A Victim of the Aurora (5 page)

‘Alec?' Harry Kittery called. ‘I think you ought to look at him.'

At the head of the table Sir Eugene Stewart seemed impassive and even reached for more of Walter O'Reilly's fresh-baked bread. He accepted these spasms of Waldo's, because he liked him, because the fits never lasted more than a day or so, and, as some of us had noticed, never occurred at times of crisis, when Waldo – as the people of my adoptive homeland would put it – was working his ass off. Stewart never mentioned the fits in his journal. If he forgave you anything it was as if the fault or crime had never existed; and he forgave Waldo his catatonia.

Alec Dryden went and took Waldo's pulse, felt the temples, pinched the cheeks. He mixed up bromide and asked Kittery to hold the patient's head so that the draught could be poured down his throat. Everyone at table paused in their meal at the sound of Waldo's gullet reluctantly taking down the sedative.

Bromide worked well on Waldo's state. After a while he would relax and fall asleep and wake at the end of the day, sheepish and full of energy.

When Alec returned to the table, Sir Eugene said, ‘Did Waldo drink much last night?'

Alec smiled. ‘I think he had less than anyone. It has nothing to do with drink.'

Harry Kittery had taken his place again and grabbed his tea mug, frowning. Across the table, Henneker raised his own mug as if in a toast. ‘Our little ice martyr,' said Henneker, as he often did. Kittery didn't answer. He was very angry, hating to be called that, hating Henneker for defining the trouble between Stewart and himself.

Kittery, like most of the staff members, came from a particular background – middle class, private schools (they called them
public
schools in England), the services, the Oxford-Cambridge axis. It was a background even Paul Gabriel's hectic mother had imposed on him by main force. The three I mentioned, Barry, Henneker, myself, were all farmers' sons. Henneker had a cruel rural wit, the kind of blood-raising tongue some of my brothers had. He made his fortune by refining it and using it on public figures. My colleagues did not understand this. They were well-mannered and clubbish Englishmen and they did not often have replies for him.

John Troy sighed in his place at table. He had had plans of his own for the day, working on the sledding rations for the summer and keeping his catalogue of supplies up to date. Now he had to spend his time in the meteorology-room, making entries for Waldo in the various journals, taking hourly readings from aneroid barometers, wind and precipitation gauges, magnetometers and an ion-bombardment gauge which Waldo and an older scientist had, between them, invented.

Victor Henneker and I also stirred in our chairs.

‘Tony,' Troy asked me, ‘would you do the ten o'clock readings at the outside screens? And Victor, would you do the two o'clock readings?'

At five minutes to ten I put on an extra sweater, my windproofs and a pair of snow boots, found a lantern, pencil and paper, and went into the naturalist's room. From there a door could be opened that gave on to outer Antarctica.

Paul Gabriel stood at his work-bench in the naturalist's room. Before him lay a frozen skua which had been killed the previous autumn and stored in the ice cave behind the hut. Paul merely contemplated the iron-hard gull. He seemed glad that it defied his taxidermist's skills and required him to wait on its slow thawing.

He looked up at me. ‘If you like, I'll take the notes for you.'

‘Gladly, Paul,' I said.

He stared at me with his hung-over eyes, magnified by glasses.

‘I need the air,' he said.

Our hut was a fragment of heat on the flanks of the great ice organism, amoeba-shaped and larger than the United States and Mexico together. There was no moisture or mercy in the flesh of the organism. Even the sun did nothing more than colour it. And now there was no sun. To conserve our tight little bubble of heat, our doors were double, even the door from the naturalist's room to the outside. You opened the inner door and were in a little porch. Before you opened the outer door you made sure you shut the inner. Doing so, Paul Gabriel and I found our way out into the dark but spectacular winter's morning. The moon was a sliver away to the north. We looked across the sound and could see the ice solid and gleaming by the light of the stars and the radiance of the aurora. We saw too, in the strange luminous dark, the mountains beyond the sound, the great mountains which Scott, with more gratitude than gift for imagery, had disappointingly named The Royal Society Mountains. The aurora had become more intense than Alec Dryden had reported it. The arch of light to the south-west had vanished but straight across the sound and above the mountains hung great translucent curtains of green and gold and blue. They seemed to be suspended from the highest point of night, to cover an area of sky vast as a continent. Giant ripples of light, white, blue, yellow, ran through them so that it looked as if a furious astral wind were blowing. The base of the aurora blurred and faded at a point that still seemed miles above the mountains.

It was Waldo Warwick's task to study this phenomenon. Measuring the great atmospheric draperies, he was as uncrowded by rival experts as Adam was in Eden. He concluded that the auroras were the fruit of some sort of electric discharge from the earth's magnetic field (for the earth
was
a magnet, I had discovered, and we were of course near its South Pole). Waldo, inconvenienced only a little by his fits, wanted to show that the intensity of the phenomenon was connected to the magnetic storms which his gauges could, in a rudimentary way, detect. Scientists have since told me Waldo's theory is either wrong or unpopular – with scientific hypotheses it can amount to the same thing.

The aurora did not yield to the arts, either. Peter Sullivan, using the finest Lumière colour plates, had found it impossible to photograph. I was finding it hard to paint in its exact effect of solidity and wispiness. Peter thought he was helping me by telling me he would have called his abortive photographs
The Stage Curtains of the Gods
. But coy figures of speech were no use to me. In the end you have to paint things for what they are, not for the images they evoke. That's what I thought anyhow.

Paul and I stood on the rise behind the hut. The view of the sound was never the same, there were always variations of light in the darkness, always new dimensions and grandeurs and omens.

‘We're the only human beings out of doors,' I said. ‘In the whole of this, we're the only ones.'

‘Except Forbes-Chalmers,' he said.

‘Except him.' Forbes-Chalmers was the name of a certain illusion, a trick of light which had caused members of the expedition (Kittery was the first) to report having sighted a man high up on glaciers or far out on the ice of the sound. Forbes and Chalmers were two members of Holbrooke's expedition of 1908 who never returned from a journey across the sound to study the Taylor Glacier. Stewart now gave their names to a phantasm created by light refraction.

It was the only memorial they had.

‘Some things are too much for a person to take in,' Paul told me suddenly. He still sounded as numb as he had on waking.

‘Are you all right?'

‘As a matter of fact I don't feel well.' Then he laughed. ‘But Waldo's pre-empted the sick-bay for the moment.'

I told him he should go to his bunk for the day if he needed to.

‘Please,' he said. ‘If Beck can walk this morning, I can.'

The little weather screens were the visible signs of our expeditionary seriousness. They stood like tabernacles atop poles which last autumn we had sunk into the perma-frost. Whilever we visited the screens and read their instruments, keeping records that no one else on earth was keeping, we remained a worthy priesthood.

The first screen stood on a small hill no more than a hundred yards to the north of the hut. Above the box spun the small cups of an anemometer. They turned lazily that morning, for there was hardly any wind. I put the lantern between my feet in the drift snow and opened the doors on the screen. Inside were five weather gauges. One was the anemometer gauge. When I lifted the lantern I was able to read that the wind on the hill had a velocity of a mere three knots, and blew from the south-south-west. I told Paul this. He took a glove off and wrote it down on the pad of paper. We were in a warm snap, and because there was little wind, his hand retained its sense of touch. But on the colder days you saw men who had been to the screens seated and groaning by the stove, waiting for the blood to return painfully into the meat of the hand.

I read him the overnight maximum and minimum from the appropriate thermometers. I read the present temperature, –31 degrees, and the present barometric pressure. I forget what that was, but it was dropping. The temperature always rose and the barometer always fell when a blizzard was coming. I reset the maximum and minimum thermometers by pulling a cord, and then closed the screen up.

As we walked around the hut to read the screen Waldo had planted on a little elevation to the south, the dogs away to our right began baying all together. All at once the cold (even today's moderate cold) and the loneliness touched me in a way that wasn't physical. The snug life of the hut in winter had softened me. I began to doubt if I could travel far in this night.

The trouble was I had offered to. On a sunny day in the previous summer, I had nominated myself for a 70-mile journey to Cape Crozier to find an Emperor Penguin egg. The eggs are laid in mid-winter. If someone thought that such a journey sounded like the apogee of Edwardian craziness, I would forgive them. The truth was, however, that no one had ever been able to retrieve an Emperor Penguin embryo, and Dryden and Paul Gabriel would achieve a zoological triumph if they managed it.

The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.

I said, ‘The egg trip …'

‘Oh yes,' said Paul. ‘We must have a conference. You and Alec and I.'

‘The end of June? You still plan it for the end of June?'

‘Yes,' he said with no enthusiasm. ‘A week from today.'

‘God,' I said. I hadn't realized. ‘A week.' I couldn't help asking, ‘You're still keen, are you?' Because he sounded so flat.

‘Oh yes,' he told me, lifelessly.

It was Paul's vision of the Emperor embryo that had enchanted me in the first place. Between bouts of racking seasickness he would come into the wardroom of the
McMurdo
and tell me about the Emperor. How it was a survival from that strange evolutionary moment (lasting, of course, millions of years) when certain serpents developed flippers and beaks and grew feathers. The debate between Paul and Alec Dryden was whether they had ever flown or not. If we could get an egg, it was likely we could see the history of this development in the embryo, see in the embryo's rudimentary quill pores, in its physical arrangement, the shape and biological history of its ancestors.

Oh he had been fervent about the task, he was rabid very nearly. Between vomiting he drew me diagrams. ‘There are other reasons for studying the Emperor embryo,' he told me. ‘The Emperors mate in the autumn on the ice at Cape Crozier. At the beginning of winter the female lays an egg and leaves the male for half the winter to tend it. He sits on the ice with his back to the Pole and the egg lies on his feet and is covered with a flap of belly blubber. Imagine. He stands there through blizzards of force 12. He stands there when it's minus 80 degrees. He eats nothing. How can he do it? How is it biologically possible? He is blood like us. He is flesh. The answer is in his body and his blood. But more basically still, it is in the embryo.'

I went to Alec Dryden and suggested I go to Cape Crozier with Paul and himself. ‘You understand,' Alec said, ‘it has to be a mid-winter journey. By the time the sun comes back they've hatched the eggs. If we want an egg at an early embryonic stage, it
has
to be mid-winter.'

I told him I understood that. Raising the Azores, with the sun on our deck, it was easy for me to say I understood.

But now the journey was a week away, and Paul didn't seem to have any appetite for it, and I had tasted the night.

After we had recorded the scarcely-different results from the screen to the south, we stood again for a while. The dogs had stopped their noise and we took in the quiet and the overbearing scene. I could tell Paul wanted to utter something so I waited. In that place it was easy to spend three or four minutes without speaking. A sort of mystical humility came down on you and speech seemed futile.

At last he said, ‘They never forgive a fellow for having a
danseuse
for a mother.'

‘What?'

‘Their fathers all saw Mother dance. They were all enraptured. Yet they don't forgive you for being her son.'

During the year I'd known him, he'd never said that sort of thing before. I asked him who the unforgiving
they
were, and what signs he had had of their unforgiveness.

‘It's obvious you don't know. Sir Eugene went to eight men yesterday. He told them they would be the final two sled teams. From them would come the four men for the Pole.'

‘I take it you weren't one of the eight.'

‘No. No. Alec Dryden. John Troy. Petty Officer Mulroy. Victor Henneker to record everything. Brian Quincy …'

‘To hold the services?' I asked, agnostically, a little bitter for Paul's sake.

‘Because he's strong.' He paused but lost control. ‘Because he's legitimate and his mother wasn't a dancer and his name will look good in the papers.'

I thought, Henneker might be the first sodomite at the pole.

‘Then there's Mead,' Paul went on, ‘and Par-axel Beck and Harry Webb.'

‘He left out Isaac Goodman,' I pointed out. ‘He left out Barry Fields. Despite the fact their mothers aren't dancers.'

Paul stared at me. For a moment there was great anger.

I said, ‘What I'm trying to say is that Stewart doesn't give a damn what your mother was. There are other factors …'