My Attainment of the Pole Part 23

The day was beautiful. Had our sense of appreciation not been blunted by acc.u.mulated fatigue we should have greatly enjoyed the play of light and color in the ever-changing scene of sparkle. But in our condition it was but an inducement to keep the eyes open and to prolong interest long enough to dispel the growing complaint of aching muscles.

Ah-we-lah and E-tuk-i-shook were soon lost in profound sleep, the only comfort in their hard lives. I remained awake, as had been my habit for many preceding days, to get nautical observations. My longitude calculations lined us at 94 3'. At noon the sun's alt.i.tude was carefully set on the s.e.xtant, and the lat.i.tude, quickly reduced, gave 89 31'. The drift had carried us too far east, but our advance was encouraging.

I put down the instrument, wrote the reckonings in my book. Then I gazed, with a sort of fascination, at the figures. My heart began to thump wildly. Slowly my brain whirled with exultation. I arose jubilant.

We were only 29 miles from the North Pole!

I suppose I created quite a commotion about the little camp.

E-tuk-i-shook, aroused by the noise, awoke and rubbed his eyes. I told him that in two average marches we should reach the "_tigi-shu_"--the big nail. He sprang to his feet and shouted with joy. He kicked Ah-we-lah, none too gently, and told him the glad news.

Together they went out to a hummock, and through gla.s.ses, sought for a mark to locate so important a place as the terrestrial axis! If but one sleep ahead, it must be visible! So they told me, and I laughed. The sensation of laughing was novel. At first I was quite startled. I had not laughed for many days. Their idea was amusing, but it was eminently sensible from their standpoint and knowledge.

I tried to explain to them that the Pole is not visible to the eye, and that its position is located only by a repeated use of the various instruments. Although this was quite beyond their comprehension the explanation entirely satisfied their curiosity. They burst out in hurrahs of joy. For two hours they chanted, danced and shouted the pa.s.sions of wild life. Their joy, however, was in the thought of a speedy turning back homeward, I surmised.

This, however, was the first real sign of pleasure or rational emotion which they had shown for several weeks. For some time I had entertained the fear that we no longer possessed strength to return to land. This unbridled flow of vigor dispelled that idea. My heart throbbed with gladness. A font of new strength seemed to gush forth within me.

Considering through what we had gone, I now marvel at the reserve forces latent in us, and I sometimes feel that I should write, not of human weakness, but a new gospel of human strength.

With the Pole only twenty-nine miles distant, more sleep was quite impossible. We brewed an extra pot of tea, prepared a favorite broth of pemmican, dug up a surprise of fancy biscuits and filled up on good things to the limit of the allowance for our final feast days. The dogs, which had joined the chorus of gladness, were given an extra lump of pemmican. A few hours more were agreeably spent in the tent. Then we started out with new spirit for the uttermost goal of our world.

Bounding joyously forward, with a stimulated mind, I reviewed the journey. Obstacle after obstacle had been overcome. Each battle won gave a spiritual thrill, and courage to scale the next barrier. Thus had been ever, and was still, in the unequal struggles between human and inanimate nature, an incentive to go onward, ever onward, up the stepping-stones to ultimate success. And now, after a life-denying struggle in a world where every element of Nature is against the life and progress of man, triumph came with steadily measured reaches of fifteen miles a day!

We were excited to fever heat. Our feet were light on the run. Even the dogs caught the infectious enthusiasm. They rushed along at a pace which made it difficult for me to keep a sufficient advance to set a good course. The horizon was still eagerly searched for something to mark the approaching boreal center. But nothing unusual was seen. The same expanse of moving seas of ice, on which we had gazed for five hundred miles, swam about us as we drove onward.

Looking through gladdened eyes, the scene a.s.sumed a new glory. Dull blue and purple expanses were transfigured into plains of gold, in which were lakes of sapphire and rivulets of ruby fire. Engirdling this world were purple mountains with gilded crests. It was one of the few days on the stormy pack when all Nature smiled with cheering lights.

As the day advanced beyond midnight and the splendor of the summer night ran into a clearer continued day, the beams of gold on the surface snows a.s.sumed a more burning intensity. Shadows of hummocks and ice ridges became dyed with a deeper purple, and in the burning orange world loomed before us t.i.tan shapes, regal and regally robed.

From my position, a few hundred yards ahead of the sleds, with compa.s.s and axe in hand, as usual, I could not resist the temptation to turn frequently to see the movement of the dog train with its new fire. In this backward direction the color scheme was reversed. About the horizon the icy walls gleamed like beaten gold set with gem-spots of burning colors; the plains represented every shade of purple and blue, and over them, like vast angel wings outspread, s.h.i.+fted golden pinions. Through the sea of palpitating color, the dogs came, with spirited tread, noses down, tails erect and shoulders braced to the straps, like chariot horses. In the magnifying light they seemed many times their normal size. The young Eskimos, chanting songs of love, followed with easy, swinging steps. The long whip was swung with a brisk crack. Over all arose a cloud of frosted breath, which, like incense smoke, became silvered in the light, a certain signal of efficient motive power.

With our destination reachable over smooth ice, in these brighter days of easier travel our long chilled blood was stirred to double action, our eyes opened to beauty and color, and a normal appreciation of the wonders of this new strange and wonderful world.

As we lifted the midnight's sun to the plane of the midday sun, the s.h.i.+fting Polar desert became floored with a sparkling sheen of millions of diamonds, through which we fought a way to ulterior and greater glory.

Our leg cramps eased and our languid feet lifted buoyantly from the steady drag as the soul arose to effervescence. Fields of rich purple, lined with running liquid gold, burning with flashes of iridescent colors, gave a sense of gladness long absent from our weary life. The ice was much better. We still forced a way over large fields, small pressure areas and narrow leads. But, when success is in sight, most troubles seem lighter. We were thin, with faces burned, withered, frozen and torn in fissures, with clothes ugly from overwear. Yet men never felt more proud than we did, as we militantly strode off the last steps to the world's very top!

Camp was pitched early in the morning of April 20. The sun was northeast, the pack glowed in tones of lilac, the normal westerly air brushed our frosty faces. Our surprising burst on enthusiasm had been nursed to its limits. Under it a long march had been made over average ice, with the usual result of overpowering fatigue. Too tired and sleepy to wait for a cup of tea, we poured melted snow into our stomach and pounded the pemmican with an axe to ease the task of the jaws. Our eyes closed before the meal was finished, and the world was lost to us for eight hours. Waking, I took observations which gave lat.i.tude 89 46'.

Late at night, after another long rest, we hitched the dogs and loaded the sleds. When action began, the feeling came that no time must be lost. Feverish impatience seized me.

Cracking our whips, we bounded ahead. The boys sang. The dogs howled.

Midnight of April 21 had just pa.s.sed.

Over the sparkling snows the post-midnight sun glowed like at noon. I seemed to be walking in some splendid golden realms of dreamland. As we bounded onward the ice swam about me in circling rivers of gold.

E-tuk-i-shook and Ah-we-lah, though thin and ragged, had the dignity of the heroes of a battle which had been fought through to success.

We all were lifted to the paradise of winners as we stepped over the snows of a destiny for which we had risked life and willingly suffered the tortures of an icy h.e.l.l. The ice under us, the goal for centuries of brave, heroic men, to reach which many had suffered terribly and terribly died, seemed almost sacred. Constantly and carefully I watched my instruments in recording this final reach. Nearer and nearer they recorded our approach. Step by step, my heart filled with a strange rapture of conquest.

At last we step over colored fields of sparkle, climbing walls of purple and gold--finally, under skies of crystal blue, with flaming clouds of glory, we touch the mark! The soul awakens to a definite triumph; there is sunrise within us, and all the world of night-darkened trouble fades.

We are at the top of the world! The flag is flung to the frigid breezes of the North Pole!

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROUTE TO THE POLE AND RETURN

A triangle of 30,000 square miles cut out of the mysterious unknown]

AT THE NORTH POLE

OBSERVATIONS AT THE POLE--METEOROLOGICAL AND ASTRONOMICAL PHENOMENA--SINGULAR STABILITY AND UNIFORMITY OF THE THERMOMETER AND BAROMETER--A SPOT WHERE ONE'S SHADOW IS THE SAME LENGTH EACH HOUR OF THE TWENTY-FOUR--EIGHT POLAR ALt.i.tUDES OF THE SUN

XX

FULL AND FINAL PROOFS OF THE ATTAINMENT

Looking about me, after the first satisfactory observation, I viewed the vacant expanse. The first realization of actual victory, of reaching my lifetime's goal, set my heart throbbing violently and my brain aglow. I felt the glory which the prophet feels in his vision, with which the poet thrills in his dream. About the frozen plains my imagination evoked aspects of grandeur. I saw silver and crystal palaces, such as were never built by man, with turrets flaunting "pinions glorious, golden."

The s.h.i.+fting mirages seemed like the ghosts of dead armies, magnified and transfigured, huge and spectral, moving along the horizon and bearing the wind-tossed phantoms of golden blood-stained banners.

The low beating of the wind a.s.sumed the throb of martial music.

Bewildered, I realized all that I had suffered, all the pain of fasting, all the anguish of long weariness, and I felt that this was my reward. I had scaled the world, and I stood at the Pole!

By a long and consecutive series of observations and mental tabulations of various sorts on our journey northward, continuing here, I knew, beyond peradventure of doubt, that I was at a spot which was as near as possible, by usual methods of determination, five hundred and twenty miles from Svartevoeg, a spot toward which men had striven for more than three centuries--a spot known as the North Pole, and where I stood first of white men. In my own achievement I felt, that dizzy moment, that all the heroic souls who had braved the rigors of the Arctic region found their own hopes' fulfilment. I had realized their dream. I had culminated with success the efforts of all the brave men who had failed before me. I had finally justified their sacrifices, their very death; I had proven to humanity humanity's supreme triumph over a hostile, death-dealing Nature. It seemed that the souls of these dead exulted with me, and that in some sub-strata of the air, in notes more subtle than the softest notes of music, they sang a paean in the spirit with me.

We had reached our destination. My relief was indescribable. The prize of an international marathon was ours. Pinning the Stars and Stripes to a tent-pole, I a.s.serted the achievement in the name of the ninety millions of countrymen who swear fealty to that flag. And I felt a pride as I gazed at the white-and-crimson barred pinion, a pride which the claim of no second victor has ever taken from me.

My mental intoxication did not interfere with the routine work which was now necessary. Having reached the goal, it was imperative that all scientific observations be made as carefully as possible, as quickly as possible. To the taking of these I set myself at once, while my companions began the routine work of unloading the sledges and building an igloo.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLIMBING THE LADDER OF LAt.i.tUDES]

Our course when arriving at the Pole, as near as it was possible to determine, was on the ninety-seventh meridian. The day was April 21, 1908. It was local noon. The sun was 11 55'' above the magnetic northern horizon. My shadow, a dark purple-blue streak with ill-defined edges, measured twenty-six feet in length. The tent pole, marked as a measuring stick, was pushed into the snow, leaving six feet above the surface. This gave a shadow twenty-eight feet long.

Several s.e.xtant observations gave a lat.i.tude a few seconds below 90, which, because of unknown refraction and uncertain accuracy of time, was placed at 90. (Other observations on the next day gave similar results, although we s.h.i.+fted camp four miles toward magnetic south.) A broken hand-axe was tied to the end of a life-line; this was lowered through a fresh break in the ice, and the angle which it made with the surface indicated a drift toward Greenland. The temperature, gauged by a spirit thermometer, was 37.7, F. The mercury thermometer indicated -36. The atmospheric pressure by the aneroid barometer was at 29.83. It was falling, and indicated a coming change in the weather. The wind was very light, and had veered from northeast to south, according to the compa.s.s card.

The sky was almost clear, of a dark purple blue, with a pearly ice-blink or silver reflection extending east, and a smoky water-sky west, in darkened, ill-defined streaks, indicating continuous ice or land toward Bering Sea, and an active pack, with some open water, toward Spitzbergen. To the north and south were wine-colored gold-shot clouds, flung in long banners, with ragged-pointed ends along the horizon. The ice about was nearly the same as it had been continuously since leaving the eighty-eighth parallel. It was slightly more active, and showed, by news cracks and oversliding, young ice signs of recent disturbance.

The field upon which we camped was about three miles long and two miles wide. Measured at a new creva.s.se, the ice was sixteen feet thick. The tallest hummock measured twenty-eight feet above water. The snow lay in fine feathery crystals, with no surface crust. About three inches below the soft snow was a sub-surface crust strong enough to carry the bodily weight. Below this were other successive crusts, and a porous snow in coa.r.s.e crystals, with a total depth of about fifteen inches.

Our igloo was built near one edge in the lee of an old hummock about fifteen feet high. Here a recent bank of drift snow offered just the right kind of material from which to cut building blocks. While a shelter was thus being walled, I moved about constantly to read my instruments and to study carefully the local environment.

In a geographic sense we had now arrived at a point where all meridians meet. The longitude, therefore, was zero. Time was a negative problem.

There being no longitude, there can be no time. The hour lines of Greenwich, of New York, of Peking, and of all the world here run together. Figuratively, if this position is the pin-point of the earth's axis, it is possible to have all meridians under one foot, and therefore it should be possible to step from midnight to midday, from the time of San Francisco to that of Paris, from one side of the globe to the other, as time is measured.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE ALL MERIDIANS MEET AND EVERY DIRECTION IS SOUTH

The Pivotal Point on which the earth turns.

*Magnetic Pole]