Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 24

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The return journey was a race for life. An indescribable chaos of broken and rafted ice, open water, blizzards, and starvation put the last possible strain on their exhausted bodies as they forced their way southward. Peary was almost blind from the strain of taking continual observations in the dazzling light. The pain in his eyes was terrible. Time after time he buried his face in the snow until the eyelids were numb, to ease the ache. At the "Big Lead" they waited for five days for the water to freeze. On the fifth day, an Eskimo reported young ice in formation. In breathless silence, with feet wide apart, they crossed in safety, but as they were unfastening their snowshoes, the bridge of thin ice behind them parted again, and the lead began to widen. During the next three marches the desperate men hewed and hacked their way through a hell of heaped-up ice such as none of them had ever seen. Peary's mutilated feet caught it unmercifully, and he said that at their first camp his jaws ached from grinding his teeth together in the searing pain.

When they reached the northern shore of Greenland at Cape Neumeyer, they were almost dead from starvation. Four hares helped to keep them going but, unless they found game soon, they were doomed men. Seven musk oxen saved their lives. Peary has given a graphic description of what it means to be hungry. He says: "The hunger that I do mean is that which has gone to the utmost limit consistent with the full retention of all the faculties, mental and physical . . . Now, as we lay there, looking at the big black animals before us we had none of the sportsmen's sensations in the presence of big game. They were not game for us, but meat! and every fibre in our gaunt bodies was vibrating with a savage lust for that meat—meat that should be soft and warm, meat into which our teeth could sink and tear and rend, meat that would not blister lips and tongue with its frost, nor ring like rock against our teeth . . .

"I can scarcely realize as I write these lines, what absolute animals hunger makes of men, and yet I can say truthfully, never have I tasted more delicious food than was that tender, raw, warm meat—a mouthful here, and a mouthful there, cut from the animal as I skinned it. I ate 'till I dared eat no more, although still unsatisfied."

For two days the men ate and slept without ceasing before continuing their way across Robeson Channel to Cape Sheridan and the Roosevelt. It was the one of the most remarkable marches ever made by an Arctic explorer. Of the 120 dogs that started, only 41 returned. The others had been fed to the living animals or eaten by the men. The unusual weather, and the strong eastward drift of the ice, had kept Peary from reaching the Pole but had not dimmed his determination to try again.