The Norwegians had been pushed ever rightward in their ascent by the crevasse fields of their time, until they had been forced to climb the funnel on the right side of Mount Engelstad, and only then turn left and south. But Val could see on the screen that the glacier had changed in the last century; there was a makable route leading off to the left, straight up the more southerly slope. If they went that way it would save them several kilometers, and also save them the ascent of the right side of the funnel, which appeared to be quite a bit more broken up than it had been a century before.
So she waited for everyone to catch up to her, and declared a rest stop. While they were drinking the meltwater out of their arm flasks—which were on the outside of their upper arms, and wired to the photovoltaic elements in their suits so that they melted a pint of water per hour in good sunlight—she showed them what she had seen on her screen. “Maybe we should go left here, directly to Butcher’s Spur.”
“Oh, come on,” Jack said, panting a little—red-faced, dried sweat streaking his cheeks, grinning handsomely at her. “We’ve been sticking to their route through all the other really hard parts, and once we get up to the plateau it’ll be easy from there on to the Pole. Why wimp out now, with just this last stretch to go?”
The others shrugged uneasily, looking at the cracked ice above. Both ways looked bad, to tell the truth. Elspeth muttered something. No one seemed to care that much one way or another.
It was Val’s call, she knew. If conditions in the icefall had changed, enough to make the right-hand route too dangerous, they should go left, and that was it. No one tried to repeat any particular route up an icefall, that would be absurd; icefalls changed every month, and one had to react to that.
Irritated, she looked at the screen again. Hard to tell what it would be like on either side, really, until they tried it. “Let’s set camp for today,” she said finally. “This might be the last flat spot in a long time, and it’s too late to take on another hard pitch. And I’ll need to think about the route a bit more.”
“Why?” Jack said.
“To see if it will go,” Val said shortly, and went to the sledge and started the work of making camp.
That night in the dining tent they ate for the most part in silence. They were tired, and the crux of their entire trek would be in tomorrow’s climb; and camped right under the slope the foreshortening made the icefalls seem very steep indeed, so that every time they looked outside they were confronted with what they had taken on. Even inside the tent the great broken white wall seemed to be visible to them. It reminded Jack, he said, of the night he had spent at the Hornlihutte on the side of the Matterhorn, looking up at that great spike overhanging them and wondering what he had gotten himself into. “And then we started while it was still dark, and we couldn’t see a thing. I climbed the first hour with my flashlight hanging from my teeth so I could use both hands. But in the end it turned out to be a piece of cake.”
People nodded. It was curious anyone ever boasted, Val thought, considering that no one was ever taken in by it.
“Have you climbed the Matterhorn?” Jack asked her.
“Uh, yeah. Long time ago.”
“The Normalweg?”
“What—the ridge from the hut? No no. We did a traverse that time.”
“Oh yeah—up the Zmutt and down the Lion? I’ve heard that’s great.”
“No, that time we went up the north face and down the south face.”
Jack was taken aback, and he colored a little. “Whoa,” he said. “That must have been radical!”
“Yeah. My partner was five months pregnant at the time, so it was kind of nerve-racking.”
People laughed, and Jack did too, coloring some more as he watched her.
“Like Alison Hargrove!” Elspeth exclaimed, eyes smiling wickedly.
“That’s right. In fact Meg called it doing her Hargrove.”
Like many women climbers Val honored the memory of Hargrove, a Brit who had climbed the north face of the Eiger in a single day while five months pregnant. Later on she had been killed on K2 when her kids were four and six years old, which was a shame. But certainly after that it was hard to do anything as a woman climber that seemed unmaternal in comparison.
Jack abandoned the Matterhorn, and the conversation wandered as they shifted from chili to chocolate, and began to wash the dishes. At one point Elspeth said to Ta Shu, “Butcher’s Spur is where they shot half their dogs, you see.”
“Ah! I see.”
The Norwegians had of course become fond of their dogs by the time they reached this point: each one a hardworking eager enthusiast, like a furry Birdie Bowers. So it had made them melancholy to shoot so many of them. Each man had shot the weakest half of his team, meaning two or three dogs apiece. And so despite the incredible accomplishment of climbing the icefall, the accomplishment that Val’s party still faced—despite making it from sea level to the polar cap in only four days, taking a difficult route never seen before by humankind—they had still had a very, very melancholy evening of it. Not that that had kept them (or the surviving dogs) from feasting on steaks carved out of their late companions.
“Kind of like cannibalism,” Elspeth said.
“The British killed dogs too,” Jack reminded her. “They wanted to use dogs, they just couldn’t figure out how.”
“And all the while hammering Amundsen for it,” Jim said, shaking his head ruefully. “You know the British Royal Geographical Society finally held a dinner in Amundsen’s honor, years afterward, and the man introducing him ended the introduction by saying ‘I propose three cheers for the dogs!’”
“You’re kidding!” Elspeth said.
“I am not kidding. Lord Curzon, as Amundsen recalled when he wrote about it in his autobiography. He was really pissed off.”
“What did he do?”
“He left after the dinner and went to his hotel, and asked for an apology but never got one. And so he quit the Royal Geographical Society, and never went back to England again.”
“Incredible.”
“There’s no one ruder than the British when they want to be.”
They ate in silence for a while, thinking about it. Val tried to imagine it: the roar of laughter from the British audience, Amundsen furious and humiliated, sitting on the stage unable to move. Quite a scene.
Ta Shu finished a chocolate bar. “These dogs deserved three cheers,” he observed.
“But it was Amundsen who should have toasted them,” Elspeth said.
“He did not get a chance, not then. But other times he always told their importance.”
They sat eating, resting, thinking it over. It was strange, Val thought, how heavy a mark those first expeditions had left on the people in Antarctica; they composed the continent’s only shared culture, really. No one knew what had happened here in the International Geophysical Year, no one knew what the U.S. Navy years had been like, no one knew the history of the Australian sector, or the Kiwis up at Lake Vanda, or the steady trickle of solo crossings and the like. Nothing remembered but the beginning.
Now Jim said to Ta Shu, “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, about how all our stories have colored lights on them. I know what you mean, and to a certain extent it’s true, of course. But what good historians are trying to do, I think, is to see things in a clear light—see what really happened, first, to the extent possible, and then see how the stories about the events distorted the reality, and why. And when you’ve got all those alternative stories together, then you can compare them, and make judgments that aren’t just a matter of your own colored lights. Not just a matter of temperament. They can be justified as having some kind of objectivity.”