At the South Pole - Terra Incognita - page 71

til 31 October 1956, when Admiral George Dufek stepped out of an R-4D plane called Que será
será . The following month Americans began parachuting in materials, and construction of the first
South Pole station began. In 1947 Admiral Richard Byrd had flown over the Pole. It was his second
attempt, and he said it was like flying in a bowl of milk. Byrd was a towering figure in the short
history of Americans in Antarctica, though not a popular one, and several of his claims, such as his
1929 'flight over the South Pole' are regarded with suspicion. People told stories about him fall-
ing drunk out of planes. He made five journeys to the ice, and when asked what men missed most
on Antarctic expeditions, he would reply with the single word, 'temptation'. Harry Darlington, an
American who took his wife south some years after Byrd, was asked the same question. He replied
also with one word. It was 'variety'.
Byrd's second expedition, only twenty-two years after Scott, was the most spectacular. Discov-
ery , the topic he wrote about it, 1 includes an account of the return to Little America, Byrd's base
on the Bay of Whales, after four years. Together with several companions, he dug down into the
mess hall. As they were standing there under six feet of accumulated snow, the telephone rang. It
was an internal system, of course, and a colleague in another part of the base had found the button
and pressed it. 'If Haile Selassie had crawled out from under one of the bunks,' said Byrd, 'we
couldn't have been more taken aback.'
Alone is Byrd's best book. It tells the story of four-and-a-half months alone at Bolling Advance
Weather Base in 1934. It was night all the time he was there, and very cold; he was living in con-
ditions 'like those when man came groping out of the last ice age'. He injured his shoulder before
the support team left and almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning. It taught him, he wrote, 'how
little one really has to know or feel sure about'. Only when he became almost certain that he was
going to die did he understand Scott's last words, 'For God's sake look after our people.'
This is how he described the departure of the sun.
Above me the day was dying; the night was rising in its place. Ever since late in February, when
the sun had rolled down from its lofty twenty-four hour circuit around the sky, it had been set-
ting a little earlier at night, rising a little later in the morning. Now it was just a monstrous ball
which could barely hoist itself free from the horizon. It would wheel along for a few hours, ob-
scured by mist, then sink out of sight in the north not long after noon. I found myself watching
it as one might watch a departing lover.
. . . Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and sound-
less. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence - a gentle rhythm, the strain
of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres . . . This is the way the world will look to the last
man when he dies.
The decision to inaugurate an International Geophysical Year in 1957-8 encouraged the Americ-
ans to build up their Antarctic programme. In addition, the Soviets were known to be nurturing
a desire to build a station at the Pole. When the U.S. government learnt of this, the project was
quickly hustled down the corridors of bureaucracy and out on to the ice. The station was completed
in February 1957, and no more was heard of the Soviet plan.