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Page 13
"November 30th--Tuesday--The doctor amputated Mr. Ferriss's other
hand to-day. Living gale of wind from northeast. Impossible to
march against it in our weakened condition; must camp here till it
abates. Made soup of the last of the dog meat this afternoon. Our
last pemmican gone.
"December lst--Wednesday--Everybody getting weaker. Metz breaking
down. Sent Adler down to the shore to gather shrimps. We had about
a mouthful apiece for lunch. Supper, a spoonful of glycerine and
hot water.
"December 2d--Thursday--Metz died during the night. Hansen dying.
Still blowing a gale from the northeast. A hard night.
"December 3d--Friday--Hansen died during early morning. Muck Tu shot
a ptarmigan. Made soup. Dennison breaking down.
"December 4th--Saturday--Buried Hansen under slabs of ice. Spoonful
of glycerine and hot water at noon.
"December 5th--Sunday--Dennison found dead this morning between
Adler and myself. Too weak to bury him, or even carry him out of
the tent. He must lie where he is. Divine services at 5:30
P.M. Last spoonful of glycerine and hot water."
* * * * *
The next day was Monday, and at some indeterminate hour of the
twenty-four, though whether it was night or noon he could not say,
Ferriss woke in his sleeping-bag and raised himself on an elbow, and for
a moment sat stupidly watching Bennett writing in his journal. Noticing
that he was awake, Bennett looked up from the page and spoke in a voice
thick and muffled because of the swelling of his tongue.
"How long has this wind been blowing, Ferriss?"
"Since a week ago to-day," answered the other.
Bennett continued his writing.
"...Incessant gales of wind for over a week. Impossible to move
against them in our weakened condition. But to stay here is to
perish. God help us. It is the end of everything."
Bennett drew a line across the page under the last entry, and, still
holding the book in his hand, gazed slowly about the tent.
There were six of them left--five huddled together in that miserable
tent--the sixth, Adler, being down on the shore gathering shrimps. In
the strange and gloomy half-light that filled the tent these survivors
of the Freja looked less like men than beasts. Their hair and beards
were long, and seemed one with the fur covering of their bodies. Their
faces were absolutely black with dirt, and their limbs were monstrously
distended and fat--fat as things bloated and swollen are fat. It was the
abnormal fatness of starvation, the irony of misery, the huge joke that
arctic famine plays upon those whom it afterward destroys. The men moved
about at times on their hands and knees; their tongues were distended,
round, and slate-coloured, like the tongues of parrots, and when they
spoke they bit them helplessly.
Near the flap of the tent lay the swollen dead body of Dennison. Two of
the party dozed inert and stupefied in their sleeping-bags. Muck Tu was
in the corner of the tent boiling his sealskin footnips over the
sheet-iron cooker. Ferriss and Bennett sat on opposite sides of the
tent, Bennett using his knee as a desk, Ferriss trying to free himself
from the sleeping-bag with the stumps of his arms. Upon one of these
stumps, the right one, a tin spoon had been lashed.
The tent was full of foul smells. The smell of drugs and of mouldy
gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of
stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that
exhaled from the tent cover--every smell but that of food.
Outside the unleashed wind yelled incessantly, like a sabbath of
witches, and spun about the pitiful shelter and went rioting past,
leaping and somersaulting from rock to rock, tossing handfuls of dry,
dust-like snow into the air; folly-stricken, insensate, an enormous, mad
monster gambolling there in some hideous dance of death, capricious,
headstrong, pitiless as a famished wolf.
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