Terra Incognita (44 page)

I hiked up towards Lake Chad, following the route I had taken to Bonney the previous summer with Ed the mountaineering physicist. The ice was cracking like a whip on tin. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a white bolt of lightning flashing across the chalky blue. Of course, I knew this landscape, but I had never seen the pink glow of dawn over the Canada Glacier, or the panoply of sunset over the Suess, or, in between, sunlight travelling from one peak to the next and never coming down to us on the lake. We lived in a bowl of shadow during those days. One morning the sun appeared for ten minutes in the cleft between the Canada and the mountain next to it, and everyone stopped working to look up. The lake was carpeted with compacted snow, and from the middle, where the Canada came tumbling down in thick folds, the Suess was cradled by mountains like a cup of milky liquid.

On our last night, Lucia went outside after dinner to empty the dishwater into its drum. Suddenly she appeared at the hut window, gesticulating furiously. I rushed out, thinking that perhaps the propane toilet had exploded again. But it wasn't that. She was looking up at the electric gallery of the southern lights. The sky was streaked with faint emerald shadows, splaying out in several directions to the horizon, changing shape, spreading, and bleeding into the blackness. Iridescent coppery beams roamed among the stars like searchlights, and soft ruby flames flickered gently above the glacier, sporadically leaping forward into the middle of the dark sky. Towards the east, a rich and luminous topaz haze rolled lazily back and forwards like a tide. At one moment the whole sky was a rainbow, flaming with radiant mock suns.

‘Heavenly music,' I murmured.

∗

The following week, John Priscu sent a message inviting me up to Lake Fryxell for a night. When the helicopter dropped me off, the five men in John's team had just arrived from Lake Bonney, their base further up the valley. Ed came bounding out to meet me. They had tossed their sleep kits over the floor of the Jamesway, which was being blasted with hot air by a diesel blower, and were preparing equipment to pull out ice cores which would be taken back to Bonney the next day. They reminded me of a raiding party of Huns descending from the hills for a spot of marauding among the Visigoths.

Each flight of the drill measured three feet, and after the fifth had been screwed on, they usually hit water. Ice drilling had been going on up there at Bonney for a month in temperatures of minus fifty.

‘Everything breaks when it's this cold,' Ed said when I joined them on the lake later. ‘You flip the lid off a tin with a screwdriver, and the metal shaft snaps.'

They were pursuing not Visigoths but cyanobacteria, unicellular photosynthetic organisms generally considered algae. These bacteria live in sediment in the ice, and the scientists knew they had them when the core contained a tissue-fine dark layer.

‘In certain parts of the lake, it's like a rainforest,' Ed said.

When they went inside, it took half an hour for their beards to unfreeze from their balaclavas.

The day I returned to Wooville, 22 September, the sun rose shortly before seven, and it set exactly twelve hours later. We were halfway there.

∗

It was suggested that we might like to relocate Wooville, to give us a change of scene, and we decided to take up the offer. After a few rounds of discussion we settled on Cape Evans.

Before the two men arrived from McMurdo in a sno-cat to tow the huts to their new location, Lucia and I broke down our camp so that everything was tightly secured for its undulating passage over the ice. We were to follow behind in the Woomobile. Our pee flag was so firmly frozen in that it had to be sawn off at the base. Despite our best efforts, the Antispryte failed to start, and it had to remain at Wooville, each day heaped with more snow and looking as maladjusted as we knew it to be.

We made the two men tea in the Dining Wing before setting out.

‘What's the news on station?' I asked.

‘A circus!' replied one of the pair, a man with a beard like a medieval depiction of Noah.

‘The planes are gonna be here bringing the summer folk soon, and all hell's gonna break loose. Everyone's getting ready.'

‘You must have wintered,' I said. ‘You're used to peace and quiet.'

‘Yep,' said the man, as tea and flat muffins disappeared into the wilderness of his beard. ‘My fifth winter. Say, is that a cockroach in there?'

It wasn't just the station that was changing. Everything was changing off base too. One morning at around that time we saw our first emperors. The velvet backs of their necks were flecked with grey, and they blinked at the pale sun as it struggled through the cloud cover among the translucent bands of coloured light behind Big Razorback.

We loved the new Wooville as much as its predecessor. On one side we overlooked the striped Barne Glacier, its corduroy-fluted, perfectly vertical cliff sharp against the pearly sky, and on the other Scott's hut and Wind Vane Hill. At midday on our first morning I asked Lucia to walk out with me to a berg a short distance from the Barne Glacier. I had just read this entry in Scott's diary again.

We were glad to be back on the sea ice after our brief holiday in the science camps of the valleys. Inspirational as they were, the dry mountainous landscapes did not seem like the real Antarctica.

‘It's good to be home,' I said to Lucia as we sat down at the wobbly card table for our first meal at Cape Evans.

‘You called it home!' she said, smiling broadly. Then she added, ‘I'm afraid I overcooked the beans.'

On clear days, when I walked around the new Wooville or looked out from the long window by my desk, the landscape spoke to me so directly that it no longer seemed to be made of corporeal ice. It had become a kind of cosmic symbol of harmony and of a peaceful freedom beyond poverty, gas bills and unrequited love. ‘For Shackleton', physicist Louis Bernacchi noted in his diary on the
Discovery
expedition, ‘Antarctica didn't exist. It was the inner world that engrossed him.' At last, I understood what he meant.

We often had storms, and when they came, being drawn by Lucia was an occupational hazard of Woovillian life. The wind was so strong that we were knocked over taking the few steps to our pee flag, and in some areas the relentless gusts scoured the sea ice clean of snow. If Scott's hut disappeared, we knew we were in for a long session. We were obliged to wear our parkas for the ten-foot journey between huts. To vary the routine, we took turns doing the morning radio sched in one another's accents. I'm not sure which was worse – my American accent or her English one – but neither of them ever fooled anyone. If we were isolated for a long time I tried to identify signs of incipient madness. Would we start using Lucia's paints to divide our bodies into thirds, like Byrd? In reality, we had never been saner.

∗

On 3 October, Joe from the McMurdo communications hut came to stay with us. A pair of ozone scientists dropped him off in a Spryte. We went outside to greet him.

‘Come on in,' said Lucia as she clapped Joe on the back. He had come to seem like a friend, we had spoken to him so often.

‘Thanks,' said Joe. It seemed odd to hear his voice coming out of a mouth rather than a metal box.

‘Your solar panels are the wrong way around,' he said the minute he got inside the Dining Wing. ‘They're pointing into the hut.'

I had been broadcasting our success with the solar panels, especially after I discovered that no one in the valleys had theirs working. How the radio had continued operating with its recharging panels the wrong way round I never knew.

Later that day we drove over the sea ice to Cape Royds, taking a circuitous route to avoid the cracks that by then were fanning out from the bergs and the shore. Joe came along.

‘Look!' he said suddenly, pointing up into the sky. Lucia and I squinted into the glare.

‘I can't see anything,' I said.

‘That black dot,' said Joe. ‘It's the first plane of the season, heading for McMurdo from Christchurch.'

We carried on in silence. For Lucia and me, the start of the season marked the beginning of the end. The female seals were getting fatter, and we had been seeing ice blink in the sky – reflections of open water in the lower cloud layer which appeared as a heavy purple black blanket above the bright band of light on the horizon – so we knew what we would find at Cape Royds. As we crested the hill beyond Shackleton's hut, there it was below us. Water.

On our return to Mactown in the second week of October, it was as if we were witnessing a population exchange: in the first six days of the summer season 300 people had changed places. The parties were fun, but it was hard to socialise after the seclusion of Wooville. Besides that, since my last visit south, and to wide-spread incredulity, I had given up alcohol. For some years I had been living near the edge, and I had decided to make a trip to the unknown territory of the interior. I do not believe it was a coincidence that this change occurred after my long Antarctic journey.

Drinking large quantities of wine had always seemed like part of the big picture – an essential ingredient in the creative process and a harmless method of making the lights brighter, keeping the demons at bay and enjoying temporary respite from the treachery of the Nomadic Thoughts.
It was what people like me did
. Only most people did it rather less excessively than the small group I called ‘people like me'. A curious thing had happened by the time I got back from Antarctica.
I didn't need it any more
. I knew that the peace I had experienced in the south would always come back to me, even if I had to sit out more bleak times waiting for it, and that meant I needn't be frightened of what my vagabond thoughts might uncover. The demons hadn't disappeared, but they had shrunk. Many things changed. Living without a glass of wine in my hand was another voyage of discovery. Like all the best journeys, it had its long moments of agony, too. But I couldn't jump ship now. It was too thrilling.

A psychologist had come in to interview the winterers before they disappeared.

‘The lore has it that Antarctica fosters insanity,' he said, ‘but the facts don't support the theory. The reality is that the opposite shows up. In other words, it shows how valiant and intrepid the human spirit can be in adversity.'

An influx of new people swarmed over the station, and in the galley we had to wait in queues. Those of us who had come in on Winfly said that we now knew how the winterers must have felt when we pitched up. The Winfly experience glued us together – even Ron, the dispenser of the Spryte vehicles, came to seem like an old friend.

At the same time, it was good to see some old friends back at McMurdo. David appeared, the chainsmoking Russian geocryologist with the ink-black hair which hung over his eyes like a sheep-dog, and he gave me a pair of earrings made out of mammoth tusk to match the ring. The Kiwi pilots who had taken me to Terra Nova Bay were back, and we had a great reunion. A fish biologist brought the news that Britta had asked Hans to marry her. The Corner Bar revved up. Housing had tried to close it down, but of course, they had not succeeded.

One day I heard a familiar Chicago accent booming along a corridor in the Crary. It was Nann, the porcelain engineer from the Pole, her hair still looking as if it had been arranged by a blowtorch.

‘So you came back!' I said as we embraced.

‘Couldn't stand another minute with that sucker,' she said, and I knew she meant her husband.

It was a relief, nonetheless, to get back to Wooville. Various science parties were heading out into the field, which meant that the airwaves were busier, and as a result my accent was no longer the source of apparently limitless hilarity. Soon after our return to Cape Evans, we heard that Wooville was to be disrupted by the arrival of a diving project. I made a ‘No Diving' sign and strapped it to the ‘
Welcome To Wooville
' post we had erected. I had also purloined the plastic penguin with the target on its chest from the Corner Bar, and this we positioned near Wooville, its back to the Sound. We were able to observe visitors climb down from their vehicles, layer up, load film into their cameras and stalk the bird.

I watched an enormous Reed drill, mounted on a tracked vehicle, lurching along the flagged route, and soon Wooville was swarming with people and pitted with diving holes. The divers were studying larval development in
Sterechinus neumayeri
sea urchins, and they were anxious to get under the ice before the algae began to bloom. A hut had been dragged out to cover the main hole, and it was heated, so when the floor hatch was open and the two divers had suited up, we all crowded in. The hole resembled a giant glass of Alka-seltzer. Looking down at the fat white amphipods coiled like ropes on the seabed, Lucia and I were amazed to see what we had been living over for so long.

‘What temperature is the water?' I asked one of the divers as he peeled off his dry suit after half an hour under the ice.