The Ice Museum (2 page)

Under the snow, the ice land is an anonymous world, the trees stripped of colour. The frost breath of the wind makes me blink, the frigid air rips at my lungs. The fjord is frozen, the trees are silver splinters.

I was travelling through northern lands, compelled by the endless indeterminacy of a myth: the land of Thule—the most northerly place in the ancient world. Before the regions north of Britain were mapped, there was a dream of a silent place, where the inhabitants lived under darkened skies through the winter, and enjoyed constant sunshine in the summer. A land near a frozen ocean, draped in mist. Thule was seen once, described in opaque prose, and never identified with any certainty again. It became a mystery land, standing by a cold sea. A land at the edge of the maps.

A Greek explorer, Pytheas, began the story: he claimed to have reached Thule in the fourth century B.C. He had sailed from the sun-drenched city of Marseilles to Britain. He sailed up to the north of Scotland, and then sailed onwards for about six days into the remote reaches of the ocean, until he sighted a land called Thule. There, so the story goes, the inhabitants showed him where the sun set on the shortest day. In the winter, the land was plunged into darkness. Near Thule, the sea began to thicken, and Pytheas saw the sea, sky and land merging into a viscous mass, rising and falling with the motion of the waves. He turned away from the seething semi-solid ocean, and sailed back to Marseilles.

Where was Thule? The question perplexed the ancient geographers, as they fashioned their fantastical maps—imagining the known world encircled by an impassable river, or crisscrossed by vast belts of water from Pole to Pole and around the equator. There were contenders throughout history—Iceland, Scandinavia, Britain—but the precise location of Thule was never categorically determined. Thule remained a mystery—an island, shrouded in a mist, standing on the edge of a frozen ocean.

Pliny the Elder described Thule as the ‘most remote of all those lands recorded,' a place where ‘there are no nights at midsummer when the sun is passing through the sign of the Crab, and on the other hand no days at midwinter, indeed some writers think this is the case for periods of six months at a time without a break.' Virgil called it Ultima Thule—farthest Thule—emphasizing its remoteness, its status as the shadowy last country of the northern world. Strabo poured scorn on the idea. Pytheas—a charlatan, wrote Strabo—had made up a load of fiction about the north, and Thule was just one among the mass of lies and fables he had spun. He had said that Thule was six days' sail north of Britain, which was absolutely impossible, Strabo insisted. It was obvious that Britain was the most northerly inhabited land in the world, a place where the inhabitants lived in misery because of the cold. Only Ireland was more miserable, Strabo thought, where everyone lay with their sisters and ate their parents.

With each new discovery in the north the name of Thule was evoked. The Romans reached the north of Britain, and claimed they had conquered Thule. The scholar Procopius thought Thule was in Scandinavia, and wrote garbled anthropologies of the Thulitae, the inhabitants of the vast country of Thule. In search of a retreat, clerics from early medieval Ireland sailed to Iceland—a land they thought was Thule—and brought back stories of a place where hermits clung to sea-lashed rocks, and cried for the forgiveness of their God. The Venerable Bede called Iceland Thule, as did King Alfred of England. The medieval German poem “Meregarto” described Thule as a place where the sun never shone, and the ice became as hard as crystal, so the inhabitants could ‘make a fire above it, till the crystal glows.' Petrarch mused on where it might be; the cartographer Mercator fixed Thule at Iceland. Christopher Columbus claimed he had been there, long before he arrived in America. As the lands of the north were mapped—Iceland, Scandinavia, Britain, Greenland, the Baltic coast—the name of Thule was moved around, from Iceland to Norway, from northern Britain to the tip of Greenland. Northerly latitude was enough, a midnight sun and a frozen ocean still more persuasive.

Ultima Thule, distant island, place of dreams, but disconcerting and somehow strange—writers flung the words into their verse and prose, drawing on their resonance. A few scholars tried to find the solution in the meaning of the word “Thule,” stacking up their definitions, squabbling about Old Norse and Phoenician meanings. Some said Thule might have come from the Old Norse for frozen earth or tree or from the Old Irish for silent or from the Old Saxon for limit or from the Arabic for far off. But no one could decide for certain; eventually most seemed to agree that the origin of the word was unknown. The spelling of Thule was inconsistent through the ages: Thule, Thulé, Thula, Thyle, Thile, Thila, Tyle, Tila, Tylen and Tilla, among others. Faced with the subject of the pronunciation of Thule, the scholars shrugged their shoulders. Some said ‘Toolay,' some said ‘Thoolay,' a very few said ‘Thool.' Poets rhymed Thule with newly, truly and unruly, but never, it seemed, with drool.

Mist, sea and land, a frozen ocean, a midnight sun in the summer, a twilight sky throughout the winter. Pytheas's account of his journey was lost, and no one could decide where Thule might have been. It left the story of Thule as a glimpse of a distant land. It was an empty page, its silent rocks inviting interpretation. Gradually, through countless verses and learned hypotheses, Thule became a symbol of remoteness, of the shadowy world of the north. Nothing could be known for certain about Thule, and so the word was drawn into imaginative histories, poems, novels and explorers' accounts. It was worshipped and parodied, cited in stanzas and used for rhetorical phrases. Thule was entwined with thousands of years of fantasies about what might lie beyond the edges of the maps. As the maps came to cover the world, Thule was bound up with the crusades of modern exploration.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as more and more travellers set off for the remote north, Thule recurred in explorers' accounts: Fridtjof Nansen from Norway, Richard Burton from Britain, Vilhjalmur Stefansson from Canada, Knud Rasmussen from Denmark all sounded the cry Thule, as they travelled across the Arctic. Imaginative explorers filled in the blank moment of arrival with a devout incantation. Where the ice stretched away, and the birds plunged and dived, crying into the cold air, the explorers remembered Thule, pinning the word to the empty wilderness.

 
 
I found Thule as a curious footnote, a detail that enticed me. I was working in an office in London, dreaming of escaping the city. The crowds were grinding me down; it was a common complaint, but I found I could hardly board a tube. I had lost the will to push myself forward, and as spring broke across the grey-fronted houses I knew I had to leave. I was not vehemently anti-city; in the evenings when the crowds had become more shambling and slow-paced I liked to wander through the centre, from the South Bank to the City, along the Strand, past the fractured façades of the old buildings. I liked the incongruous noises outside my window in the mornings—a solitary bird trilling like a soloist, above an accompaniment of cars and trains. At weekends I sat in parks, reading the papers, staring at the city shimmering under smog. But I was tired of standing in an endless sea of people. I wanted to walk through empty serenity and hear nothing but the thump of my feet on the rocks.

I knew about the idea of Thule from earlier reading. I remembered it as a plain white place, a land that was startling and strange. But I hadn't known there was a US air base called Thule, and it was this that set me thinking about the far north. Thule Air Base was in northern Greenland, and had been a staging post for nuclear bombers during the Cold War. It was—when I read the article—being upgraded, as part of America's new missile defence system. It had seen off one threat, the threat of war between the USSR and the USA, and now it was part of a new sense of security concerns. Thule Air Base was the most northerly listening post of a vast military empire. A military base called Thule, nuclear bombers in the remote north, military waste spreading across the silent ice. It was a potent idea; it intrigued me as I read. I thought of this camp, at nearly eighty degrees north, in the most northerly land in the world.

It was around that time that I regained an earlier obsession with polar exploration. It was an old interest of mine; I had always enjoyed an Arctic saga, but I began to buy them in bulk. There was something about the starkness of life in the snow, the terrible risks of travelling across ice plains, that seemed to supply a release from the sameness of my days, the relentless round of my hours. Leafing through explorers' accounts, I read about Thule again. The old fantasy of a remote northern land appeared in a book by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the story of his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1893. As a way to draw the reader in, to emphasize the significance of his journey, its place in polar history, Nansen added Thule to the narrative. For Nansen, Thule meant the grandeur of the ice, the pure beauty of the northern landscape. It was a land obscured by mists, standing somewhere in the northern ocean.

Each day, I took another explorer into the packed carriages, flicking through another attempt to shade in a few more blanks on the maps. My mounting fascination supplied a sense of purpose, something I had lost in my dislocated progress round the city. I thought of plains of ice, snowscapes and glaciers shining under a pale sun. As the crowds swelled into the underground, I thought of emptiness, barren rocks washed by a clear blue sea, the long shanks of ancient mountains. I had travelled and lived in the far north; I knew that the ragged mountains and cold fjords still supplied the consolations of a perfect view, the tranquillity of slowness, and I longed to set out for them.

On this theme of Thule, I started compiling notes, scribbling down quotations as I read through books. A long line of philosophers, poets, advocates and detractors referred fleetingly to Thule, from Boethius to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mostly they cast it in a cameo, adding the word to a line of their prose or verse, using it to evoke pallor and the north. Alexander Pope wrote a slapstick interlude in “The Dunciad,” in which a fire was extinguished with a dank and clammy page of a poem about Thule. Charlotte Brontë put Thule into a gothic scene, as Jane Eyre sits, abandoned by her relatives, dreaming alone on a rain-drenched afternoon. She is reading a book about the Arctic; a reference to the lonely rocks of Thule sets her off into a wild transport, as she conjures the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with ‘the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the Pole, and concentre the multiplied rigors of extreme cold.' Thule was the symbol for all of this, Brontë thought, all these dreams of beauty and fears of desolation. From Julius Caesar to Edgar Allan Poe, Thule suggested cold silent plains, the blank spaces of the remote northern lands, awaiting discovery and interpretation. ‘. . . To the west, to Hesperian darkness, and the shores of barbarian Thule,' wrote William Godwin, in
Caleb Williams
. ‘A wild weird clime,' Edgar Allan Poe called it, a land on the way to night, a strange unworldly place.

Thule appeared in fairytales, in children's fables. Through the years, a complete cast of fantasy Thulean inhabitants appeared in verse: there was a ‘King of Thule,' a ‘Lord Archbishop of Thule' who preached to ‘elfin legions,' there were ‘children of wild Thule' who lived in the deep caves of the northern sea, and there was the Queen of Bubbles living in her caves on the coast of Thule. Thule came to stand in for anything superlative, any finest example of its type. So e e cummings wrote of the ‘Ultima Thule of plumbing,' and Cecil Day Lewis wrote of trains drawing out from a terminus, ‘snorting towards an Ultima Thule.' It could be anywhere remote, so Thomas Hardy talked about Thule as the geographical antithesis of London, and Anthony Trollope described Penzance as ‘your very Ultima Thule.' By then, Thule was so hoary and established that you could play with it, laugh a little at its antiquity and resonance.

In the twentieth century, Thule told a changing story. For thousands of years, no one had known what lay in the ice around the North Pole. During the twentieth century the most northerly places had been mapped and seen, a slow line of explorers with sledges and planes had arrived onto the ice. Lands draped in shadows for thousands of years had been drawn into the light. Fantasy had been replaced by knowledge. It was a desperate struggle, filled with uncertainty. For generations it was thought that the American Robert Peary had been the first man to reach the North Pole by land, arriving there in 1909. Later, Peary's account was questioned: his skiing was too fast; his diary had perhaps been doctored. In 1926, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, with his companions Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile, flew above the Arctic ice in an airship, dropping flags onto the North Pole. They saw the Pole, but they didn't land on the ice. In 1948, a Russian expedition, led by Alexander Kuznetsov, landed an aircraft and walked the last steps to the North Pole. If Peary's detractors were right, Kuznetsov's team would have been the first to stand at the Pole, fifty years after Nansen had come home. And if Peary had never arrived, it would have been as late as 1969 that the first overland ski and sledge expedition reached the Pole, led by a British explorer, Wally Herbert. It was in the same year that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The northerly regions remained distant and inaccessible throughout most of the twentieth century, even as the focus turned to space travel.

Now, you could fly to the North Pole if you had the resources and mass tourism had made incursions into the northern lands. You could take a tour of Greenland and Svalbard, for the pleasures of the white mountains, the Northern Lights or the midnight sun. Wilderness treks set out across the interior of Iceland. Norway was a winter playground, offering dog sledging, reindeer herding, skiing; and in the summer the coast was full of slow-moving ferries, bringing tourists to the north. These mysterious lands, once untouched, then barely known, were now trading on their ancient credentials: their purity, their emptiness, their beauty. There was an industry in Thules—Thule tours, Thule gear, Thule knitwear shops, Thule cruises. Typing in Thule on the Internet released an array of Thule companies touting for trade, offering the sublime experience of northern wilderness. I knew that things were changing in the north. I knew there was a sombre theme in reports from the Arctic—the suggestions of climate change, the glaciers haemorrhaging ice into the fjords, the heat of the sun scalding explorers. The dour predictions hardly stopped the Thule tours; the intimations of pending destruction failed to dampen the longing for empty nature.