— and again the slope refuses to read, the compass dragging maybe four degrees off whatever the chart wants it to be, so we stopped under the lee wall and I let the tape run while [14:08 — radio cuts] tried to raise camp III again with no answer, only that thin ionised hiss the laminate hisses with when the sun catches the foil wrong. The basin opens west of here in a long shallow bowl, no horizon, no shadow to gauge depth by, and at [redacted] metres the wind comes in from below somehow, which I have never been able to write down without sounding wrong on paper. We pinned the second plate to the rock with a beacon clip because the wax wouldn't hold against the cold — everything on the surface here is cold, every ink, every glove, every breath I record back into this tape is colder than it left me. I keep coming back to the third corrected coordinate, the one [14:19 — faint signal] crossed out twice in red, because if it was right then we walked over it at first light and saw nothing, no cairn, no marker, just the rim of a slope that didn't exist on the older sheet. The editor will scratch this passage, I expect. I am leaving it on the tape anyway, because the chrome of the case will outlive the writing on it, and whoever finds the laminate next will at least have the sound of someone who was here saying [redacted] was here, and that the basin did not give the coordinates back —
Daitoua Expeditionary Society / debrief surface 04
DAITOUA
QUEST
basin N 27°58′[REDACTED] / cirque E 088°[REDACTED] / alt 6 200 m
recovered tape, lamination still warm —kit plate — 01 / pickaxe
stem cracked — replaced 14:22kit plate — 02 / beacon
battery 38% — cold droptopo strip / camp III → col
do NOT cross before 04:30
wind 38kt — repeat
radio frequency log
- 14:02147.420CARRIER
- 14:08147.420CUTS
- 14:11149.880SCAN
- 14:19151.205FAINT
- 14:24[----]NULL
- 14:33147.420RETURN