She got the clients up and over the wall one by one. Then they all pulled the sledge up to them through a jumar, which allowed the rope up but would not let it slip back down—“one, two, three, haul!” After that they sat beside the sledge; everyone was now following Val’s example with the thermostatting, and it looked like beach blanket south, for a few minutes anyway. But they were only ten meters higher, and twenty farther on, with several crevasses to go before they could simply slog uphill again. “It’s going to take all day to go the next hundred yards!” Jorge exclaimed.
“Oh it shouldn’t take quite that long,” Val said cheerfully. “But I guess we’d better get to it.”
“Oh God.”
“Not again.”
“You slavedriver.”
“Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.” Val put on the sledge harness, then her sungloves. “Come on, let’s go.”
So they did. Up here the ice proved to be broken in a series of broad ledges, like a giant’s steps. The crevasses were frequent, and the tortured ice gleamed in the wild shear zones walling them in on left and right. The work was unrelenting, and it took careful thermostatting to keep from sweating, then to keep from getting over-chilled after the hot spots. The view changed slowly. While waiting for the others Val looked back and down and out—two thousand feet down, thirty or forty miles out—over the jumbled frozen surface of the Ross Sea, in this month all white all the way to the horizon, the big icebergs scattered like a great fleet of torpedoed aircraft carriers. Mount Betty was now below them; the rest of the Herbert Range still loomed to their right, with a spur running off the range blocking the way ahead of them. To get to that spur they had to cross the bowl at the head of the Sargent Glacier, a little glacier high in its own basin, falling down to the Axel Heiberg on their left.
On they climbed. The sun wheeled around in the blue-black sky, until when Val looked back the glare off the sea ice was blinding. She checked her watch: though it was still sunny midafternoon, it was nine P.M. She had wanted to reach the saddle in the spur ahead of them, to give them a view of the Axel Heiberg below, but it was too late to continue. “Time to camp.”
So they pitched the dining tent and their little sleeping domes, and then in the nylon blue incandescence of the diner they got three pots of ice on the stove. In the violent blue light of the team tent everyone tended to look like morgue photos of themselves, but Jack did not seem to mind this effect, as he kept glancing at Val while they wolfed down the hors d’oeuvres: taste of smoked oysters, sip of tea, glance at Val, three little taste treats, repeated over and over. And a bit of a come-on too. But Val had had a lifetime’s experience ignoring such looks, she could ignore men across a whole broadband of registers, from outrageous flirtation to demure appreciation to neutral obliviousness to cold warning to gross insult. Back in the world she would have ignored him in a really dismissive way, the back of her hand to him; but as he was a client, she kept it oblivious.
Besides, it was hers and Ta Shu’s night to cook, and cooking made one generous. The two of them sat by the stove tending the rehydrating spaghetti sauce, cooking the pasta, frying hard bread in garlic butter, and passing out cup after cup of hot tea. Val did not always enjoy cooking for even as small a group as this, but Ta Shu with his fractured English and his unusual ideas about food (he wanted to put ginger in the spaghetti sauce) made it entertaining. It was a pleasant couple of hours, one of the unsung attractions of mountain expeditions: getting off one’s tired feet, getting warmed up, getting food in the stomach, food which because of the extreme states of hunger involved often tasted wildly delicious even if it was very plain fare; and all the while lounging around on soft sleeping bags in colorful silky clothes like Oriental pashas, and talking a mile a minute. In these conditions cooking for others was a solicitous, avuncular activity; taking care of people; which meant that the cooks got a little taste of how the guide felt all the time. Even Jack was not as much of a jerk on the nights when he and Jim cooked.
On this night, however, he was not cooking, and so free to look, and to talk. And the day’s exertions had made all of them talkative, to tell the truth.
“That was so hard!”
“I can’t believe they got fifty-two dogs up that!”
“Three thousand vertical feet, and a lot of it gnarly indeed.”
“And then to find out it was all wasted effort!”
“And with the big icefalls still to come!”
But the Norwegians hadn’t known that, Val thought. Perhaps not knowing what lay ahead had made them less apprehensive rather than more. Ignorance was bliss. At least sometimes. “It’s a good thing we came this way,” she said. “It’s nice to see what they saw.”
Jack nodded complacently. “That’s what it’s all about.”
After more food intake Jorge said, “You know, it gives you an interesting new angle on the myth of Scott as total bungler and Amundsen as hyperefficient genius. I mean unless you’ve done today you don’t realize what huge risks Amundsen took. There were sections today that were worse than when we went up the Khumbu Icefall.”
To the same kind of goal, Val thought—Everest, the South Pole—the tallest, the bottommost; something only had to be the mostest and suddenly it was the holy grail, worth taking fatal risks for. For a certain type of person.
“But the Norwegians were good on ice,” Jack told Jorge. “They were experienced polar travelers.”
“Yes,” Jorge said, “but that wouldn’t have helped if a snowbridge had collapsed at the wrong time, or if a serac had fallen on them. That easily could have happened.”
“You can imagine them disappearing without a trace,” Elspeth added. “Then Scott’s group would have gotten there first, and had the extra psychological push to make it back home, and the whole story would have been reversed.”
“The rash presumptuous Norwegians,” Jorge declaimed, “and the amateur but tough steady Brits. It’s the story everyone wants, really.”
“Not me,” Jack said. “Scott was an idiot. If it had turned out that way it would be the genius punished and the idiot rewarded.”
“Very realistic,” Val murmured, but no one heard her, as Elspeth was crying “Oh come on!” and waving a finger at Jack. “Scott was not an idiot!”
“But he was!” Jim said. “He did everything wrong!”
“Everything,” Jack said, with a knowing smile at Val.
And then he and Jim were off and running, playing riffs they had obviously played many times before, variations on the theme “Scott and His Stupidities.” He had become a torpedo lieutenant in the late Victorian Royal Navy, a ridiculously dead-end post in a ridiculously moribund service. He had gotten the polar assignment through personal connections even though he had no knowledge of polar regions. He had not bothered to learn a thing from previous polar explorers, nor had he bothered to study the Arctic indigenous peoples—perish the thought. In fact he took exactly the wrong lessons from those who had gone before, disdaining Eskimo furs in favor of naval canvas clothing, disdaining dogsled travel in favor of manhauling. Actually he tried to use dogs, as well as ponies, motor tractors, and skis; but as he and his men could not manage to master any of these modes of transport over snow, they had had to fall back on walking as a last resort. Only at that point had Scott proclaimed to the world that manhauling was really the only honest and noble way to go.