Terra Incognita (17 page)

The configuration of small buildings which made up the station were dominated by the sapphire blue harlequinned dome, an aluminium structure shaped like the lid of a work. It was 165 feet in diameter and 55 feet high, and on the top a Stars and Stripes flag was flapping among a small forest of antennae. Underneath this protective lid, half a dozen simple heated buildings housed essential facilities such as winter accommodation and the communications room. Before I went inside. I wanted to see the Pole itself. For a year I had looked at it every day, in a photograph next to the toothmug in my bathroom in the attic; and every day, as I cleaned my teeth, I had made myself believe I could get there. It was the famous photograph of Scott and the four others at the Pole. Ponting had taught Scott and Bowers to use a remote device so they could shoot photographs of themselves, and after the film had reached home he told a journalist, ‘They all look so well and strong in that last picture.' But they don't. They look as though their hearts have just broken.

The marker at the Geographic Pole is shifted about thirty feet each year to compensate for ice drift. The layer of ice, basically, is moving steadily over the surface of the earth far below it, with the result that once a year a member of staff from the U.S. Geological Survey is obliged to make the trip to the Pole to pull out the marker and move it thirty feet.
¹
This must be one of the best jobs of all time. Later in the season I met the person who did it, and I asked her what she said to people at parties when they came out with the usual ‘And what do you do?' I was longing to hear her say, ‘I'm a Pole-shifter', or something similar, but alas, she launched into a lengthy description involving geological software. At least it's guaranteed to clear the deck at the party.

A few hundred yards away from the perambulating marker, the permanent Ceremonial Pole consists of an arc of flags facing a chromium soccer ball on a short barber-striped column. Here someone had drilled a compass into the snow on a piece of canvas, every direction pointing north. I wondered how Muslims knew which way to face.

The Geographic Pole was marked by a small brass plaque and a large board quoting Scott and Amundsen (presumably they had to move this too). Whoever selected these quotes must have had a stunted imagination. Amundsen was commemorated with the immortal words, ‘So we arrived and were able to plant our flag at the geographical South Pole.' Scott's quotation read ‘The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected.'

The bathetic words conceal a welter of cultural baggage. Two nations could hardly have been further apart in their journeys when Amundsen and Scott raced one another to the Pole. When Amundsen was born, Norway didn't exist. The Norwegians separated from the Swedes on 7 June 1905, and when Amundsen planted the flag at ninety south Norway was taking its first tentative steps on the fragile slope of nationhood.

The citizens of Britain, on the other hand, had learnt that it was their right to rule. It was inconceivable to them that Britain could be wrong, or lose. Scott wrote, ‘I don't hold that anyone but an Englishman should get to the Pole first,' and on the subject of Norwegian competition in the south the crusty president of the Royal Geographical Society said, ‘Foreigners rarely get below the Antarctic Circle.' When Amundsen finally announced that he too was going south,
The Times
said in a leader that ‘he may not have played the game', a notion which has been handed down the generations like a mildewed heirloom, resurfacing (for example) in 1995 in a biography of Scott's widow written by her granddaughter: ‘At best, Amundsen's secrecy was underhand.'

In his excellent book
The Return to Camelot
, Mark Girouard points out that the code of medieval chivalry and the cultural appendages it towed in its wake were revived and adapted in Britain between the late eighteenth century and the First World War, and that the Scott myth should be seen in the context of the vanished world of late Victorian and Edwardian England. In
Westward Ho!
, as Tom swims to the North Pole Charles Kingsley conjures up the frozen spectres of dead explorers. ‘They were all true English hearts; and they came to their end like good knights-errant, in searching for the great white gate that never was opened yet.' The chivalric code created ideals of behaviour. The concept of playing the game, which loomed so large in the British perception of Antarctic exploration and in the code of conduct of the English gentleman of that time, ultimately derived from that of medieval knights. Oates appears in Baden-Powell's bestselling
Scouting for Boys
, in which the scouts are portrayed as little knights, and while Scott was slugging back from the Pole the play
Where the Rainbow Ends
was packing them in at London's Savoy theatre; it was repeated, in fact, every Christmas till the 1950s – the
More-cambe & Wise Show
of its day. In this piece of deathless drama St George appears in shining armour, there is talk of dying for England and at the end audience and cast sing the national anthem together.

In the context of the British exploration of Antarctica and this chivalric code, Girouard concludes that Scott's last message suggests an attitude in which heroism becomes more important than the intelligent forethought which would make heroism unnecessary.

By and large, the war put an end to all that.

Amundsen didn't labour under such a burden. It wasn't science that motivated him; he just wanted to get there first. He wasn't eloquent, either on paper or in person, and he never played to an audience. It is revealing that he alone of the Big Four did not take a photographer to the ice. He had his own demons, however. For reasons of his own, perhaps jealousy, he humiliated Hjalmar Johansen, a polar explorer whose feats in the north with Nansen had rendered him a national hero. Johansen was a member of Amundsen's team, but was excluded from the polar party, probably because he criticised Amundsen's judgement. When Johansen shot himself in a seedy hotel room back home in 1913, his friends held Amundsen responsible.

The Norwegians had practically grown up on skis – Olaf Bjaaland, one of the five who reached the Pole, was a former national skiing champion. Luck, as far as they were concerned, had very little to do with it. When the victorious polar party boarded the
Fram
at the end of the season, the captain, Nilsen, chatted to Amundsen for an hour before asking, ‘You have been there, haven't you?' Both men recorded this in their journals. ‘Victory awaits him who has everything in order,' wrote Amundsen. ‘Luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time – this is called bad luck.' When the five of them set out from Framheim, their base, to ski to the Pole, the cook, Lindstrom, didn't even come out to say goodbye. In order to toast the return of the polar party he had slept all winter with bottles of champagne in his bed to stop them from bursting. In his long account of the race to the Pole Amundsen makes it seem as arduous as a day at the seaside. The food depots were so plentiful that he describes the plateau as ‘the fleshpots of Egypt'.

Commentators have found Amundsen cold, but the author of
The South Pole
, published in English in two fat volumes in 1912, emerges as a warm and humorous figure. He was capable of great admiration; he said that Shackleton's sledge journey to within 97 nautical miles of the Pole was ‘the most brilliant incident in the history of Antarctic exploration', and that ‘Sir Ernest's name will always be written in the annals of Antarctic exploration in letters of fire.' The night before he reached ninety south he said that he felt as he did as a little boy the night before Christmas Eve. There is more than a touch of romance about his perception of the continent. He refers to it as ‘the fair one': ‘Yes, we hear you calling, and we shall come. You shall have your kiss, if we pay for it with our lives.'

Many pages of the book concern the dogs, some of which have more distinct personalities than the men. ‘If we had a watchword', Amundsen wrote, ‘it was dogs first, dogs all the time.' When the dogs were killed for manfood, Amundsen records that he turned the primus up full blast so he couldn't hear the shots. And oh, the innocent, ingenuous times! A photograph, taken by a member of the crew and depicting a man dancing with a dog, is captioned, ‘In the absence of lady partners, Ronne takes a turn with the dogs.'

He tried hard to be egalitarian, insisting that all five plant the flag at the Pole, and when they arrived back at Framheim they mustered outside the hut so that they could go in together. He cherished those days. ‘When everyday life comes back with its cares and worries, it might well happen that we should look back with regret to our peaceful and untroubled existence at Framheim.'

Yet there was a doubt, lurking somewhere in the shadowy recesses of his mind. He left a letter for King Haakon in the tent at the Pole, for Scott to deliver should the Norwegian party fail to return. They talked of Scott daily. Amundsen must have known that he himself had made a terrible mistake by setting off too early in the season and almost killing his men and himself.

Amundsen also used a camera, and the images in his surviving lantern slides are artless, immediate and authentic, revealing, in the self-portraits, a long face, enormous nose and the gleaming, lugubrious eyes of a basset hound. He was lonely and unhappy at the end. He knew that the English had all but expunged his achievements from the records. His autobiography tells of the son of a prominent Norwegian living in London who reported that English schoolboys were taught that Scott discovered the South Pole. As Roland Huntford commented in his introduction to a 1987 edition of the lantern slides, ‘It was as if he had been called upon to pay the price of achieving all his goals; beware, as Teresa of Avila said, of having your prayers answered.'

∗

I entered the dome through the wide tunnel. Underneath, it was a couple of degrees warmer than outside. Following the sound of laughter, I crunched over the same knuckle-hard snow and stopped in front of a construction like a large mobile home with a freezer door. At that moment a woman appeared behind me dragging a banana sledge loaded with cardboard boxes. She was wearing a white apron underneath her parka, and on her head she had a purple hat with enormous earflaps.

‘Ha!' she said. ‘You must be Sara. I'm Kris, one of the Galley Queens. That means I cook your meals. Pleased to meet you!' She extended a bearpawed hand.

‘Go on in.'

I helped her to carry in the boxes. They contained frozen peas.

A small vestibule was piled with vermilion parkas, white bunny boots and multi-coloured hats, and beyond it a group of women were unpacking boxes of Christmas decorations in a brightly lit and well-heated room spread with tables. As I watched the snakes of tinsel uncoiling, childhood memories rose like milk to the boil.

‘The other Galley Queens,' said Kris, waving her hand at the women.

At that time there were 130 people at the Pole, 40 of them scientists. This made for an extremely crowded station. Besides the dome, and the dozen Jamesways, the station consisted of a handful of science buildings on stilts (some sporting bulbous protrusions or spherical hats), a few metal towers vaguely resembling electricity pylons, and long neat lines of construction equipment and shipping containers that trickled over the plateau. Despite the webs of antennae and the clumsy cargo lines, and the fact that the buildings constituted an unsightly jumble of shapes and colours, I cannot say that the station was ugly. It was too small and insignificant in such a vast landscape to seem anything but vulnerable.

Later in the day, I borrowed a pair of skis and spent a while alone on the ice. A high-tech hut which had lost its roof stood on the bare plateau, a testament to some modern Ozymandias. The sun moved steadily, always at the same elevation, and the ice glinted secretively, shimmering in the distance like heat. The surface was creased with tiny ridges and embossed with minuscule bumps. It was so quiet I heard the blood pumping round my head, and I had the same sense of immersion in a different world that I've experienced scuba diving. The silence was like the accumulation of centuries of solitude. I was shocked that such emptiness could inspire me with awe, but it did. It was the purest landscape, the grandest, and, so it seemed to me, the most exalted. I had a powerful sense that I didn't exist at all. The sublime grandeur of nature can strip away layers of the ego – I had experienced it once in the Australian outback, lying under an immense purple sky as the heat rose off the sun-cooked earth.

Later, I stopped at the ASTRO building to see Tony. ASTRO stood for Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory, and Tony was an astrophysicist I had met on the plane from Los Angeles to Auckland. After telling me casually that he was going to Antarctica, he had looked punctured when I revealed that I was too. He resembled a bear, and the label on his parka said
Ironman
, which was not a conceit but an endearing attempt to recapture the spirit of the old days (the name had been bestowed upon him in 1986, when everyone wrote nicknames in magic marker on their parka labels) and a clue to what lay below the scratchy exterior. He had designed the building himself in 1987. His telescope, which weighed six tons, was on the roof, and he showed it to me as a parent might reveal an infant in a cot, pointing to the damage sustained when the truck conveying it was rearended in Arkansas. (I had heard about this harrowing episode in some detail on the plane.)

‘It detects short wavelengths known as submillimetre radiation,' Tony told me as his beard iced up. The instrument could look into distant galaxies, and its detectors were cooled to three degrees above absolute zero (minus 273 Celsius) with liquid helium to damp down the machinery's own submillimetre-wave radiation. Talk of minus 273 degrees made me feel less cold.