Terra Incognita (3 page)

When someone asked Jonathan Raban why he was making his journey down the Mississippi, he said he was having a love affair with it. Antarctica was my love affair, and in the south I learnt another way of looking at the world. What I want to do now is take you there. As Shackleton said, ‘We all have our own White South,' and I believe that the reach of the imagination extends far beyond the snowfields.

PART ONE

Antarctica left a restless longing in my heart beckoning towards an incomprehensible perfection for ever beyond the reach of mortal man. Its overwhelming beauty touches one so deeply that it is like a wound.

Edwin Mickleburgh,
Beyond the Frozen Sea

CHAPTER ONE

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from
Ulysses

E
ACH DAY
was hotter than the last, and I soaked up the November sunshine like a lizard. Two Sundays after landing in New Zealand I had to present myself at nine in the morning at the headquarters of the U.S. Antarctic Program in Christchurch in order to be issued my Extreme Cold Weather clothing. I borrowed a mountain bike and cycled along deserted roads tasselled with silent shopping malls to the snoozing outskirts of the city where the sun had already burnt the blue from the sky. The bike had a matching helmet with a tiny rear-view mirror protruding from the side. I swung up to the entrance of the institutional snow-white building where a sprinkling of fellow travellers had settled on the low walls and warm grass. I couldn't unstrap the helmet and was obliged to solicit the help of a vulpine Russian glaciologist.

At nine sharp we were ushered inside to take our places in a windowless room festooned with posters of icescapes, and there we waited for the last arrivals in the silence of strangers while a man ticked off our names on a clipboard and scowled like Beethoven. I felt very alone at that moment, in a strange country bound for a stranger continent. I had come right up to the pane of the looking-glass, after so long.

The safety video began, optimistically, with Scott's ‘Great God, this is an awful place' delivered in a sonorous thespian voice and accompanying footage of well-clad individuals crashing into crevasses. When it was over we trooped through to the changing rooms. There were three other women, and our room was bare except for four pairs of tagged, overstuffed orange fabric bag the size of medium suitcases.

The bags yielded a bewildering array of footwear, underwear, headwear, handwear, eyewear and unidentifiable items which didn't look as if they would fit comfortably over any part of my body. At the bottom of one of my bags, underneath an enormous vermilion parka, lay a coiled chain and a pair of metal dog tags engraved with my name and a long number. I arranged my clothes in neat piles on the carpet and eyed the others. They were beginning to try things on, so I tackled a pair of thermal longiohns with a willy-slit at the front. At one end of the room a curtain shielded us from a long counter to which we returned ill-fitting items to a blue-overalled clothing assistant who would scuttle away to pluck a different size pair of windpants or polypropylene glove liners from unseen mountain ranges of gear lurking in the hinterland.

As we pulled, zipped, laced and unrolled, my companions began to talk. One was a cook, another a senior ice-corer and the third a NASA technician. The ice-corer had six seasons of ‘ice time', and she showed me how to switch on the white rubber bunny boots. They were insulated by air, and had a valve on the side which you had to open and close on aircraft.

When we had satisfied ourselves that no part of our extensive new wardrobe would chafe or pinch or expose our soft flesh to the rigours of frostbite, we packed up our bags and the scowler despatched us into the sunshine, ticking a clipboard and issuing threats about the consequences of arriving late for the plane.

The sun made me squint as I cycled back along the straight artery into town. The malls had opened, and I stopped to have a roll of film developed, drifting around the shops for the waiting hour, consumed by a desire to buy almost everything I saw, given that it was my last chance – as if anything could help me now. I groped around in my addled mind for the dream that had brought me here to the other side of the planet, but it seemed to have evaporated in the heat.

I was a guest in Christchurch of Roger Sutton and Jo Malcolm, who lived in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of the city. Roger's sister Camilla was an old friend of mine from her wild London days. The entire clan had embraced me as one of their own, and I enjoyed their company enormously. Jo was a news reporter on New Zealand television and Roger bought energy for SouthPower. He was obsessively committed to the outdoor life, and flung off his suit to go running or bicycling or climbing at the first opportunity. That evening they drove me to Lyttelton, a potent toponym in the history of Antarctic exploration and the last stop for most voyages early in the century. We went, on the way, to Kinsey Terrace and the clifftop house where Scott stayed with his New Zealand agent, signing his name above the fireplace, and emerged from the high passes overlooking Quail Island where he grazed his second-rate mules. In Lyttelton I saw hollow-eyed Russian seamen and tired brothels with shreds of grass struggling through cracks in the front step. It was quiet, and old-fashioned even by New Zealand standards. It seemed to dwell in another age. In one bar, the table soccer was equipped with small wooden teams of Jews and Nazis.

The crews of the first ships to drop anchor off the unknown southern continent reported pleasing success with the women of Lyttelton, noting in their journals that mention of imminent departure for Antarctic exploration constituted the most effective chat-up line they had ever deployed. ‘No mere ship's officer had a chance against a polar explorer, even if only in the making,' one of them wrote. Roger suggested keenly that I should test the contemporary application of this theory, and stopped the car outside several bars, urging me inside and saying that he would pick me up later. Apparently it still worked, at least for men. I read in a textbook on Antarctic psychology published recently by Victoria University of Wellington that when two men placed a personal ad in a magazine asking for ‘active female companionship for a week for fit men about to go to the Antarctic', they were inundated with offers.

When we got home I called my friend Cindy in London; I needed to speak to her before I left. She said she was glad I'd rung as she wanted the recipe for pisco sour, which they were planning to have before lunch. I was furious that they were going to drink pisco sour without me, as I had discovered it in Chile and introduced it to my friends. Still, I told her how to make it, and at the end of the conversation, as we said goodbye, she said she felt as if I were disappearing into a black hole.

∗

The taxi arrived at four and Roger struggled out of bed to say goodbye. It had rained in the night and the tarmac glistened in the deserted roads, the only trace of life a cat rubbing its ear in a pool of light from a sodium streetlamp. At the airport I found my orange bags in the changing room, layered up in my new cold-weather garments and slipped the dog tags round my neck so that in the event of a crash my charred remains could be airmailed to my parents. Then I joined thirty other dim-eyed people in the lobby, and we all shifted from foot to foot while the pilot of our LC-130 turbo-prop, a ski-equipped Hercules, barked out the drill for the eight-hour flight.

‘The toilet facilities on board', he said, ‘are primitive at best. They consist of a urinal and a honey-bucket. I advise y'all to go for the major purge before departure, to avoid the honey-bucket.'

So that was another American achievement. They could turn their bowels on and off.

As the first creeping glow of dawn hesitated above the eastern skyline we carried our gear through to the customs building observed by a handful of saturnine U.S. Navy personnel. Then we eddied around a machine which dispensed plastic cups and squirted out an inch or two of weak Nescafe until we were marshalled into line in front of our baggage by short-haired men in combat fatigues while a sniffer dog idled among us.

At this point we were despatched into the watery dawn light and across the grass to have breakfast in the mess canteen. I was desperate for real coffee, but the shadowy form of a honey-bucket loomed between me and the pot. In the strip-lit dining room, an American football game screaming from the television, we sweated in our thermals and ate eggs and hash browns while a biochemistry graduate from North Dakota who had recently learnt the rules of cricket discoursed upon them at length. It took the rest of the table some time to grasp the basic principles involved. I dealt confidently with all appeals to me as custodian of this British secret; it didn't matter that I too had never understood the rules. Those elysian Sunday afternoons on the edge of sunlit village pitches never seemed to have anything to do with cricket.

Two hours later we boarded the plane, a crocodile of bulky vermilion parkas differentiated only by velcro strips on the breast pocket emblazoned with our names. As I stepped inside the belly of the plane someone handed me a brown paper lunch bag and pointed to the end of a row. I strapped myself into a red webbing seat, wedged up against a stack of cargo crates, and looked around, like Jonah.

The man next to me was an astrophysicist involved in the study of supernova explosions. He planned to send a balloon up over Antarctica to record the spectral properties of gamma rays. We pushed in our earplugs and the plane rushed down the runway and into the morning sky, and then it was too noisy to hear any more about his balloon. I couldn't see a window either, so I hurtled towards Antarctica in my own private capsule. I slept fitfully, squashed between the astrophysicist and the cargo. None of us could find space for our enormous feet, and our legs crossed in the aisles at our ankles like upside-down guards of honour.

After an hour the temperature rose swiftly from glacial depths to tropical heights, and we struggled out of our parkas and balaclavas and neck gaiters just in time to feel it plummet again. The Russian glaciologist sat with his head in his hands for most of the journey, staring at the floor, while the astrophysicist gazed benignly into the middle distance, serene and untroubled, floating along like one of his balloons. He was so eminent that he knew exactly where we were at any given time. At one point he smiled beatifically and shouted in my ear that we had passed the PSR. Months later I found out that this stood for Point of Safe Return, which means over half the fuel has gone. It used to be called Point of No Return, but it frightened people, so they changed it.

We picked at our sandwiches and muffins and long-life chocolate puddings in plastic pots. Over the next months I was to become very familiar with the contents of these brown paper lunch bags.

When we landed and a crewman opened the door, it was as if he had lifted the lid of a deep freeze. Bloodless icefields stretched away to mountains below softly furred cumulus clouds, and ice crystals came skittering towards us through the blistering air. The Hercules had landed on the frozen sea between Ross Island and the Antarctic continent, and along the wiggly island coast land met solid sea in a tangle of blue-shadowed pressure ridges or the pleated cliffs of a glacier. I began to readjust my perception of ‘land' and ‘sea'. Not far off, a tabular iceberg was clamped into the ice, its steep and crinkled walls reflecting the creamy saffron sun. The sky was a rich royal blue, marbled up ahead by the volcanic plumes of Mount Erebus, and a paler blue sheen lay over the wrinkled sea ice like a filmy opalescent blanket. A spur reached from the island towards the continent, and on a hump at the end I saw a wooden cross, man's tiny mark. It was Vince's cross, erected in 1904 by Scott's men in memory of a seaman who fell down an ice cliff during a blizzard. When I looked, it gave me an almost Proustian rush: I had been here so often in my dreams.