhood home to find it just the same as when you left.

Dr. Cook chatted with Whitney, who spoke disparagingly of Peary, said that Peary had mistreated him and that he had not got his money’s worth on this hunting trip.

Dr. Cook had kept a record of our journey in a mass of notebooks, which he said contained scientific proof that we had reached the pole. The covers of the notebooks had disintegrated. The ragged and filth-ridden pages were held together with paste and reindeer lashings. There was no question of our waiting with Whitney for Peary and his ship, since Peary would never allow us on board. The nearest shipping port was Upernavik, to which we would have to walk on foot, which would take about four months. Dr. Cook said he was certain that if he travelled this distance on foot with the notebooks, they would fall to pieces.

“I must leave these notebooks with you, Mr. Whitney,” he said. “May I trust you to bring them back safely with you to New York and leave them with my wife? Otherwise, they will soon be of no use to anyone.”

Whitney assured Dr. Cook that he would take good care of the notebooks and would say nothing of them to Peary.

Dr. Cook told me we had to get to Upernavik as quickly as we could, there being no telling when Peary would return from up north or how far he would claim to have gone.

At Upernavik, we parted with Etukishuk and Ahwelah. They were bewildered at the fuss we made over them, hugging them and trying not to cry. When we were through, they smiled sheepishly, then turned and headed back towards Etah.

A Danish ship called the Hans Egede took us on board. It was bound for Copenhagen but detoured to Lerwick, the most northern city of Scotland, the capital of the Shetland Islands and the nearest port with a wireless. The Danes told us that going straight to Copenhagen would give Peary a better chance to stake his claim first. They favoured us over Peary, if only because to them would go the honour of transporting us, not only back to civilization, but to their own country, which would be the first to celebrate us and our accomplishment.

From Lerwick, Dr. Cook telegraphed to the Lecointe Observatory in Brussels the news that we had reached the pole on April 22, 1908. He sent the telegram September 1, 1909. We had spent the past sixteen months making our way back.

I sent a telegram to Kristine: “I am safe and will soon be home.” I wondered if after all this time, my safety still mattered to her. Dr. Cook sent one telegram to his wife and another, two thousand words in length, to the New York Herald. The latter was a sketchy account of our attainment of the pole that the Herald ran on its front page on September 2.

“I felt an intense loneliness, despite the presence of Mr. Stead and the Eskimos,” wrote Dr. Cook. “What a cheerless spot to have aroused the ambition of man for so many ages. An endless field of purple snows. No life. No land. Nothing to relieve the monotony of frost. We were the only pulsating creatures in this world of ice.”

We travelled to Copenhagen.

What an unlikely way this was for a man to make his first journey to the Old World from the New. I had all but walked to Europe from the pole. To Denmark, by whose tribes those of England were defeated. From whose people those of England were descended. Old Denmark. Old Copenhagen. Dr. Cook, the Eskimos and I had journeyed like a tribe of four against the course of time. We had gone back to the Stone Age at Cape Sparbo. Lived in a cave, hunted animals with weapons that we made from bones.

As the Hans Egede steamed into the harbour at Copenhagen, I was reminded again of my first sight of Manhattan. The harbour was a brilliant blue, reflecting the sky that had cleared from a storm the night before. It was cluttered with small boats, many of them flying the Stars and Stripes. A chorus of ship’s whistles and sirens went up. Bands we could not see began to play, each blaring forth a different song, the only one I recognized “See the Conquering Hero Comes.”

Life seemed to have become a series of discoveries set in motion by our having made it to the pole. Cape Sparbo, Upernavik and Copenhagen might all have been unknown to the outside world until we found them, so foreign did everything seem to me. Dr. Cook said it was twenty-seven months since we had set out by train for Gloucester from Manhattan. The number thirty, the idea of a month, meant nothing to me. To measure time in numbers or in distance seemed absurd. I wondered for how long this feeling would last.