The men feel emotion as the coast vanishes behind them, for they all know that they are saying goodbye to warmth and sunlight for years, some of them perhaps for ever. But the British flag flies above the ship, and they console themselves by thinking that a signal from the world is travelling with them to the only part of the conquered earth that as yet has no master.

Universitas Antarctica

In January, after a short rest in New Zealand, they land at Cape Evans, on the rim of the eternal ice, and erect a building where they can spend the winter. In Antarctica December and January are the summer months, because only then does the sun shine in a white, metallic sky for a few hours of the day. The walls of their house are made of wood, like those of buildings erected by earlier expeditions, but inside the progress of time is evident. While their predecessors still made do with the dim and stinking light of smouldering fish-oil lamps, tired of their own faces, exhausted by the monotony of the sunless days, these twentieth-century men have the whole world and all its knowledge in abbreviated form inside their four walls. An acetylene lamp gives warm white light, as if by magic cinematography bringing them images of distant places, projections of tropical scenes from milder climates; they have a pianola for music, a gramophone provides the sounds of the human voice, their library contains the wisdom of their time. A typewriter clacks away in one room, another acts as a darkroom where cinematographic and coloured photographs are developed. The expedition’s geologist tests stone for its radioactivity, the zoologist discovers new parasites on the penguins they catch, meteorological observations alternate with physical experiments. Every member of the expedition has his allotted work for the months of darkness, and a clever system transforms research in isolation into companionable study. For these thirty men give lectures every evening, hold university courses in the pack ice and the Arctic frost, and they acquire a three-dimensional view of the world in lively conversational exchange. The specialization of research gives up its pride here and promotes understanding in the company of others. In the middle of an elemental, primeval world, alone in a timeless place, thirty men instruct each other in the latest scientific findings of the twentieth century, and in their house they know not only the hour but the second of the world clock. It is touching to read how these serious men enjoy their Christmas tree and their spoof journal The South Polar Times, to find how some small incident—a whale surfacing, a pony’s fall—becomes a major event, and on the other hand astonishing aspects of the expedition—the glow of the aurora borealis, the terrible frost, the vast loneliness—become ordinary daily experiences.

Now and then they venture on small outings. They try out their motor sledges, they learn to ski, they train the dogs. They equip a depot for the great journey, but the days on the calendar pass very slowly until summer (in December), when a ship reaches them through the pack ice with letters from home. Small groups also go on day-long journeys to toughen them up in the worst of the Antarctic winter, they try out their tents and consolidate their experiences. Not everything succeeds, but even the difficulties reinvigorate them. When they return from their expeditions, frozen and tired, they are welcomed back with rejoicing and a warm fire in the hearth, and the comfortable little house at latitude 77 seems to them, after days of deprivation, the most blessed place in the world.

But once such an expedition comes back from the west, and its news silences the house. On their way they have found Amundsen’s winter quarters, and now Scott knows that, as well as the frost and danger, he has someone else competing with him for fame as the first to discover the secret of this refractory part of the earth: the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. He measures distances on the maps, and we can imagine his horror from what he wrote when he realized that Amundsen’s winter quarters were 110 kilometres closer to the Pole than his own. He is shocked but does not despair. He writes proudly in his diary of his determination to press on for the honour of his country.

The name of Amundsen appears only once in the pages of Scott’s diary, and never again. But the reader can feel that, from that day forward, a shadow of anxiety lies over the lonely house in the frozen landscape. And from now on there is not an hour when that name does not torment him, waking and sleeping.

Setting off for the Pole

A mile from the hut, on the hill where they take observations, they always post alternating guards. An apparatus resembling a cannon has been set up there—a cannon to combat an invisible enemy. Its purpose is to measure the first signs of warmth from the approaching sun. They wait for its appearance for days on end. Reflections already conjure up glowing colour in the morning sky, but the round disc of the sun does not yet rise to the horizon. However, that sky itself, full of the magical light of its proximity, the prelude to reflection, inspires the impatient men. At last the telephone on top of the hill rings, and they are happy to receive the news: the sun has risen, raising its head into the wintry night for an hour, for the first time in months.