So many things could have happened to him in the five months since he was left here.  Though he had been fit and strong except for frostbite in his toes and though he couldn’t have caught any infectious disease on the lifeless ice cap, he might have fallen to some organic illness and died alone in terrible pain.  Or when he could still go out to make scientific observations before the weather had locked him in, he might have strayed too far from the tent (half a dozen paces would be enough in an Arctic storm) and been unable to find his way back, to perish quickly of exposure.  Or later, after the tent was submerged but if the ventilator pipe had got blocked with snow, he might have been poisoned by carbon monoxide from his stove.

Imprisoned all those months in a tiny cell below the surface where they now stood, a man’s body could just have survived.  But what of his mind?

They didn’t stand there long.  The tent in its cave of snow blocks, with two small igloo for stores, had sunk under a snow-drift that rolled to the horizon and hundreds of miles beyond.  But rising above the surface near the scrap of flag were the tops of some meteorological instruments and the handle of a spade.  More important, an inch or two of brass pipe was visible.  If the ventilator was still clear above the drift, there was hope for the man below. Dancing on Ice, Jeremy Scott

His tent, at an altitude of 9,000ft was a canvas dome ten feet across and six feet high, which was hung by tapes from a frame of curved bamboo ribs.  A ventilator pipe went up from the top and an outer tent hung over the whole.  Here August would dress up every three hours and crawl through the tunnel to take weather readings from his instruments outside, constantly having to unblock the tunnel with his frost-bitten fingers and toes from the snow which ceaselessly filled it.

The walls, bulging inward from the weight of snow, were lined with hoar frost that hung in icicles, reducing the space further; they drifted and pieces dropped on him in the dark.  Condensation turned to ice in his sleeping bag, so that his feet froze and he had to warm them with his hands”.
August was down to two ounces of food a day…
Inside his tent he read books which had been left by previous occupants, as well as his own: Guy Mannering, Moby Dick, Jane Eyre and his favourite poem Joseph Conrad.  He planned the perfect boat for when he got home, played chess against himself, thought up meals he would have when food was once more not just a question of pemmican and pea flour and wrote messages to Mollie in his diary.

AUGUST’S JOURNAL:  “Outside when the wind wasn’t blowing, it was amazingly still.  The only thing you could hear was the blood pounding in your ears.  Far in the sky, the Northern Lights waved and shimmered.  At times they looked like waving curtains; at others like beams of hidden searchlights.  All around it was utterly flat; in every direction snow stretched to the horizon like the sea.  There was no life on the ice-cap.  I never saw a bird or even a fly”.

“But as each month passed without relief I felt more and more certain of its arrival.  By the time I was snowed in, I had no doubts on the matter, which was a great comfort to my mind.  I will not attempt any explanation of this, but leave it as a fact, which was very clear to me during that time, that while powerless to help myself, some outer force was in action on my side and I wasn’t fated to leave my bones on the Greenland ice-cap”.

AUGUST COURTAULD, 5TH MAY 1931

AUGUST’S JOURNAL: “Why is it that men come to these places?  So many reasons have been ascribed to it.  In the old days it was thought to be a lust for treasure, but the treasure is gone and still men wander.  Then it was a craving for adventure.  There is precious little adventure in sledging or sitting on an ice cap.  Is it curiosity, a yearning to look behind the veil on to the mysteries and desolation of nature in her forlorn places?  Perhaps, but that is not all.  Why leave all whom we love, all good friends, all creature comforts, all mindly joys, to collect a little academic knowledge about this queer old earth of ours?  What do we gain?

Do we infact morally bury ourselves in fleeing from the world?  Do we simply rot or grow rank like some plant thrown over the garden wall?  Or do we come nearer to reality, see more clearly the great purpose behind it all, in stripping our souls of the protection of our friends and in putting from us the pleasures of the body?  How little the worries of the world seem to one in a situation such as this; how grand and awful the things that are here, the things that grip the heart with fear, the forces that spin the universe through space.  In leaving behind the transitory hopes and fears of pathetic humanity, does one become closer to the things that abide, the things that endure?..”