Terra Incognita (8 page)

Ben was resupplying a pair of biologists working on a penguin project at Edmondson Point on the other side of Mount Melbourne. It was not a beautiful spot. Only partially snow-covered, it was heavily invested with skuas on the lookout for penguin eggs. The huge Adélie colony dominated the landscape, and as the Squirrel began its descent we could see individual birds waddling about with stones in their beaks. When we opened the doors, a sulphurous gust of wind blew in a blizzard of ice and rock particles. Edmondson Point reminded me of a curled old photograph I had seen of an early British base on the Antarctic Peninsula with the words ‘
semper in excreta
' above the door of the hut. A permanent low murmur hung on the air. Edward Wilson, Scott's confidant, said that walking up to a penguin rookery was like approaching a football ground during a match.

The two women came to meet us. They had been living at this bleak spot with thousands of penguins for three months, and later I watched them capturing nesting birds with what looked like a large black butterfly net, stowing the egg lying under each one in a skua-proof box, tying the bird up by its feet, weighing it on a weighbridge, opening its cloaca to determine its sex, measuring its beak, passing an infrared wand over it and painting a number on its back. The penguins kept quite still throughout this ordeal, and afterwards settled back on their stone nests with a quick wing-flap as if little more than a minor inconvenience had occurred.

One of the women, Francesca, was about twenty-five, and she had never lived in the field before; when they weren't working she seldom strayed far from the tent. Raffaella, the other one, probably wasn't older than thirty, but she had years of field experience behind her and seemed much more at ease in the landscape. I imagined that the penguins felt safer with her.

‘Don't you get bored?' I asked in my sketchy Italian.

‘No,' she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. ‘I bring a skipping rope. The penguins are good company – though I like some better than others. Take that one over there – the one poking his nose into someone else's nest. Miserable
diavolo
!'

‘How do you tell which is which?'

‘How you tell which man is which?'

‘Er, well, they sort of look different.'

‘Yes, so penguins look to me.'

And that, it seemed, was that.

Then we headed south along the coast to pick up a pair of scientists at Dunlop Island. Below us, suffused in a primrose light, seal pups were slithering over the ice sheet, and in the distance the last remnants of sea ice lay on the bright blue water like a membrane.

A geomorphologist and his
alpinista
– the Italian version of the field leader – had already struck camp when we arrived, and they were waiting next to a mound of rucksacks and boxes. We milled around for a few minutes, then loaded up. The geomorphologist wanted to take samples at Depot Island some way to the south, and he and I were dropped there while Ben and the
alpinista
went off to refuel. The small, snowy island was discovered by Mawson and the South Magnetic Pole party at the end of October 1908 and named after a cache of rock specimens. The geomorphologist grew increasingly excited about the soil he was digging, and gabbled away happily in Italian.

Later that day we landed at the snout of the Mawson Glacier for a picnic. The
alpinista
was a sturdy little marine commando called Nino. After despatching several wedges of bread and salami the geomorphologist strode off to repeat his earlier success while Nino, Ben and I sprawled in the sun. I struggled to translate for them. That morning, we had heard over the radio that a coalition of opposition parties in Rome was on the verge of bringing down the government. Swallowing the last mouthful of chocolate, Ben asked Nino what he thought about it.

‘Not much,' said Nino.

‘You must think something! It's your bloody country!'

‘Look, politics in Italy has no surprises since Caligula proposed a horse for senator,' said Nino, who came from a village in the high Alps. ‘Besides, all that seems so trivial here.' Yes, I thought. Antarctica represents everything beyond man's little world. Most of time and space is like Antarctica, untouched and unowned.

Sometimes, in the evening, a group of us would repair to the
pinguinatolo
, a wooden hut among the outbuildings. The walls were graffitoed with the imprimata of a generation of Italian Antarcticans, and half-consumed bottles of grappa from seasons past loitered on the shelves. The Italians never got drunk. They enjoyed wine with their meals but never took more than two glasses. It was the Kiwis and I who had a winebox
fest
when the spirit moved us. There were many cultural differences between the New Zealand air unit and their Italian employers. While the New Zealanders were frequently frustrated by Italian emotional outbursts, they recognised their hosts' technical abilities; if a helicopter part needed fixing once they handed it over to the electronics engineers it would come back not only mended but
improved
. Everything the Italians did, they did stylishly. They had the best gear, and far outclassed any other nationality on the ice with their red
tute
bodysuits and red-and-white rucksacks. They made the British look as if they hadn't left the continent since 1912.

‘It's Giuseppe's birthday today,' someone told me one evening in the
pinguinatolo
.

‘Which one is Giuseppe?' I asked.

‘You know, the fellow from Umbria.'

They talked often about where they came from – it constituted a vital part of their identity. ‘You see, Sara, I'm from Spezzio . . .', someone would say, and in the dining room they took every opportunity to deliver a paean to some special dish from their region. If ever one of these dishes made an appearance a huge portion would be set before me while arguments raged about variations on the recipe. It was very endearing, particularly as it was obvious that none of them ever went anywhere near a kitchen at home.

On Sunday evening I offered to cook a traditional English dish. I decided on bread-and-butter pudding, and spent half the morning in the kitchen. Ciro bounced around, searching out a starched white chef's hat for me and changing the cassettes of Neapolitan music which blared out of the sticky kitchen. I made two big trays, and just as I had taken them out of the oven, five minutes before lunch, I was called over the loudspeaker to the ops room – McMurdo wanted me on the radio. When I came back down I saw that they had piled their plates with
antipasti
and bread-and-butter pudding and were enthusiastically seasoning it all with salt, pepper and olive oil.

∗

One day, they took me up to the polar plateau on a survey to plot sites using hand-held Global Positioning System units. By transmitting to a series of satellites, they were able to receive accurate latitude and longitude readings – invaluable navigational information if a scientist needed to return to the scene of an experiment. Before we left base, Nino made me a thermos of tea, and Franco the doctor stuck a label on it saying ‘
te di Sara
'. They treated me like a doll, and would wander around looking for me, singing some Italian song involving
Sara
and the
primavera
. I was referred to as
la principessa
and schemes were devised to induce me to stay for the whole season. I felt vaguely guilty as I smiled vacuously and failed to deliver a feminist Gettysburg address. But not guilty enough, obviously.

I took off in a helicopter with Ben, a geophysicist and Nino. The air was full of diamond dust that day. We chatted over the headsets, interrupted by Gaetano who kept breaking in from base. ‘Don't touch Sara,' he said. Then Ben put on a Strauss tape. The snow at the bottom of the Priestley Glacier was beaten into wide dunes, like a bleached Sahara, and as we wheeled upwards the pitted pale blue glacier rushed beneath us, reflecting the violet streaks of the limpid sky. We crested the ridge, momentarily buffeted by a gust of wind, and then, ahead, we saw the polar plateau.

Life felt very sweet, at that moment.

We landed at flagged points, to take observations. It was minus 25 degrees Celsius, and very windy. I learnt about the 30-Knot Club, entry into which involved pissing into a 30-knot wind without splashback. It was quite a sophisticated club, with a President and a Secretary. I trailed around behind Nino, and we found a small meteorite. Nino seemed impervious to the cold. When I watched him working I thought of Birdie Bowers who died in the tent with Scott. He was so resilient to cold that people have written medical papers about him in learned journals. When he undertook the Winter Journey to Cape Crozier with Bill Wilson and Apsley Cherry-Garrard it was seventy-seven below zero Fahrenheit and he didn't need the outer layer of his bag.

∗

One more Hercules was scheduled before the runway on the sea ice melted. After that, they had to wait for the ship. I was obliged to hitch a ride on this last plane as far as McMurdo, and woke on the day feeling unutterably depressed. Life had been very easy at Terra Nova Bay. The rest of the journey wasn't going to be as straightforward.

I made a little speech of thanks in Italian over the loudspeaker, and they presented me with a satellite map, signed by everyone, with the places I had visited marked with yellow asterisks. Instead of Victoria Land they had printed Sara Land.

Almost everyone came over to the ice runway to see me off. The LC-130 eventually hove into view above the furthest mountain, and the Italians started jabbering, as if they hadn't really believed it was going to come at all. The plane was flown by a crew from a Pisa-based squadron of the air force. It made the round trip from Italy via Christchurch, and shut down for one night at McMurdo on the way from Terra Nova Bay back to New Zealand. After a batch of scientists had emerged from the hold, and much armwaving and kissing and a slew of mouthed imprecations to write, I walked up the ramp and into the back of the plane.

A pair of Italian fire engines chased us up the runway as we left so that our departure resembled a scene from
Dad's Army
. Even then I hadn't left them, as Gaetano had radioed the captain, a friend of his, and told him to let me sit next to him, so I was ushered straight up to the flight deck.

CHAPTER THREE

. . . people are trying to fathom themselves in this antarctic context, to imagine their coordinates, how they are fixed in time and space.

Barry Lopez, Crary Lab dedication talk, McMurdo, 1991

A
FRENCHMAN
appeared in my office shortly after I returned to McMurdo: someone had told him I spoke French. He was an ice-corer en route to Vostok, the Russian base in the empty heart of East Antarctica. Vostok was a potent name in the history of the continent. There they had recorded the coldest temperature in the world, minus 129.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is minus 89.2 Celsius. The annual mean temperature at Vostok was minus 55 Celsius – five degrees colder than at the South Pole. They had also drilled deeper than anyone else, so they had the world's oldest ice. The harsh conditions at the base had earned it a reputation as a gulag of the south. The French corer knew it well.

‘It's not unusual to wake up to fist fights outside the bedroom door,' he said airily. And to think that in the sixties, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviets used Vostok as a behavioural testbed for the Salyut space programme,

I had read a book by the geophysicist who was station chief at Vostok in 1959. Despite dabs of Russian colour, such as frequent references to cabbage pie and the October Revolution, the text was painfully guarded. Besides the temperature, they had to cope with the problems of living at an altitude of 4000 metres, and Viktor Ignatov, the author of the book, reports grimly that potatoes boiled at 88 degrees Celsius and took three hours to cook. Being so high and so remote, Vostok cannot be adequately supplied by air, and therefore each summer a convoy of Kherkovchenka tractors heavily laden with food, fuel and other essential goods sets out from Mirny, the Russian station on the east coast. I once saw a film of this traverse, shot in the late sixties. The Amsterdam Film Museum found the spools languishing in their dungeons, restored them, put them on video and sent me a copy. It told a story of polished llyushins, white huskies, a solitary grave (well-tended), grubby calendars with days crossed-off and men sunbathing in pneumatic bathing trunks on the deck of a vast icebreaker and polishing stiff lace-up shoes when they saw land. It ended with a little girl's face, eyes tightly closed and thin arms clutching her weeping father's neck. The sombre military music played over the footage of the traverse itself made it seem as if they were marching across the steppe into the Siberian permafrost to defend the motherland against a marauding barbarian horde. When the tractors arrived at Vostok it was to bearhugs and a tray of vodka. The fact that I couldn't understand a word of the narration only made the film seem more exotic.

The Frenchman eventually left for Vostok, and on the same day Seismic Man and his group finally took off for their deep-field destination. They had been delayed by both weather and planes for two weeks, and some of them had checked in for their flight fifteen times. Most of them hadn't known each other before they came south, and during the fraught waiting period they had knitted together as a team. I was terribly jealous of that, especially as I had got to know them as they lounged over the sofas on the top floor of the Crary and wandered the corridors like nomads. I was sorry to see them go, though they had invited me out to their camp, an invitation which wouldn't, in theory, be difficult to take up as their project was being supported with a large number of fixed-wing resupply flights. They called me Woo after my W-002 label, and as we waved goodbye they shouted that when I arrived they would have a Welcome Woo party on the West Antarctic ice sheet.