Terra Incognita (45 page)

‘Minus 1.8 degrees Celsius,' he said. The skin around his mouth was numb with cold, and he was talking as if he had just been to the dentist.

‘Look,' he went on, waving a bit of old leather. ‘I found a shoe from Scott's expedition.'

‘If the water temperature is below freezing,' I asked, feeling – and sounding – stupid, ‘why doesn't it freeze?'

‘The salt lowers the freezing point,' said the diver, towelling his hair. ‘The saltier the water, the lower the temperature at which it freezes. That's why you spread salt on highways when it snows – as the salt dissolves, it lowers the temperature at which the water on the road surface freezes.'

A helicopter arrived to whisk the urchins to the aquarium at McMurdo. The shoe went back in someone's pocket.

∗

Day after day Erebus appeared without its swaddling clothes. The absence of wind seemed like a miracle after what we had been through. We began taking the card table outside and eating lunch on the ice. Occasionally the silence was broken by the snort of a seal coming through the grease ice which had formed over the dive holes. It was between a gurgle and a squeal, and when the female seals flopped out, they were so fat they could hardly move. By mid-October there were many seals, especially around Big Razorback and Hutton Cliffs. The temperature in those days might swing between ten above and ten below in twelve hours, and from Wooville we began to see mist rising from open water to the north. Hillocks of snow grew on the sea ice overnight as pressure ridges formed. We sensed that something dramatic was happening to the environment. A visiting climatologist put it like this when he sat on a folding chair at the outdoor card table, looking out at the ice blink on the horizon.

‘You are currently living through the greatest seasonal event on earth, in terms of mass and energy – the growth and decay of Antarctic sea ice.' Put like that, it was apocalyptic.

When sunlight falls on its fissured cliffs, the Barne Glacier is one of the wonders of the natural world, and we never grew tired of looking at it. Lucia was gazing out at it one day through the window next to the long table. Suddenly she winced.

‘I must have some Windex,' she said, narrowing her eyes as if in pain. I began rummaging through the first aid kit in search of an anti-flatulant. But she was only being American. She wanted to clean the window.

An igloo went up in front of the huts, built by a pair of atmospheric scientists who came to stay for a week. They were on holiday, or allegedly taking a break from monitoring the ozone layers in the stratosphere and measuring stratospheric particles that affect ozone depletion by filling balloons with helium and sending them up 100,000 feet. Shortly after they arrived, the pair of them set to and marked out an ambitiously large circle on the ice. This resulted, four days and three nights later, in an astrodome of igloos. As we had only one ice saw, the carving knife was called into service. The entrance was supposed to be facing Scott's hut but, due to an architectural error, it ended up facing the pee flag. The igloo had a carved ice figurehead above the door and a window made out of a disc of ice frozen into shape in the lid of a pan. When it was finished we ate a celebratory meal inside, and then we all slept in it.

∗

In the second half of October the seals pupped. The snow on the sea ice was smeared with blood, and we began to see small brown sausages next to the long grey ones. The pups weighed about forty-five pounds at birth. At two days, they discovered they could bite their own tail flippers. Seal milk has the highest fat content of any vertebrate (approaching seventy per cent), and the pups gained five pounds a day. It was like watching dough rise.

On the night of 22 October I slept outside. There was no wind and the temperature was hovering around zero. The sun set shortly after eleven o'clock, and all night I heard seals calling. The eastern slopes of Erebus were violet at first, and then they were bathed in rosy pink alpenglow, and between two and three o'clock, when the sun rose above Wind Vane Hill, they became sunflower yellow.

Immediately before I awoke, I had a vivid dream. I dreamt I was going to die. I was at home, and everyone was there. There was no panic or fear or sadness, and when I opened my eyes I felt peaceful and happy. It had all seemed so real, and I lay supine in the bag, mummified in polypropylene, wondering what I could deduce from it. After a while, Lucia came out of the hut carrying an insulated mug of coffee. When she saw me there without a book or the creased page of typescript awkwardly wedged between the lip of the bag and my face (an irritating problem I never satisfactorily resolved), she looked surprised.

‘What are you thinking about?' she asked, imagining, no doubt, that I was hatching a plan and that we were about to go careering off to the ice edge or halfway up Erebus.

‘Death,' I said cheerily. ‘Thanks for the coffee.' She withdrew swiftly into the hut.

I had been thinking a good deal about issues of life and death. A friend of mine at home had recently become a Buddhist, and the conversations we had in the Japanese restaurant which lay halfway between our flats had kept coming back to me at Wooville. I realised that my fear of losing my faith was based on another, more primeval fear. It was my own death that was haunting me, of course. Faith enabled me to cope with the concept of mortality, but if I lost faith, how would I live with the treacherous knowledge that I was going to die? If anyone asked, I had always said that I wasn't afraid of dying – but I wasn't being entirely honest. I hadn't confronted it. My friend and I had discussed Buddhist teachings on the acknowledgement and acceptance of mortality. It was a long struggle, but it was infinitely more important than everything else. Yet western culture strives to divert these thoughts and mask the concept of mortality so we don't have to confront it. I believe that if it is not confronted, it will slosh around in the subconscious and manifest itself somewhere, unresolved and in disguise. It might do so in an unnaturally heavy reliance on alcohol, for example. I wasn't sure.

I did know that the marginalisation of spirituality in western culture was a shocking indictment of the society in which I lived. In Greece, on the other hand – a country to which I had always been powerfully attracted – an awareness of spirituality was still as indivisible and natural a part of the landscape as the green waters of the Aegean or the wild thyme on the mountainside. I had learnt a good deal from my peregrinations in Greece, but Antarctica had taken me further. When I looked out of the bag at the opalescent swathes of ice and the ribbons of smoke lazily uncurling from the crater of Erebus, issues involving Orthodoxy or the Tibetan blend of Buddhism and vexing questions of personal morality melted like so many weightless ice crystals.

Antarctica was a cultural void, a space in the imagination like the blank pages of Lucia's sketchbooks. It forced me to begin confronting a fear I had barely acknowledged. Despite everything I had gone through to get where I was – the years of preparation and anxiety – it seemed to me then that the external journey meant nothing at all.

∗

We had all but relinquished our diurnal clues to the summer, and became desynchronised all over again. I caught sight of something in the distance one morning and realised it was a skua. It was like seeing a tree sprouting out of the ice. But it was the skuas' time – they ate the seal placentas.

I was sitting on a folding chair between Wooville and Scott's hut, looking out at the Barne Glacier. The wind had dropped. I suddenly became aware of a thin black line on the snow near the Barne. It was moving. As I sat there, the line grew bigger and coalesced into the form of twenty-four adolescent emperors who were soon waddling around our huts on their horny heels. Much of the ice was scoured clean, and their breasts reflected yolky yellow in the blue surface.

When the seal pups were about ten days old, it was time for their first swim. In an attempt to lure their progeny, the mothers plunged enthusiastically into the holes, bellowing loudly. As the reluctant pups remained doggedly on the ice, their mothers began to sound increasingly exasperated – but they always won in the end. At about this time we had a cold snap. The ambient temperature reached minus thirty, and with windchill we had minus sixty. The antenna broke in eight places, and I got a metal burn on my hand from a wrench. It was like old times.

All too soon, the terrible day came when a Caterpillar arrived to tow away the Clinic. A group of seal physiologists had returned for another season, and they needed their hut. We moved all our gear into the Dining Wing and, cramped as it was, continued to live there. After a week we steeled ourselves to visit the Sealheads. There were four of them, all men, and the Clininic resembled a refugee camp on the war-torn border of an African country.

‘Does it seem different?' they asked as a stack of beer cans toppled over, ripping another animal from the Woo Zoo we had stuck on the wall, beast by beast, throughout our tenure.

‘Yes!' we both said, simultaneously.

‘How?' one of them asked.

‘Well,' I said, ‘you're in it.'

∗

During most of October the sunsets had consisted of a display of shifting colours which lasted for hours. Each night it lingered a little longer over the Transantarctics, and from the window next to the long table we could see, all night, a flaming band of light in the west. On 25 October, for the first time, the sun stayed with us. I no longer needed the Coleman lantern to be able to read at night, and our candlelit dinners were a distant memory. I watched the female seals shrink until their hip bones showed. The poignant beauty of the last weeks was almost unbearable. I knew that I would never live in such splendour again in my life; not if I had a hundred lives. But it was time to go home. The Solarbarn was a small place in which to live and work, and one night I found a napalm tablet for lighting the Preway nestling up against my toothbrush. I was fed up with having willy slits in my longjohns, pee bottles in my pocket and a VHF antenna up my nose. I wanted Cox's apples, the hammock on my roof and a bathroom without a seal in it. I wanted to hear the Whitmanesque roll call of the shipping forecast before I went to sleep: Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Gale Force Nine, Showers, Good.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Talk of ex-soldiers: give me ex-antarctics, unsoured and with their ideals intact. They could sweep the world.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, from
The Worst Journey in the World

W
E JUMPED
over the soft cracks in the snow to reach Scott's hut, and Lucia opened the door with the heavy metal key. It was our last full day at Wooville.

‘Remember –' she began, grinning mischievously.

‘I think we've been through that enough times,' I said. I knew she was about to refer to our first visit to the hut, when I had struggled to pull the wooden bar back from the door before unlocking it. To free up my hands, without thinking I had put the key in my mouth, where it had instantly frozen to my lips. Lucia had been obliged to exhale energetically over my face to unstick the key without the loss of too much of the skin on my lips. No lasting damage had been done, but the image of me parading around Wooville with the key to Scott's hut glued to my mouth had kept Lucia amused throughout our tenure at Cape Evans.

As sunlight poured through the door, crusts of snow gleamed on the shovels hanging in the small vestibule. For no real reason, we wandered through to the stables at the back of the hut. They were under the same roof as the living quarters but separated by internal wooden walls. The first of two openings on the left in the small snowbound vestibule led to a storage area and then the stables. In the second opening they had hung a sturdy wooden door which opened on to the living quarters.

The stables consisted of a row of eight horse stalls of conventional design. Each horse's name had been stencilled at the end of its stall.

‘Abdul,' Lucia read. ‘Is that a common name for an English horse?'

She had an endearing habit of assuming that everything Scott had done, or indeed everything that she observed me doing in our camp, was indicative of activities in which all English people were permanently engaged.

‘No,' I said firmly. ‘I've never heard of a horse called Abdul before.'

She was standing alongside a window at the end of the stable, concentrating on a lightning sketch of the horse stalls. Next to her I noticed the blubber stove where Oates had cooked up bran mashes for the horses. I narrowed my eyes and imagined Oates there – I had seen him standing exactly where she was, in one of Ponting's photographs. He used to sleep in the stables sometimes, to be near the sick ponies during the night. He was much taller than Lucia, but there was something similar in the chiselled nose and high cheekbones.

I waited till she had put her sketchbook back in her pocket. On our way into the main part of the hut, I stopped in the storage area at the large pile of glistening seal blubber, slabbed like peat and stored by Scott's men for winter fuel, and bent down to touch it.

‘It's amazing that it's still tacky,' I said, ‘even after the iron freeze of an Antarctic winter.'

‘It must have smelt gross when the hut was heated,' Lucia said. ‘I don't know how they stood it. Look at those hockey sticks hanging on the wall. I've not noticed them before. That's an idea. We could have had a game of hockey.'

‘Do you think two people can play on their own?' I said, fingering the spokes of a crumbling bicycle hooked on the wall of the passageway between the stable and the main part of the hut.

‘Sure they can!' she said. ‘At Wooville they can, anyway.'

‘Yikes,' I said.