Out of the Ice (7 page)

I ran a gloved hand around my chin and it made a noise like rubbing on paper – my skin was dehydrated from the cold. I walked around the small lounge room. There were bright fabrics on the two lounges, two armchairs and curtains, all in a loud pink blossom pattern that reminded me of a Marimekko design. The kind of thing people were buying now for its retro beauty.

This sort of homeliness was like nothing I’d seen down here, and I found the domesticity strangely alarming. I had to try hard to remember I was in Antarctica.

One of the coffee tables was made from a pale European wood. Larch perhaps? It was from an older period. An antique. On it was an ashtray; I almost expected a smoking pipe. Then I smelled something and turned. On another coffee table sat another ashtray – and this one was full of cigarette butts. I went over rapidly to see if they seemed recent. There were bright pink lipstick marks on at least half the butts, but it was impossible to tell how old they were; Antarctic air is so dry and freezing, it preserves. The butts could have been here for weeks, months, years or decades. I took photos, intrigued. My guess was the butts were original, from the fifties. At this time, I would touch nothing. After my report there would be another team sent in to forensically go through everything.

That was why I was so angry that Travis had been. Had he touched anything in Fredelighavn? Contaminated anything? I assumed the previous engineers wouldn’t have disturbed the site last summer, because they were trained and briefed.

I took more photos of the room and then continued down the passage. On my right was a tiny bedroom containing a single bed covered in a thick blanket with a pink woollen crocheted rug on top. Lovingly handmade and not so lovingly left behind. A flea-bitten Steiff teddy bear lay propped on the pink pillowslip; one eye was missing, the other glassy eye stared out accusingly, as if it blamed me for its abandonment.

Colourful floral curtains seemed eerily new. There was no deterioration at all. On the walls were pictures of horses cut from magazines, and on a dressing table stood little carved wooden horses, cows and goats. A sweet rural scene, totally incongruous with where we were. Why couldn’t the little girl at least have taken these tokens with her?

These artefacts would have to be carefully preserved and conserved and moved into a main museum building. Tourists couldn’t be let loose in such an environment. A Steiff teddy would be stolen for sure. It was so cute even I wanted to pick it up. I photographed it instead.

I moved on. Slightly down from this room on the opposite side was another small bedroom. This one had carved wooden models of sailing ships, and a series of beautiful wooden fish painted brightly in blues and reds and yellows and greens. There were little white yachts sailing jauntily on the cotton curtains. The bedspread was again crocheted, but in a deep blue. The little boy loved the sea. What had he thought about the whales? And why had he left his carvings, which were clearly painstakingly made and with great pride?

It was like plague had come and wiped this family quickly off the earth, but I knew that couldn’t be the case.

I walked further into the belly of the house and arrived in a neat Scandinavian kitchen full of carved, pale wooden cupboards. A gorgeous teak table was bathed in sunlight streaming through the window. I couldn’t believe my eyes: there were blue and white coffee mugs still on the table, with a brown liquid in them, frozen solid. Why had these people left in such a hurry?

I went to the nearest cupboard and opened it. Cans of herrings, sardines, pork and tomatoes were neatly stacked. I opened another cupboard: paper bags of sugar and salt and rice stared out at me.

Ernest Shackleton had left his supplies at his famous hut in Antarctica, as had Scott. They were entirely preserved. I therefore shouldn’t have been surprised and yet I was. They had been explorers and left their provisions for future need and also because they couldn’t carry them. Here we were at a port, or a harbour at least, where boats came and went with their cargo.

Why was nothing packed up?

Had they intended to return?

I would have to co-opt historians to shed light before I finalised my report.

At the back of the house was a latrine-style toilet: a raised timber box with a hole in it, similar to those the explorers such as Mawson had used in their huts. The wooden lid was closed. I had no intention of opening it.

I retreated through the house to the front staircase and looked up. Shadows were falling through a fine lace curtain, flickering on a forest-green wall.

Was it safe to go up? I knew I should probably wait until Rutger arrived, but the engineers’ report had given the houses a clean bill of health last summer, and I was curious. My feet creaked on the stairs, the wood worn into mellow grooves. Every year they’d acquired this rich patina thousands of whales had been slaughtered. Suddenly I wanted to run. For the first time in years I yearned to go back to Melbourne to my mother and hide in our big family home in Kew. It held some bad memories but nothing like this.

I reached the landing, my hand resting on the smooth wood of the railing, polished from wear to a fine, silky feel that was almost warm to the touch.

On the upstairs level was the master bedroom. Again, the decor was fashionable 1950s. There was a small double bed with a striking cover in a geometric print of yellow, pink and green. The woman of the house surely loved it.

And yet had left it behind.

There were exquisite carvings of marine life, predominantly whales, capturing the different species in profound detail. Had the man who made them also slaughtered them? I had no doubt.

Perplexed and sad, I retraced my steps and went out the front door into the clear, cold air. I was thankful to be back in the street, away from this abandoned home. I made notes on my tablet, realising I hadn’t taken anywhere near enough photographs. I called it
The House of the Carvers
, in a nod to Pompeii. That’s what it had felt like because it seemed to have been so quickly vacated, as if the family were fleeing a volcanic eruption.

I picked up my skis and walked past more colourful houses towards the chattering of the bay. But before I arrived, a huge building loomed large on my right; its giant red doors hung open, askew, their hinges broken – and inside, I could hear and smell penguins. I walked carefully into the gloom. Snow and ice lay around in a shed full of rusted machinery: ancient tractor-tyred vehicles, all dilapidated. Around them, hundreds of Adélies had carried stones to make their nests. I photographed the birds in the glowering green light that was seeping through grimy windows high up in the timber walls.

The penguins looked at me, growing increasingly disturbed. As I walked further in they started to waddle away. There was no doubt – they were frightened. I backed off, sharing their alarm.

Out in the street I could still hear the raucous squawks of terror from the penguins. An invader had been.

It was so completely out of character for the Adélies. What had Travis and his friends done down here? Or was it the engineers who had come last summer?

Shaken, I continued on towards the bay past other corrugated- iron sheds, their doors closed, and one brick building. I thought of going into the latter, curious that it was of a different construction, but I was distracted by the unmistakable oily, fishy smell of seals. I looked around and saw an open door into a large pink wooden building. I walked across and peered inside. It was very dark and there were no windows, so I flicked on my torch as I entered. Among drifts of snow that had turned to solid ice, the room was full of comfortable lounge chairs arranged in rows, and in between the chairs, and sometimes on the chairs, was a colony of Weddell seals. I was in a cinema. The cinema that Captain Halvorsen’s wife Ingerline had built in the 1920s. Most of the seals were facing the screen at the far end, like they were watching a movie. At the back of the room was an old projector, with a reel of film still threaded into it. The huge seals lay around, their sleek grey bodies dappled with white and black splotches, whiskered faces now raised to inspect me. An enormous seal started to bark, and others joined in. They came at me aggressively and I backed away at lightning speed, my body tingling in shock. Weddell seals were usually placid, calm and untroubled by humans.

One young seal cut me off.

‘It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.’ But now the biggest seal in the room, a bull stretching almost four metres long, weighing about 500 kilos, was lunging at me. I ran. He followed me into the street and I kept running. Looking back, I saw he’d stopped outside the cinema and was propped on his front flippers, tipping his head to the sun and roaring. I didn’t slow my pace until I reached the harbour. Doubling over with stitch, I looked back. The bull seal was nowhere in sight, but I still felt like I was being watched.

Placid Bay stretched in front of me, sparkling in the sunlight. I turned again to look at the settlement. This was the view I remembered, but now it was in colour. The buildings were pink and green and orange, red and blue and yellow. A rainbow village. Fredelighavn didn’t feel like it had stood empty for decades – it didn’t seem like a ghost town. There was a strange sense of occupancy. Perhaps because of the wildlife? I turned back to the sea. To my right was a vast Adélie penguin rookery, streaked red from krill the penguins ate, stretching up a steep slope to Alliance Point. To my left, a distance away along the bay, gentoo penguins were nesting. Gigantic southern elephant seals sunned themselves on the beach.

I’d walked into a version of Paradise: a loud, noisy, hooting and honking world of happiness. Except in this scene, wrecks of old whaling catcher ships hulked in and out of the water near four wooden jetties stretching along the shore; the catcher ships, like everything else, had just been left. And strewn along the beach were huge whale bones, skeletons of the beautiful, gentle creatures that had been slaughtered, their bleached ribs rising up to the sky, casting shadows. Bile rose in a tart gush, washing my mouth with acid.

The ships were at strange angles to each other but most were fully intact. It was probably cheaper to scuttle them here than sail them back to Norway. There was no longer a use for them, because the prey had been killed to the edge of extinction. As I took photographs, a bull elephant seal, five metres long and slug-like, weighing around 3000 kilos, rose and roared through its long nose. I backed away, wary, but two seals, cows, lifted their heads and roared back. A mating ritual. The other seals remained sleeping, supremely relaxed. I left the love triangle to its courting, and walked towards the Adélies up at Alliance Point. They were just like the ones I knew from Australian Antarctic Territory, and I hoped that here, where they would have naturally nested for hundreds, even thousands of years, they wouldn’t be frightened of a human like the ones I’d just seen in the machinery shed.

The rookery was a thriving, thronging mass of black and white. The noise was deafening. I put down my skis and walked up and among the Adélies, imitating Charlie Chaplin, swinging from side to side like them.

Without warning the penguins came at me in a group, squawking and pecking. I put my hands down to fend them off and brought them back up bloodied – sharp beaks had gone right through my gloves. I couldn’t believe it. I tried to stay calm and continued to walk through the rookery, wanting to show them I was no threat, but the birds came at me again, swarming and thrusting their beaks.

I had no time to photograph their strange behaviour, no choice but to grab my skis and flee. I ran along the shore, stopping when I reached the huge expanse of the wooden-slatted flensing platform, turned silver with age. Catching my breath, I pulled out my first-aid kit. My arms were bleeding as well as my hands. There were a couple of deeper punctures on both legs where the beaks had gone through my trousers, deep into my flesh. Trembling, I dabbed on liquid disinfectant, then antibiotic cream. I was stunned. It was so unusual to be attacked aggressively by wildlife in Antarctica. When putting radio antennae on penguins you could get a few scratches and bites, but nothing like this – nothing with this force and anger. I took out my tablet and made myself focus enough to make notes, recording the time and details of what had just happened.

I ate an energy bar, but I didn’t have any appetite. In front of me was the slipway into the sea, where the whales would have been brought after having been harpooned from the catcher boats and hauled to the harbour.

From the slipway, the whales were winched up to the flensing platform to meet the flensers, men with long knives who peeled the blubber away in strips. Then more men with knives, lemmers, cut the meat from the bones. I saw winches that would have been used to turn the whales as they were sliced up; a winch that would have hoisted the bones up to the bone cookery loft afterwards; and other winches that would have taken the blubber and meat to their processing plants, one on each side of the flensing platform.

I felt deep shame at what had been done to the whales. Reluctantly, I went to inspect the nearest shed, a long, red, corrugated-iron building with tall towers to let out the steam. I turned on my torch and slashed light through the gaping doors into the darkness. Giant metal vats, about ten times my height – pressure cookers – were lined up in two rows of eight, stretching about thirty metres into the deep gloom. Ladders were propped at several points, leading to a timber platform above. I walked through the cookers, coming out into an area that made my pulse quicken. Long saws lay along a vast table like something out of a nightmare, their jagged teeth rusty but deadly. Other circular saws stood in front of conveyor belts that rose to the upper platform. It was here the men would have cut the whale meat into smaller pieces, before sending it up to boil in the cookers. Nauseous, I walked out a door at the end, back onto the flensing platform. I breathed deeply and stared out to sea, where icebergs crowded further out, covered with Adélie penguins. One bird peered over the edge, decided it was safe and plunged down into the water. The rest of the Adélies followed in a single movement.