The Ice Museum (5 page)

Certainty came in the embodied form of a Mr. Frederick Jackson, an Englishman, who was wandering around on Franz Josef Land, an island north-east of Svalbard. This was, Nansen discovered, where he had camped. The two men met. Jackson was a well-dressed Englishman in a checked suit and high rubber water boots, smelling strongly of soap, raising his hat to say ‘How do you do?' Nansen was a man dyed black with oil and soot, with a long, shaggy beard, wearing foul-smelling rags and something roughly akin to a hat, but he extended a dirty hand, shaking Jackson's recently scrubbed and perfumed one, soft to the touch. Their conversation was brief, confused at first by Jackson's failure to recognize Nansen. Nansen recorded it in his notes: 
Seizing the soot-encrusted hand again and shaking it still more vigorously, Jackson said, ‘I am very glad to see you!'

A well-washed Stanley to Nansen's blubber-greased Living-stone, Jackson supplied a hut to sleep in, water to bathe in and letters from Norway, which he had taken in case of just such an unlikely meeting. Nansen and Johansen were swiftly released from the elements; their oil and soot encrustations were washed away. ‘The troglodyte has vanished,' wrote Nansen, ‘and in his place sits a well-favoured, healthy-looking European citizen in a comfortable chair, puffing away at a short pipe or a cigar, and with a book before him.' The dark heart of the Arctic night had been washed from their bodies, Nansen seemed to say; they were reclaimed by civilization. Nansen had tried to harness the power of nature to achieve his ends, but he was forced in the end to admit defeat. ‘Nature goes her age-old round impassively; summer changes into winter; spring vanishes away; autumn comes, and finds us still a chaotic whirl of daring projects and shattered hopes,' he wrote. He had managed a distance of 86°13.6' N, the furthest north so far reached by any explorer. He had spent three years of his life in the far north, leaving his wife, his child and his job. He had proved his theory of the drift of the ocean, he had returned without losing a man, but he had failed to reach the North Pole.

For many it would have been a triumph, but Nansen was disappointed, a dark secret disappointment. He continued dining and dancing with the international explorers' set, turning up in British society, later immaculate in ambassadorial robes, charming, a courteous dining companion, an elegant dancer. Internally, he was raging and melancholy, desperate for solitude, fearful of its effects. He was hardly pitiful; he was robust and strong, hailed as a hero by the Norwegians, showered with praise, paraded along the streets of Oslo and invited to lecture the formerly sceptical experts of the London establishment. Yet he was a moody Viking hero, his long moustache dragged down by the turn of his mouth, his fierce blue eyes expressive in later photographs of despair barely contained.

As I walked away from
Fram
, I was thinking again of Nansen's quotation from Seneca. There were hundreds of stirring Thule quotes Nansen could have used. Nansen had used the lines at the start of his account of the journey on
Fram
; he wrote for a captive audience, and his book was an immediate bestseller. The words seemed to spell out a sense of glory. Nansen had been to lands beyond Thule: the barren island he wintered on, a place beyond the earlier limits of the world. He had proved his theory that the Arctic regions would succumb to laws, to scientific calculation. If he hadn't reached the Pole, he had gone further than anyone before him, and he had formed a reasonable idea of a portion of the globe that formerly lay in darkness.

But something in Nansen's fixed stare made me think his Thule quotation might mean something else, something more ambiguous. There was a chance his quotation from Seneca was more like a personal code, a phrase that was only superficially jubilant. The play the quotation comes from,
Medea
, is a gory sequel to the story of Jason and the Argonauts, showing Jason and Medea at home, after they had eloped when Jason took the Golden Fleece. At the opening of
Medea
, Jason has found that living with a sorceress no longer suits him and is erring towards a dynastic marriage with the daughter of the King of Corinth. The marriage, Jason hopes, will bring him back into the establishment, away from the marginal brutality of Medea, who murdered half of her family to secure their escape. The characters are mostly unsympathetic—Jason is an unappealing hero and Medea is unhinged to a degree notable even in classical tragedy. When Seneca's Medea realizes Jason is about to abandon her, she murders their children and hurls the bodies to him on the street below as she flies away in a chariot.

Interspersed with the bloodbath, a nostalgic Chorus intones about how much simpler it was when everyone stayed at home, happy on their own shores, living to a ripe old age on the fields of their ancestors, knowing only their home soil. No one then, the Chorus says, was able to navigate from the stars, but a time came when sailors began to understand the winds, and could spread their sails or bind them at the top, in order to speed themselves around the world. Jason's ship, the
Argo
, which he took on his Fleece-quest, was one such nature-defying vessel. The
Argo
moved past Scylla, past the tempting songs of the Sirens. Since the
Argo
made this voyage, the Chorus says, things have become easier still, and a great ship like the
Argo
is no longer even required. Sailors are setting off in any ship they can find, wandering at will on the previously mysterious deeps. The Chorus complains that all the boundaries between nations have been removed, cities have set their walls in new lands, and nothing has been left where it previously stood. Everything has been mixed up, joined by the boats crossing the oceans, and ‘the Persians quaff the Elbe and the Rhine.'

After these observations, the Chorus presents its prophecy, as Jason and Medea's marriage spirals into further destruction. The Chorus's moral seems to be that no good comes of hubristic curiosity, from this haphazard mapping of the world. It makes Thule part of a strange premonition: ‘A time will come in later years when the Ocean will unloose the bands of things, when the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries, and Thule will no longer be the extreme point among the islands.' Set against the murderous finale of the play, the words suggest that the acquisition of knowledge and the craze for exploration have their dark side. With knowledge comes a terrible loneliness, as humans realize they are alone in the world, alone with their laws and cracked civilization. The last words of the play are Jason's cry after Medea: ‘Go on through the lofty spaces of high heaven and bear witness, where thou ridest, that there are no gods.' Jason's triumph over the Ocean ends in a bloody flight from Pelias, and the bloody end of his marriage to Medea. There are no more mysteries, and no more gods in Jason's world, after the Ocean has been crossed.

It was something of this that Nansen, a polymath who would have known the play he quoted, expressed in the Seneca line. Nansen's use of the Seneca quotation could have been a simple rallying cry, a simple expression of optimism—the old mysteries would be outlawed, man would be supreme and lord of all he surveyed and so on. Daring insouciance, absolute confidence—Nansen's party persona. But behind the quote, as under the slick surface of Nansen's charm, lurked something more complex. Nansen asked what progress meant, what this surge of explorers struggling towards the north might mean for the old sense of mystery and wonder.

Standing beneath the boat again, I gazed at the gentle sides of
Fram
. A beautiful bow-legged bison of a boat, she sat squatly, surrounded by the ranks of stuffed animals. In the glass cabinets, the relics gathered dust; the discarded trappings of the early struggle for the North Pole.

Outside, dusk had fallen, a three o'clock dusk spreading darkness over a cold shore. Stumbling across the ice, through the twilight, I cast a glance across the fjord towards the city. The lights of Oslo twinkled blissfully up the mountainside. There were no ferries across the fjord, so I waited for the bus, which rambled through the evening streets back to the National Theatre. The bus passed a statue of Henrik Ibsen, jowly with huge whiskers, staring towards the Storting—the parliament building. The main street, Karl Johans Gate, curved upwards like a ski-jump, flying towards a modest palace. There was an outdoor ice rink, with skaters performing tentative turns, the occasional expert turning centrifugally, arms outstretched, a leg raised. In the shops along the street, people were buying hot dogs spread with luminous sauces, which they were eating with gloved hands. I stepped off the bus and turned the corner towards my hotel on Rosenkrantz Gate, not far from the Grand Hotel, where Ibsen used to dine. One of the many photographs on the walls of
Fram
was of Rosenkrantz Gate in September 1896, decked in flags, thousands of people streaming along the street saluting Nansen and his crew, who had just returned from their voyage. The faces of the celebrants are cast in shadow, but the buildings—large, solid blocks, in white and yellow stone—are gaudy with bunting and flags.

It was a clear, cold night, and the streets were full of shrouded figures, moving along the ice pavements. The bells from the Town Hall clock chimed, atonally. The town spread up the mountainsides, casting a haze of streetlights into the forest. In the hotel I sat in the polished bar, watching a table of Norwegians toast themselves through the evening, huddled round a fire. They had been skiing in the mountains above the city, I heard them saying. Great conditions. Wonderful snow. Their skis were propped by the door, bleeding ice onto the wooden floor.

The barman passed me a glass of aquavit, which I drank slowly, sitting outside the circle of light from the fire. I found I was thinking about the past, about my childhood fascination with polar explorers, and the simple sense I had of things at the time. As a child I merely loved the cold; winters were never cold enough, even when the snows fell and blocked the roads, and there was sledging on the low hills of Suffolk. Sometimes the river at Flatford was crusted with ice; the church at East Bergholt surrounded by whitened graves. When it snowed the morning was muffled, footfalls faded into the whiteness outside, cars slid along the roads. It was a time when car engines failed in the cold mornings; the rising street was a chorus of spluttering seventies' cars, struggling to hit the high note, when the engine would spark to life. A series of emphysemic coughs came from each drive, with the contrapuntal sound of rising frustration, keys jangling in the ignition, the slam of the door. The windows were patterned with hieratic displays of ice, crystals glistening on the other side of the glass.

These earliest memories were focused around small novelties—the spectral phenomenon of visible air, as I breathed out on a cold day, the sharp sensation of chilled oxygen entering my lungs. The infant games, the fresh snow like a blank page, waiting for the imprint of child shoes, the crisp whiteness cold and damp in my hands. In the snow branches were beautiful, like the ghosts of trees, haunting the edges of the village where the streets became fields. And there were the long evenings, when I thought the roads looked like dark rivers, between the shores of streetlights.

When I read stories of polar exploration, I lingered over the descriptions of intense cold; and when my brother and I played at explorers we were always lost in the storm, beaten by frigid winds. To me, the tales of exploration were more mesmerizing than the fairytales I was supposed to enjoy. Dutifully, with mounting boredom and confusion, I read through the tales of princesses, princes, the whole range of fairytale royals, choking on apples, pricking their fingers, sleeping, waking with dwarfs, generally misbehaving. Discarding the multicoloured child-friendly books, I pored over the explorers' diaries, the immaculate records of pemmican eaten, pemmican stored, oil cans squandered to the frost, gloves dropped on the snow, never recovered, the sighting of a seal, six o'clock, gun jammed.

It was the chill of the stories that made them appeal to me. I never responded with such excitement to adventures from deserts or lukewarm places. There was something in the stillness of the ice which gripped me, stillness like suspense, an empty stage ready at any moment for the grand entrance of another explorer, struggling against the snow. I liked the shifting illusions of the Arctic—the bergs which hid their depths in the sea, rising like drifting mountains, the crevasses under a thin surface of ice. I memorized lists of countries, lists of explorers: Britain, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Wilson, Oates, Bowers, Scott, Shackleton, Bjaaland, Johansen, Amundsen. An exotic pantheon, to me. The ships ploughing a furrow through the pallid ocean, towards the great walls of ice. The explorers sounding the refrain—death or glory, a heroic return to a bunting-festooned quayside, or a fading away into the silence of the snow. Some sailed in ships doomed to founder, their wreckage found drifting on floes; men who would become mysteries themselves, never seen again, never heard of. Or years later, a diary would be found at a frozen last camp; they lugged their diaries to the end, recording the dwindling strength of their colleagues—the death of the first officer from a malady which swelled his limbs, the death of the oceanographer who had eaten rotting seal flesh. I imagined these explorers as a series of shadows, stumbling over brilliant white snowfields. Pitching another flag, in the middle of an interminable nowhere, leaving it fluttering against the snow.