Terra Incognita (16 page)

This was all frightening enough, but it grew much worse when the Nomadic Thoughts arrived at their favourite watering-hole. Everything was all right, of course, if God was in his heaven; as the Catholic Church used to preach in the South American slums before Vatican Two in the sixties, ‘Life in this world is a piece of shit but shut up and put up with it because in the next world everything will be fine.' (I admit they didn't actually preach that overtly, but it was what they meant.) I have never had any trouble with faith. I have believed in God for many years. It was a God who constantly redefined himself as I staggered through my life, and he seemed to live inside me, rather than in heaven or on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He did not, of course, have a long white beard. If any of the radio journalists had asked me directly: ‘What are you frightened of?' – I could have told them immediately, in three words. ‘Losing my faith.' I had experienced intimations of it when the teabag man and the smeared window of the day centre and the AIDS ward supply-line led me too far down the long, unwinding road of despair. All I can tell you is that I felt the white heat of terror then, and the idea that a gang of Bolivian truck drivers could provoke a similar response was like suggesting that if I attached wings to my skis I could take off and fly back to McMurdo.

In Antarctica I experienced a certainty amid the morass of thoughts and emotions and intellectual preoccupations seething inside my balaclava'd head. It was what I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. It wasn't an answer, or the kind of respite offered by a bottle of calamine lotion on sunburn. It was something that put everything else – everything that wasn't Antarctica – in true perspective. I felt as if I was realigning my vision of the world through the long lens of a telescope. It emanated from a sense of harmony. The landscape was intact, complete and larger than my imagination could grasp. It was free of the diurnal cycle that locked us earthlings into the ineluctable routine of home. It didn't suffer famines or social unrest. It was sufficient unto itself, and entirely untainted by the inevitable tragedy of the human condition. In front of me I saw the world stripped of its clutter: there were no honking horns, no overflowing litter bins, no gas bills – there was no sign of human intervention at all.

You might ask why I didn't go to the Yorkshire moors or the Nevada desert if ‘all' I wanted was pristine nature. It would have been a lot easier. I had been to those places, and many others, but it was the scale, the unownedness, and the overpowering beauty that made Antarctica different and diverted the Nomadic Thoughts. It wasn't a permanent diversion. I knew I would meet my demons again and again before my life ended. Still, I glimpsed a world in which everything made sense. God didn't appear to me in any particular shape or form – if anything he became even more nebulous. But I heard the still small voice. I had never known certainty like it. I felt certain that a higher power exists, and every soul constitutes part of a harmonious universe, and that the human imagination can raise itself beyond poverty, social condemnation and the crushing inevitability of death. For the first time in my life, I didn't sense fear prowling around behind a locked door inside my head, trying to find a way out. It was as if a light had gone on in that room, and I had looked the beast in the eye.

It happened in a second. I've noticed that it is often the seconds which matter. They can be far more important than the hours. Reason is too lumbering a faculty to operate in seconds, and it leaves the way clear for instinct, or for nothing at all except a bit of psychic energy flying across a synapse. The glimpse left me with a deep and warm sense of calm and mental well-being, like the cosmic glow after some astronomical phenomenon.

CHAPTER SIX

Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority . . . Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it.

From Scott's diary, January 1912

T
HE ONLY
other passenger on the fuel flight to the South Pole was a physicist in his late twenties from Boston. On the way to the ice runway he told me that he had been south before, and was about to spend a year at the Pole, a prospect which filled him with great joy. He reminded me of an overgrown puppy.

The sun was shining, and the ice runway was pitted with waterholes. The following day, 17 December, air operations were shifting to the firmer skiway at Willy Field. We picked our way over to a metal hut on stilts containing a drum of drinking water, a quantity of padded blue plastic chairs, the usual bewildering array of rubbish bins and a box of yellow earplugs. The walls were bare except for two brightly coloured waste management posters, and the blue lino floor was smudged with dirty snow. When we had settled down, the physicist handed me a photograph of his telescope at the Pole. He was carrying a stash of them in his pocket.

We could see our plane squatting on the ice, attached to umbilical tubes of fuel and tended by diminutive khaki figures. After an hour, the pilot arrived and announced that we were ‘all set'. We made our way over to the steps of the Hercules. On the Flight Information board in the hold it said, ‘Only eight shopping days till Christmas.' As we belted up in the red webbing seats, the pair of us alone in the cavernous fuselage, a crewman appeared and said, ‘As far as emergency exits go, if you have to, get out any way you can.'

They ushered me up to the flight deck immediately after take-off, and there I stayed for the whole journey. A crewman gave me a styrofoam cup of coffee, and on the side he wrote ‘850 miles to go'. We flew towards the Beardmore Glacier over a window in the clouds, and up ahead the tips of the Transantarctics pierced the stratocumulus. Scott and his party walked up the Beardmore to get through to the plateau, and it had become a potent name in the shaping of the legend: Nancy Mitford called her chilly upstairs lavatory the Beardmore. It was hot in the cockpit, and I fell asleep for a while, images of small figures and cold Edwardian porcelain flashing through my dreams.

The ten men of the Ross Sea party had manhauled upwards of 1,500 miles over that stretch of the continent, some of them without washing or changing their clothes for two years, and on that ice they had laid depots for men who never came; depots which were still there, strung out for 400 miles. They were members of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and their party, led by one-eyed Aeneas Mackintosh, were storing supplies from the coast to the base of the Beardmore Glacier for six men, led by Shackleton, who were supposed to be marching across from the other side. At Cape Evans I had seen a cross to the three who had stayed in the Antarctic; Wind Vane Hill, they called it. Back at home, nobody ever carved statues of the Ross Sea party to adorn public squares. It was partly because the survivors got home in the middle of the Great War.

Like Scott, they didn't feel they had struggled in vain. Dick Richards, the party's physicist, wrote later, ‘That the effort was unnecessary, that the sacrifice was made to no purpose, in the end was irrelevant. To me, no undertaking carried through to conclusion is for nothing. And so I don't think of our struggle as futile. It was something that the human spirit accomplished.'

On 6 May 1915, before they had unloaded all their supplies, the ship blew away. They had to make trousers out of canvas tents left in the Cape Evans hut by Scott. Later, Mackintosh fell sick, and another man, Ernest Joyce, took over the leadership by default. He was a complicated character whom Shackleton engaged after seeing him ride past the expedition office in London on top of a number 37 bus. (Exactly how this occurred, I cannot say. I like to think of Shackleton glancing out of the office window and, as he catches sight of Joyce riding contentedly past on the top deck, being struck by inspiration. Recognising his man, Shackleton sprints after the bus until he is able to leap on and collar the hapless Joyce.) Mawson almost took Joyce south in 1911, but there was a row about Joyce's drinking in Tasmania, so he wasn't asked. On the first page of his book,
The South Polar Trail
, Joyce says that the hardships ‘were almost beyond human endurance'. ‘If there is a hell,' he wrote, ‘this is the place, and the sleeping bags are worse than hell.'

Twenty-five months after they had left the fleshpots of civilisation, Shackleton came to get them, aboard
Aurora
. They never forgot what they had endured. In a footnote to his text, Joyce said that when they got home they were frequently invited to festivities in London which went on into the early hours, and afterwards they would find destitute people on the Embankment ‘and line [them] up at the coffee stalls'. When he was ninety, Dick Richards said that he hadn't yet recovered.

There was a padre with them, Spencer-Smith, who died of scurvy after weeks lashed to the sledge, often unconscious. Then, when they had laid the depots and got back to Hut Point, Mackintosh, who had recovered, and V. G. Hayward, who was in charge of the dogs, their minds fogged by suffering, set out across the fragile ice for the other hut at Cape Evans. They were never seen again. It has been said that Shackleton made a rare error of judgement in choosing Mackintosh. He might have done so out of loyalty, because Mackintosh had lost his eye on Shackleton's previous expedition, aboard
Nimrod
.

When I woke up, I had spilled the coffee over my windpants. The crew were pointing out of the window. I looked out too, but I couldn't see anything. Then I spotted a smudge. It was a small patch of snow groomed as a skiway, and a cluster of black dots. Feeling confused, I looked at my watch. It had taken three hours.

The first thing I saw when we landed was a twelve-foot poster-board of Elvis and a signpost marked ‘Graceland'. The geodesic dome in the middle of the station flashed in the bright sunlight. It was very noisy when we climbed down the steps, as it was too cold to shut down the engine, and the snow was knuckle-hard. A man approached me, bulky as a yeti.

‘Welcome to South Pole,' he shouted in my ear, and together we walked down through a tunnel into the dome beneath a sign announcing that the United States too was welcoming me to Amundsen-Scott Station. My heart was beating fast, due either to excitement or lack of oxygen, and I sat drinking weak tea in the galley with the puppy-like physicist.

Later, the yeti directed me to a Jamesway ten minutes' walk from the dome. When I got there, I lay down on my bed and tried to think about where I was.

‘The South Pole', says a character in Saul Bellow's novel
More Die of Heartbreak
, ‘gives a foretaste of eternity, when the soul will have to leave its warm body.' At another point he says, ‘There you saw as nowhere the features of the planet in pure forms and colours.' In reality the only two colours were white and blue – but I liked the sentiment. In Thomas Pynchon's first novel,
V
, published in 1963, a man makes this statement about the Pole. ‘But I had to reach it. I had begun to think that there, at one of the only two motionless places on this gyrating world, I might have peace. I wanted to stand at the dead center of the carousel, if only for a moment; try to catch my bearings.'

I admired both writers. If they had been able to see me at that moment, supine in a tent at ninety degrees south, I imagine they would both have said, ‘God, I didn't mean it
literally
.' Without going anywhere near it, Pynchon had transformed the continent into a symbol so comprehensively that when reduced to a lower-case ‘a' in his book ‘antarctica' becomes isolation itself – ‘a beach as alien as the moon's antarctic'. I had to come, and already I knew that I would never be quite the same again; nonetheless Pynchon's character was right when he said, ‘It is not what I saw or believed I saw that in the end is important. It is what I thought. What truth I came to.'

∗

The twelve cots in the Jamesway were curtained off with sheets of green canvas, so we all had our own few feet of privacy. It was hot and dark inside, and when I went out to find the bathroom the glare made my eyes smart. First of all I strode into a Jamesway marked ‘Women', but this turned out to be a joke, and the shift-workers asleep inside turned fitfully on their cots. The bathroom was called ‘The Inferno', and it was as bright as the inside of an open fridge. In the toilet cubicles a sign read, ‘If it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down.'

‘Showers', another sign said, were ‘limited to two minutes twice a week'. Out of the window I could see a dozer trundling along carrying a load of snow, and a strange blue building on stilts.

I walked to the dome, and my heartbeat immediately quickened. My breathing was shallow. It was like being on the summit of a medium-sized mountain. The altitude at the South Pole, 2850 metres or 9,300 feet, meant I was standing on a layer of ice almost one third of the height of Mount Everest. In addition, the earth's atmosphere is at its most shallow at the Poles. The combination of altitude and shallow atmosphere means that at the South Pole the human body receives about half its normal oxygen supply.

The small thermometer which hung permanently from the zip of my parka read minus 29 degrees Celsius. This was the coldest temperature I had ever experienced, though I had once been in New York when it was minus 23. Had I spent the previous winter in the hamlet of Crask Inn in northern Scotland. I would have suffered minus 29.2 degrees Celsius – the coldest temperature ever recorded in Britain. At the Pole on that first day I felt perfectly snug, bundled up in my special clothes, though it wasn't windy. When the wind whipped up it sliced through any number of layers like a pneumatically driven carving knife. The mean annual temperature at the South Pole is minus 49, and the record high, recorded in December 1978, a sultry minus 13.6. The lowest temperature yet experienced here is the minus 82.8 recorded in June 1982.