Antarctica (37 page)

In some sections the glacier was clean blue ice, pitted or smooth, so that they had to stop and put on crampons, and chip-chip-chip on up. Often the blue ice was pitted with regular cusps that resembled suncups in snow, though not so deep; it was like walking across the surface of an enormous golf ball, their ankles twisted to a different resting angle with every step. It was very hard not to sweat, even with the smartfabrics open wide and the ambient temperature well below zero. The sledge clitter-clattered behind Val, tugging hard on her, as if trying to escape and shoot back down the length of the glacier, on a mad luge run into the Ross Sea. Looking around during rest breaks, it was so obvious that the glacier was a stupendous flood streaming down an enormous break in the mountain wall; the curve of the fluid obvious in the many rubble lines marking the surface, or just in the creasing of the ice itself, parallel creases like the lines in a whale’s white belly, all turning together with each sweep down the valley. The trench the glacier had carved was deep; the ranges walling it in were both nearly four thousand meters above sea level, and ten thousand feet above where they were now, so that it felt like being in the bottom of
an enormous slot. Sometimes it seemed it would take weeks to climb out of a box canyon as huge as this one. In their rest stops they exclaimed over it:

“Stupendous!”

“Awesome!”

“Gnarly.”

“Sublime.”

“Big.”

That was Ta Shu. He spent the rests standing off to one side, rotating like a whirling dervish in extreme slow motion, either to give his distant audience a complete three-sixty or simply because he could not take enough in. His low Chinese commentary was like the chirping of invisible birds.

Val kept the rests short, and the hours passed, hour after hour, each one full of effort. They made progress. It was surprising how hot you could get in Antarctica—walking on a kind of mirror, sunblasted from above and below, working very hard. And yet still the potential for chill was always tangible, in the tip of the nose and the ears, and sometimes, if the going was easy, in the fingertips and toes. At one point she checked; it was fifteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and most of the group were still wearing ear bands, so that they could keep their ears from frostbite while still exposing the rest of their heads, which meant they would not sweat profusely in their suits. The head was the key to ther mostatting. Most of them on this day were down to shirts and windpants over the smartfabric longjohns, with the heating elements in their photovoltaic windpants turned all the way off. The gleaming blue-purple fabric complemented nicely the glary turquoise of the ice and the dark cobalt of the cloudless sky. The sky appeared to pulse over the blaze of ice and snow, as if breathing lightly—a phenomenon that Val had long
ago learned to attribute to her own pulse, pounding in her vision somehow. She was working hard, and her clients even harder, but still keeping up. This was the kind of hour she loved; little to worry about with the clients, taxing basic work to do, the mind absorbed in the work and the feelings in her feet and legs and the rest of her body, and in the landscape towering around her as they slowly got higher and higher, with the views correspondingly larger. Sweating, breathing hard, mouth dry; thoughts ricocheting all over the canyon, flying out of it all over the cosmos; but also, for long stretches of time, merged with the ice underfoot and in the ten meters ahead of her, and so happy. The dromomaniac at full stretch.

Her screen data and the view above made it clear they were reaching the foot of the icefall proper. Up there out of sight, sixteen hundred meters higher than they now stood, the ice fell off the polar cap, down a funnel-like head section, channeled between the triangular mass of Mount Don Pedro Christophersen—Amundsen’s financial savior—and the high southern end of the Herbert Range, called Mount Fridtjof Nansen—Amundsen’s patron and friend. With a rock bump in the middle of the funnel, which Amundsen’s group had christened Mount Ole Engelstad, after the Norwegian naval officer who had been Amundsen’s second-in-command until killed by lightning while still back in Norway. Being in good with Amundsen had meant getting some quite amazing peaks named after you, Val thought as she studied the map on the screen.

The Norwegians had been pushed ever rightward in their ascent by the crevasse fields of their time, until they had been forced to climb the funnel on the right side of Mount Engelstad, and only then turn left and south. But Val could see on the screen that the glacier
had changed in the last century; there was a makable route leading off to the left, straight up the more southerly slope. If they went that way it would save them several kilometers, and also save them the ascent of the right side of the funnel, which appeared to be quite a bit more broken up than it had been a century before.

So she waited for everyone to catch up to her, and declared a rest stop. While they were drinking the meltwater out of their arm flasks—which were on the outside of their upper arms, and wired to the photovoltaic elements in their suits so that they melted a pint of water per hour in good sunlight—she showed them what she had seen on her screen. “Maybe we should go left here, directly to Butcher’s Spur.”

“Oh, come on,” Jack said, panting a little—red-faced, dried sweat streaking his cheeks, grinning handsomely at her. “We’ve been sticking to their route through all the other really hard parts, and once we get up to the plateau it’ll be easy from there on to the Pole. Why wimp out now, with just this last stretch to go?”

The others shrugged uneasily, looking at the cracked ice above. Both ways looked bad, to tell the truth. Elspeth muttered something. No one seemed to care that much one way or another.

It was Val’s call, she knew. If conditions in the icefall had changed, enough to make the right-hand route too dangerous, they should go left, and that was it. No one tried to repeat any particular route up an icefall, that would be absurd; icefalls changed every month, and one had to react to that.

Irritated, she looked at the screen again. Hard to tell what it would be like on either side, really, until they tried it. “Let’s set camp for today,” she said finally. “This might be the last flat spot in a long time, and it’s
too late to take on another hard pitch. And I’ll need to think about the route a bit more.”

“Why?” Jack said.

“To see if it will go,” Val said shortly, and went to the sledge and started the work of making camp.

That night in the dining tent they ate for the most part in silence. They were tired, and the crux of their entire trek would be in tomorrow’s climb; and camped right under the slope the foreshortening made the icefalls seem very steep indeed, so that every time they looked outside they were confronted with what they had taken on. Even inside the tent the great broken white wall seemed to be visible to them. It reminded Jack, he said, of the night he had spent at the Hornlihutte on the side of the Matterhorn, looking up at that great spike overhanging them and wondering what he had gotten himself into. “And then we started while it was still dark, and we couldn’t see a thing. I climbed the first hour with my flashlight hanging from my teeth so I could use both hands. But in the end it turned out to be a piece of cake.”

People nodded. It was curious anyone ever boasted, Val thought, considering that no one was ever taken in by it.

“Have you climbed the Matterhorn?” Jack asked her.

“Uh, yeah. Long time ago.”

“The Normalweg?”

“What—the ridge from the hut? No no. We did a traverse that time.”

“Oh yeah—up the Zmutt and down the Lion? I’ve heard that’s great.”

“No, that time we went up the north face and down the south face.”

Jack was taken aback, and he colored a little. “Whoa,” he said. “That must have been radical!”

“Yeah. My partner was five months pregnant at the time, so it was kind of nerve-racking.”

People laughed, and Jack did too, coloring some more as he watched her.

“Like Alison Hargrove!” Elspeth exclaimed, eyes smiling wickedly.

“That’s right. In fact Meg called it doing her Hargrove.”

Like many women climbers Val honored the memory of Hargrove, a Brit who had climbed the north face of the Eiger in a single day while five months pregnant. Later on she had been killed on K2 when her kids were four and six years old, which was a shame. But certainly after that it was hard to do anything as a woman climber that seemed unmaternal in comparison.

Jack abandoned the Matterhorn, and the conversation wandered as they shifted from chili to chocolate, and began to wash the dishes. At one point Elspeth said to Ta Shu, “Butcher’s Spur is where they shot half their dogs, you see.”

“Ah! I see.”

The Norwegians had of course become fond of their dogs by the time they reached this point: each one a hardworking eager enthusiast, like a furry Birdie Bowers. So it had made them melancholy to shoot so many of them. Each man had shot the weakest half of his team, meaning two or three dogs apiece. And so despite the incredible accomplishment of climbing the icefall, the accomplishment that Val’s party still faced—despite making it from sea level to the polar cap in only four days, taking a difficult route never seen before by humankind—they had still had a very, very melancholy evening of it. Not that that had kept them (or the surviving
dogs) from feasting on steaks carved out of their late companions.

“Kind of like cannibalism,” Elspeth said.

“The British killed dogs too,” Jack reminded her. “They wanted to use dogs, they just couldn’t figure out how.”

“And all the while hammering Amundsen for it,” Jim said, shaking his head ruefully. “You know the British Royal Geographical Society finally held a dinner in Amundsen’s honor, years afterward, and the man introducing him ended the introduction by saying ‘I propose three cheers for the dogs!’”

“You’re kidding!” Elspeth said.

“I am not kidding. Lord Curzon, as Amundsen recalled when he wrote about it in his autobiography. He was really pissed off.”

“What did he do?”

“He left after the dinner and went to his hotel, and asked for an apology but never got one. And so he quit the Royal Geographical Society, and never went back to England again.”

“Incredible.”

“There’s no one ruder than the British when they want to be.”

They ate in silence for a while, thinking about it. Val tried to imagine it: the roar of laughter from the British audience, Amundsen furious and humiliated, sitting on the stage unable to move. Quite a scene.

Ta Shu finished a chocolate bar. “These dogs deserved three cheers,” he observed.

“But it was Amundsen who should have toasted them,” Elspeth said.

“He did not get a chance, not then. But other times he always told their importance.”

They sat eating, resting, thinking it over. It was
strange, Val thought, how heavy a mark those first expeditions had left on the people in Antarctica; they composed the continent’s only shared culture, really. No one knew what had happened here in the International Geophysical Year, no one knew what the U.S. Navy years had been like, no one knew the history of the Australian sector, or the Kiwis up at Lake Vanda, or the steady trickle of solo crossings and the like. Nothing remembered but the beginning.

Now Jim said to Ta Shu, “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, about how all our stories have colored lights on them. I know what you mean, and to a certain extent it’s true, of course. But what good historians are trying to do, I think, is to see things in a clear light—see what really happened, first, to the extent possible, and then see how the stories about the events distorted the reality, and why. And when you’ve got all those alternative stories together, then you can compare them, and make judgments that aren’t just a matter of your own colored lights. Not just a matter of temperament. They can be justified as having some kind of objectivity.”

Ta Shu nodded, thinking it over as he jammed down a second helping of chili and camp crackers. He ate, Val thought, like a man who had been seriously hungry at some time in his life.

“A worthy goal,” he remarked between gulps. He got up and went over to the faintly roaring stove to refill his bowl. The others looked at each other.

Under his breath Jack announced, “And there’s your fortune cookie for the day.”

The next morning Val decided to agree to follow the Norwegians’ route. She could see, on both her screen
and when looking up at the ice fall, a makable route to the very far right of the funnel, up and under a small nunatak on the edge of the polar cap called Helland Hansen Shoulder. So she told the others, and Jack nodded complacently, and they packed the camp into the sledge and took off.

It should have been easier than it was. It was the least steep part of the funnel, after all; Val could see why the Norwegians had trended to this side. But something—perhaps the slight lowering in the height of the polar cap, reducing the thickness of the glacier’s upper section—had caused the ice across the whole chute to break up. Possibly it was crossing an underice rock ridge between Mount Engelstad and the Hansen Shoulder, for it looked on the map like they might be two exposed parts of a curved saddle overrun by ice.

In any case, it was very hard going. They zigged and zagged, from one narrow ramp or block of ice up to the next, sometimes crossing snow bridges over narrow crevasses, other times physically hauling the sledge over even narrower breaks in the ice, all of them pulling together. In sections like these the Norwegians had each dealt with their own sledges and dogs, and reported in their journals that they had become quite calloused to the incessant danger below; they photographed each other straddling crevasses to look down into them, or eating lunch with their feet hanging over the edges of them. But the NSF would not of course sanction any such cavalier approach, and in zones as fractured as these Val’s group had to rope up and treat it like any other serious climb, which was only appropriate. So Val went ahead and screwed in ice screws, and belayed the others up and over any serious exposure; then they hauled up the sledge; then she went back down to remove the ice screws, and climbed back up again and
carried on. It was slow work, and hot and cold in turns, depending on whether they were making adrenalated climbing moves or standing around stamping their feet waiting for the others to do the same. Even the smartfabrics were not up to that kind of alternation, and as the sun wheeled over and stood right at the top of their route, blazing down at them in a photon deluge, the temperature differentials became more and more extreme and uncomfortable; a hundred degrees of subjective difference between sun and shade, one’s face and one’s back; and nearly two hundred degrees’ difference between work and rest. Even Val was uncomfortable, and this was really what she loved doing above all else. If she had been without clients, alone or with other climbers, she would have been in that state of hyper-alert attuned-to-landscape no-mind that was the zen of climbing, the great joy of it, the source of the addiction. As it was, however, the objective dangers underfoot were great enough to put her in a high state of apprehension for her clients’ sake. A guide was only as happy as her least happy client, and right now she was surrounded by a bunch of frost-flocked insect-eyed mute people, Ta Shu and Jack enjoying themselves, the rest really eager for this part to be over.