ICE MEN OF THE NEW AGE

Radio Record, 25 March 1938, Page 8

ICE MEN OF

THE NEW AGE

IYING in underground caves of ice ‘beneath the great Arctic Cap, young explorers risked their lives to gather radio and meteorological data. They lived for ten months this strange life beneath the ice, while all the affairs of the everyday. world became a fantastic dream, and only the great forces of Nature were the reality.

By

WILL

GRAVE

N the frozen wastes uf the Arctic, the scientists risk their lives in pursuit of meteorological data. Radio is their.sole means of communicating with civisisation. After writing these lines in a "Record" article

only a few weeks ayu on those twentieth century prophets, the meteorologists, |] stumbled on the strange tale of nine young Britons and one Norwegian, none of them over 30, who lived for a zy... fF.

JU TROULIS VULIV --E uuder the ice near the North Pole. They were the Oxford University Arctic Kxpedition of 1935-36, formed to collect wireless and meteorolcgical data. ‘Cheir queer history is told in a book, "Under the Polar Star, by A. It. Glen and N. A. C. Croft, just published by Methuen. TPO collect their datu they had to establish observation stations among the snow and blizzards of the central ice cap. Since no human beings could live on the surface of these deathly cold plateaux, they had to try to live below the surface. They became human Polar nioies. Above them was the snow white waste of the Arctic , that had frozen many explorers to death. But the meu under the surface had to take off their clothes at times because they felt the heat. Spoke To London PUL men in the underworld of ice could not risk installing a motor generator for transmitting their wireless ulessages to the outside world. The cayern in which they lived was too small for it, the fumes dangerous. They solved the problem by making an apparatus like a bicycle. The explorers sat in the saddle and worked the pedals with their feet. They spoke to London and were answered. ALLED in by the ice they listened to the radio with its news of wars and threats of war. How far those threats of war in 1935-36 already seem to-day with its newer problems-and they listened to jazz and the fat stock prices. That was a quecr experience, uo doubt. One can picture them listening to the tinkling of a Hawaiian guitar that plays the music of the languorous tropics where the heat makes the shirt stick to one’s back. And above the

listeners is the great white desert of the ice. One ean see them listening to the kot rhythm of ihe danee musie from the Berkeley cr Savoy in their small human ice ehest where in the silence, when the ‘edio Was switched off, here was such utter quiet that the tekine of 2 noiseless cloel

was noticeable, a wrist-wateh beat like a hammer, and dreps of water, melted from the reef by the heat of the candle, would fall with a erash.

This may sound like exaggeration. One doesn’t, you say, lear drops of waiter fall with a

crash. UT there is an auswer to that. The world of silence in which these men lived was utterly different from the world of everyday. It was a world in which the senses were infinitely sharpened. I have no doubt that they heard the crash of drops of water just as when terrified in darkness one hears the hammer-beats of one’s heart. : Like The Old Mystics N the strange ice cave, as time went on, the men underwent an extraordinary psychological change. That. too. is perfectly logical. It was this change of the mind, I have uo doubt, that Byrd sought when he went to live alone some years ago near the South Pole, and people in New Zealand called nint evazy. It was the same change that the old mystics sought when they lived fasting and solitary for weeks, away from the everyday world. . Lawrence of Arabia sought it when he rode on a cane! on the heights of Asia Minor, with no one who spoke his ‘anguage and only his Arabs about him, and that he seught again when he threw in his hand and, turning his back on the honours he might have gathered in, began life again as the unknown Aircraftsman Shaw, OR the men in the cave their world of ice and snow became the normal, and the world that radio brought them-of fat stock prices and threats of war and the hot rhythm of the dance bands-became the unreal and the fantastic. The roar of the wind, the flapping of the ropes on ihe wireless masts, and the eracking of their frozeu windproofs were more normal to them than the rumble of traffie, the screech of brakes and the hooting of horns. They had fitted themselves out in (Contd. on page 88).

New Ice-Age Men. ee Arctic Explorers. (Continued from page 8). England at a cost of £4000 and set out for North East. Land, off Spitz bergen, only 500 miles from the North Pole. On North Fast Land there was nothing, so they had to take with them everything. Biscuits, ham, sewing machines, wireless sets, dental forceps, pencils. They were going to set up house with no store round the corner. Only two or three meu at a time were to liye under the ice. The rest would do other work from the shore base. THE first thing they did was to hack a hole just deep enough to set up a large test below the surface. The tent was rapidly covered by blizzard snow, which froze solid. As winter went on the tent became more deeply buried in the snow, with exploration passages dug down to & depth .of seventy feet in the ice, There was nothing to be seen on the surface in the waste of snow except 2 small tube puffing up steam-the yentilator. Keeping Cool. HB observers sat in their tent. It was quiet. They did not have to use the stove permanently as the heat from the lamp was enough to keep the inside of the tent comfortable. Such was the insulating property of the snow that the problem was often how to keep cool. They set about cutting underground passages, food stores, fuel stores in the ice. They formed a miniature village. VERY now and again the silence was broken by a terrifying firnstoss, or ice-quake. The effect was that of an express train rushing through a_ tunnel, The faint rumble increased to a crash as it tore below, and then died into the final silence. To hear it for the first time was fearsome, for it sounded like the collapse of some gigantic internal chasm. The men tunnelled deeper into the ice than ever man had done _ before Their courage was rewarded by a discovery of notable importance. They found lakes of running water under the ice. It had always been thought before that the Arctic ice-cap was solid. AY, HEN the time came for the expedition to sail away back to civilisation these new men of the Ice Age thought of coming back to night clubs, business, taxis-London, It all seemed different from before. The ice-cap had existed for 50,000 years, and would probably continue as long again. Their influence was a minute scratch on something vaster than their minds could hold, They had been changed by the ice. ° Gne could wish that the world’s dictators, strutting in the trappings of power over men, could live’ for a time under the simplicitude and solitude that is the power of the ice.