快猫短视频

鈥淚 do not know what time it was when I woke up. It was calm, with that
absolute silence which can be so soothing or so terrible as circumstances
dictate. Then there came a sob of wind, and all was still again. Ten minutes and
it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of hysterics. The earth was
torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar of it all cannot be imagined.鈥�
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

It was Saturday morning on 20 July 1911, the middle of winter in Antarctica.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard and his companions Bill Wilson and Birdie Bowers had
cheated death many times in the three weeks that it had taken them to reach Cape
Crozier on the eastern tip of Ross Island. But this storm should have meant the
end.

The previous evening they had moved from their flimsy tent into an igloo that
had taken them four days to build. The walls were made of rocks, and the roof
was a canvas cloth tightly stretched and wedged into the sides. The empty tent
was pitched carefully in the lee of the igloo to protect it from the wind. But
when Cherry-Garrard woke, it was to a shout of horror from Bowers. The tent was
gone, torn from its moorings by the furious storm and carried off into the
darkness. The three travellers were 100 kilometres鈥� gruelling trek from the
safety of the winter hut at Cape Evans. Without the tent, they were as good as
dead.

The worst was yet to come. As they shivered in their sleeping bags, hatching
impossible plans for retracing their path, tentless, through the black heart of
an Antarctic winter, the force of the storm ripped the canvas roof of their
igloo to shreds. Snow and rocks came tumbling down onto them. The wind was like
an express train screaming through the wreckage, hour after hour. For the next
two days there was nothing to do but lie still, cling to life, sing feeble songs
and hymns, and hope against hope for a miracle.

Today, there is not much left of the rock walls鈥攋ust a squarish
outline, roughly 30 centimetres high and a little over 2 metres long. Inside,
half-buried in drifted snow, there are a few faded green rags, an old packing
case, some yellowing patches of penguin skin.

Lying down on the snow inside the walls, I try to conjure up the presence of
the three terrified men who lay here on that black winter morning. But
everything is conspiring against me. For once, in this windiest of spots, there
is almost no breeze. The sun is bright, the temperature a balmy 0 掳C. My
fleece clothes are warm and dry. Off in the distance is the Ross Ice Shelf,
described by Cherry-Garrard as 鈥渁 breeding-place of wind and drift and
darkness鈥�. But today it is sparkling in the sunshine鈥攁bout as morbid and
threatening as a white Christmas. Even with my eyes shut tightly to block out
the sun, I can鈥檛 summon their ghosts.

鈥淲e travelled for Science,鈥� Cherry-Garrard wrote in his marvellous book
about the adventure, The Worst Journey in the World. In 1910, the three
explorers had gone south with Captain Robert Scott, ready to make an assault on
the South Pole the following summer. But that winter, they had ventured out into
the darkness and cold in search of penguin eggs. At the time, the only known
rookery of emperor penguins was at Cape Crozier. Wilson, the scientific head of
the party, was convinced鈥攚rongly, as it turned out鈥攖hat emperor
penguins were the most primitive of all birds. If he could only obtain embryos,
he reasoned, it might be possible to trace their ancestry, perhaps even find the
missing link between birds and reptiles.

Fresh eggs

But the only chance of obtaining fresh embryos was to reach the rookery when
the eggs were laid鈥攊n the dead of winter. Scott reluctantly agreed that
the three should attempt the journey. None of them had an inkling of just how
horrific it would turn out to be.

Nearly 90 years later, I retraced their steps the modern way鈥攂y
helicopter. Setting off from the main US base at McMurdo, we first flew over the
bleak, white emptiness of the place they called Windless Bight. Here it was that
the travellers, hauling their two heavy sledges by foot, met soft snow that made
their task almost impossible. No longer able to pull the sledges in tandem, they
were forced to relay them one at a time. And all this in the 24-hour darkness
that is winter in Antarctica.

It鈥檚 hard to imagine in today鈥檚 bright sunshine how the three men did
everything in the dark: fastening and unfastening their harnesses; retracing
their steps to retrieve the second sledge by the light of a naked candle;
pitching their tent. And all in temperatures that would freeze the soul. On one
day, the thermometer plummeted to 77.5 掳 below鈥擣ahrenheit, that is. It
was the coldest temperature ever recorded.

The nights were the worst. For seven hours they lay in their sleeping bags,
shivering uncontrollably and longing for morning and the order to strike camp.
Today, the journey that took the men 19 days takes less than an hour. Beyond
Windless Bight we fly over Terror Point, where the ice shelf piles up against
Ross Island and creates huge pressure ridges鈥攁nd the crevasses begin. The
pressure ridges over which the explorers had to haul their sledges look daunting
even from the air. When the team finally reached the site where they were to
build their igloo, their bodies and minds were shot to pieces.

And yet, when they finally finished their igloo and headed off for the
penguin rookery, their spirits were amazingly high. 鈥淎fter indescribable effort
and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and we were the
first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our grasp material which
might prove of the utmost importance to science; we were turning theories into
facts with every observation we made鈥︹��

Thrilled though they were, the three realised that a storm was coming and
they hastily collected five eggs, cushioning them in their mittens. Still,
Cherry-Garrard smashed two as he stumbled along on his way back: he was
desperately short-sighted, and the conditions made wearing glasses
impossible.

It was after they returned with the remaining eggs that the storm struck.
Miraculously, when the storm finally died down, they staggered out of the igloo
and found their tent intact, closed up like a furled umbrella, less than a
kilometre away. Calloused, weary, but with their hope restored, they set off
again for home.

As we return from Cape Crozier, we fly past McMurdo, on towards the hut where
Scott and the rest of his men had waited at Cape Evans. We touch down near the
hut, and I walk in. Inside, it is dark, damp and filled with the smell of
leather. Rusting tins of food still line the shelves. Faded clothes hang on the
pegs. This is where the ghosts are, where the story is suddenly real.

Pyjamas and dressing gowns

When the three travellers finally returned, cradling their precious eggs,
pandemonium broke out. In pyjamas and dressing gowns, Scott and the others in
the hut crowded round the three exhausted men and cut off their frozen clothes.
There, at the foot of Cherry-Garrard鈥檚 wooden bunk, they piled his discarded
clothes. It was here, at the large wooden table that dominates the room, where
the three companions ate their fill of sweet things, and finally felt that they
were in heaven. In this hut, at last, their presence is tangible.

Bowers and Wilson both died with Scott on the way back from the pole, leaving
Cherry-Garrard the sole survivor of the winter journey. A diffident young man,
haunted by the deaths of his companions, he returned with the eggs to England.
In spite of his exploits, which were already famous throughout England, when he
presented the eggs to the Natural History Museum he was treated with
extraordinary rudeness and received not a word of thanks.

Today, the three eggs lie on a bed of cotton wool in a glass-lidded box at
the museum鈥檚 tiny outpost in the Hertfordshire village of Tring. Three or four
times the size of a hen鈥檚 egg, they are off-white and otherwise
ordinary-looking. Each is pierced by an irregular hole, cut to allow the removal
of the embryos. Gingerly, I pick one up. It is smooth to the touch and
unexpectedly fragile.

One of the embryos remained with the museum. It sits there still on a shelf
in a jar of methylated spirits, a forlorn white scrap with bulbous eyes, soft
beak and tiny, perfectly formed wings. The remaining two embryos were passed
from scientist to scientist, until the paper detailing their findings was
finally published by C. W. Parsons of the University of Glasgow in 1934. By now
they had lost even the advantage of being the first: in the meantime other
expeditions had returned with the eggs of different species of penguin from more
accessible places. And the scientists had learnt that there was nothing
particularly special about emperors compared with the rest. The embryos, Parsons
concluded, had not 鈥済reatly added to our knowledge of penguin embryology鈥�.

When it came to the process of discovery, Cherry-Garrard was an incurable
romantic. 鈥淪cience is a big thing if you can travel a Winter Journey in her
cause and not regret it,鈥� he wrote in his book. But how must he have felt
afterwards, knowing how little scientific use his hard-won samples proved to
have in the end?

In spite of the way the eggs were first received, the museum now has a better
notion of their worth. The egg curator, Michael Walters, tells me they are far
too important to be subjected to the rigours and decay of public display. Why so
important when they told us so little? Perhaps because of the efforts that they
represent in the time before helicopters, radios and snowmobiles. Time and again
during my stay in Antarctica, scientists told me how they had been inspired to
go there by reading the accounts of these heroic early explorers. 鈥淭hey set the
stage for science in Antarctica,鈥� said one American researcher sitting in a
remote field camp in the heart of west Antarctica. Perhaps it was worth it,
after all.