“Look at the bloody pressure!” Will exclaimed as they neared the Shackleton Coast, not far from the Beardmore Glacier.
“What’s wrong?” Al stared at the gauges. “What’s wrong with the pressure?”
“Sorry — I meant the pressure ice. I’ve never seen such ridges. They look like mountain ranges.” He lifted the videotape camera to his eye and shot thirty seconds’ worth.
Wherever two islands were in contact, their edges were crumpled into steep ridges for hundreds of metres on either side, with crevasse fields running at right angles to them. In one place Will saw that part of a ridge had disappeared as the submerged sides of two islands had crushed each other to bits, creating a chasm a kilometre long whose bottom was lost in darkness.
A few minutes later they sighted what seemed to be a real island rising from the Shelf just a few kilometres Grid South of the Beardmore’s mouth. It glittered, white and blue, presenting an almost sheer face to the sun.
“What’s that?” Al asked. “There’s no island here.”
“Not sure,” Will said. “Must be two or three hundred metres high.”
“Want to get a closer look?”
“Yes, please.”
The Otter banked to the left and descended a thousand metres as it neared the island. They were still several kilometres away from it when they realised it was growing, rising higher into the air every moment while avalanches of shattered ice fell in lovely plumes like waterfalls down the island’s vertical face. The rumble of the avalanches could be heard over the engines as the Otter levelled off near the crest of the island and flew parallel to the enormous cliff. Drifting snow and falling ice masked much of the cliff face, but it did not look like the side of a tabular berg, and the island itself was too narrow to be one.
“It’s a grounded island, being pushed right over!” Will shouted.
“What?”
“Pull away to the right, fast!”
Even as the Otter banked, the island disintegrated. The cliff fractured and toppled in hundreds of places almost simultaneously, falling in a blinding white cloud that spread out over the Shelf at well over a hundred k.p.h. In less than three minutes the island was only a mass of rubble, from which a few spires of ice rose here and there.
To the Grid North, beyond where the island had been, was the surge ice. It stretched away to the distant mountains, sparkling in the morning sun like quartz crystals. It had hills and valleys, patches of drift and serac fields that went on to the edge of vision. In some places it had overrun the Shelf, crushing or drowning some islands and sliding beneath others that rose until they broke under their own weight.
The Otter climbed again, until the Shelf and the surge ice shrank to a black-and-white jigsaw puzzle, they crossed the coast at Richards Inlet, about thirty kilometres Grid East of the mouth of the Beardmore. The Otter followed Lennox-King Glacier up into the Queen Alexandra Range, crossed the Bowden Nevé, and then went up Law Glacier to the polar plateau. Everywhere the ice was surging, though less rapidly than Axel Heiberg had done a month earlier. The drop in the level of the ice made the terrain strange to Aclass="underline" too many new nunataks, unfamiliar crevasse fields and dagger-like ice thrusts. He scarcely recognised the Sandford Cliffs; facing the plateau, their steep black slopes had been almost buried by the surge. The cliffs receded under the starboard wing. Ahead was a glittering nothingness.
Al, mistrusting his compasses, shot the sun and got a good fix on their position while Will taped long stretches of the polar plateau.
“It’s moving here as well,” Will said. “The ice looks like the tapes that Steve brought back. Just seracs and crevasses and more seracs… How are we doing?”
Al was plotting the plane’s fuel consumption on a howgozit chart. “Better than I expected, but not as well as we should be. The fuel drums are too darn heavy.”
“Bloody nuisance. Varenkov said they’ve got lots of JP4; no reason to carry our own.”
“Maybe not. But if their fuel’s contaminated, we could spend a long time filtering it.”
“That’s a thought. God, how are we going to land if Vostok’s as chewed up as all this?” Will gestured towards the plateau.
“We’ll manage.”
The sun crept along the horizon, sometimes dimming behind banks of clouds. The plateau was an irregular mosaic of blues, greys, blacks and whites; only around the occasional nunatak could it be seen to be moving. The ice-free slopes of the nunataks had a raw look to them, as if their sides had been scoured. Will looked at one nunatak through binoculars and sucked in his breath. He took some telephoto shots and then studied the peak until it disappeared behind them.
“The surface is dropping,” he said. “The surge was a good two hundred metres higher than it is now.”
“That’s almost as much of a drop as there was at the Pole,” Al said.
“You know, I’m beginning to think that we’ve missed the worst of the surge. The Shelf acts like a buffer — slows down the ice and piles it up.” He pointed to the horizon ahead. “No ice shelves to speak of out on that coast. The surge would go straight into the ocean like — like a kid shooting off the end of a slide. And there’d be a hell of a lot of it. The thickest part of the ice sheet is between here and the coast… God help the poor buggers at Mirny.”
The ice sheet seemed flat, but in fact it sloped steadily upward like a shallow dome hundreds of kilometres in diameter; Vostok was near the top of the dome. To maintain their height above the surface they had to keep climbing, and Al watched their fuel consumption rise. The howgozit looked less promising. After shooting the sun again, Al calculated the amount of fuel they would have when they reached Vostok.
“Twenty litres.”
“We could land somewhere and refuel from the drums,” Will said.
“If we can find somewhere, I’m all for it,” Al answered. “But it’s bad down there. I’d hate to risk it, especially at this altitude. We might not get back into the air unless we used our JATO bottles, and I have to save them for Vostok.”
“What then — take a chance, or go home?”
Al looked at his watch. “If we can find a place to land in the next ten minutes, we will. Otherwise we turn around or we dump the drums. And hope there really is enough JP4 at Vostok.”
The surface below showed no clear space longer than a hundred metres. After seven minutes Al looked questioningly at Will.
“We can’t turn back, Al.”
“I know. Okay. If we get rid of the drums, we should gain another twenty minutes’ flying time.”
“Good enough.” Will pulled on the hood of his anorak, tied the draw-strings under his chin and pulled his gloves on. Then he went into the passenger compartment.
All but four of the seats had been removed to make room for the drums, which were lashed down on their sides. There were eight of them, each weighing close to a hundred and fifty kilos. Will edged around them to the door, slid it open and secured it. The wind made him squint, and he stepped back quickly. With the wind chill factor, the temperature near the door must have been close to -100°C. He moved cautiously around the cabin until he stood opposite the door, with the drums in front of him. Working awkwardly in his gloves, he unstrapped the first one and rolled it towards the door. It was much harder to move than he’d expected; the plane was at five thousand metres, and the air was thin.
Leaning back against the wall, Will heaved against the drum with his boot until it rolled heavily out the doorway and vanished. The Otter bucked slightly. He unlashed another drum and repeated the process. By the time half the drums had been dropped, he was panting hard and trying not to breathe too deeply. Al came back for a moment to check on him.