THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1937.
They Won't See Daylight
F
OUR fur clad men, standing at the door of
a tent, looked into the sky--and, for the last
time in five months, gazed on the sun.
It shone only for a fleeting moment, its rays feebly penc- trating an atmosphere in which the temperature was just a point above zero.
Then it set —and darkness- fell.
Those four lone men are not entombed in a mysterioua cavern in the boweln of the earth nor shut off from the world in the remote dungeons of a musty prison. They breathe, walk about, and work in the freest air known-un air in which no germs can live. But they will see no more of the sun for five months than if they were burted in a mine.
BEY are the four Soviet scientists who have done what no other hinaus have ever succeeded in doing lived at the very top of the world. It is true that they have not stayed exactly at the North Pole,, where they first landed, for they and their strange settlement are on an icefoc.
And that foe has drifted with surprising rapidly-half a mile an hour much of the time.
Not so many years ago, such an expedition would have been lost to the world in the obilvion of the Arctic night, and the expedition would have been ignorant of the apprehensions its disappearance and allence might have aroused,
To-day finds the intrepid four- Ivan D. Papanin, chief of the ex- pedition: Ernest T. Krenkel, radio operator; Eugene K. Fyodorov, astronomer and magrietologist and Peter P. Shirahov, hydrobiola- glat-living snugly in shelter constructed especially for them of duralumin, insulated with layers of waterproof rubber, silk and elderdown and of canvas, with- Windows of unbreakable glass. against which the fury of Aretle
Till Next Spring
by SPENCER WILLIAMS
Ivan D. Papanin, chief of the expedition which is now doing what no
other human beings have done before,
gules beats vainly. A kerosene stove, which serves also to cook simple meals from specially made concentrated foods, provides enough heat to make their tent a warm, if somewhat cramped, home,
"W
ARM" la a relativo term. however. The temperature within the shelter is actually about freezing point, kept there deliberately to economise the precious supplies of parafin oil, carefully calculated to last until next spring if sparingly consumed.
Plenty of warm garments and fur covers keep the men's bodies
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warm inside the shelter. Their underwear is made of silk;' their stockings, breeches and sweaters of merino wool; their outer garments of deerskin.
Their assortment of footwear consists of large boots made of felt with 'rubber goloshes fitted on them, high leather boots and deer- skin boots, all of large sizes. They sleep in sleeping-bags made of wolf-skins and elderdown, and they report that they do not feel conscious of the cold, even when. the temperature inside the shelter falls as low as 14 degrees Fahren- helt, when their stove is not work- ing.
Now that the Arctic night has
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descended upon them, their lamps
a.ro
kept burning twenty-four hours a day-or, rather, twenty- four hours a night. Anticipating this period, the wintering party brought a large parcel of books, but they report that though dark- neza has blotted out their view of their own leefoe, they are too busy to find time for reading.
"We can hardly keep up with the job of clearing the snow away from our bases," Papanin has re- "We work at ported to Moscow. least 15 hours a day and sleep
well"
A
*
COMPLAINT is that conditions of work have become much more difficult. They cannot work for a long time outside their tent, for their faces begin to freeze. The wires of their radio apparatus look liko thick white ropes from being heavily coated with frost.
The task of Krenkel, the radio operator, has become both doubly dimcult and doubly important now that the five months' darkness has fallen.
In the morning Krenkel receives wireless messages for members of the group from their homes in Russia and transmits replies to the families, dissipating fears and anxieties.
Krenkel also sends dally a report showing the position of the expe- dition, the weather and wind con- ditions. the temperature and MAR atmospheric pressure. "Night" to the group means those hours when cheerful musical pro- grammes are wafted through the ether.
When sleep overtakes the others. Krenkel attends the wireless and keeps watch. Every hour he makes an inspection of the camp, peering through the darkness at familiar heaps of icc-blocks. The stillness is broken only by the sound of ice cracking somewhere in the dis- tance: It is the duty of, the "watch" to keep an eye out for eracka in their icefloe.
NE ominous crack in the Icefield, near the expe- dition's camp, already nearly 400 yarda wide and several miles long, appeared a week or two ago, and the scientists are giving it their watchful attention to see if it shows a disposition to enlarge.
Plans for a hasty evacuation have been carefully laid should that prove urgently necessary.
But premature-alarm-is-not-al- lowed to upset a routine which keeps every one of the four occu- pled longer than the normal work day.
Shirshov, the biologist, has the most exacting tasks. His day is spent over a hole in the ice, accu- mulating materials for his studles. his hands blue from long exposure to 'ley water,
The men pause in their work for dinner in the mid-after- noon, afterwards rest an hour, before continuing their labours.
When they tire, which is usually about 10 p.m., they drink tex, put on their radio earphones and are linked with the world beyond the barrier of the Arctic silence.
-To-day's Thought- THEIR fame shrinks not to names and dates on votive store, the prey of time.
W. H. VENABLE,
Glacial Camp Discovered.
A camp, of the glacial period (30- 35 thousand years before our era) hay been discovered in the Don river valley in the vicinity of the village Kostensky by an expedition of the Academy of Sciences. A large num- ber of implements and flint articles have been discovered..
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