Terra Incognita (18 page)

When I asked how it was going, he ran a finger over his icy beard and said, ‘Astronomy in Antarctica is full of disappointments.'
¹

‘You must have great faith,' I said, ‘to keep you going through these long and gruelling years, never knowing if you're going to learn anything.'

‘That's what science is about,' he said. ‘It's usually presented to the public as unrelentingly upbeat and optimistic, and I think that's a fundamentally false picture. Science properly done should often result in ostensible failure.' He patted his telescope, as if for reassurance.

‘I'm not saying scientists are this special breed of people who alone can accomplish things, either. In fact, science and scientific thinking are things anyone can do, but they are difficult and usually require considerable struggle to accomplish anything worthwhile. The presentation of scientists as a priest caste of semi-infallible beings is a disservice to the public and to scientists. It's the root of much misunderstanding and resentment – especially in Antarctica. Let's go in. I'm cold.'

Tucked away in a small room under the dome I found a contraption which looked as if it might have been installed by Scott. It was called a gravimeter and sat in a huge glass and wood cabinet like the ones you see at the Smithsonian or the British Museum. A solid 1950s alarm clock, which wasn't working, stood next to it. It was recording data in ink, on a spool of paper, and although someone on station regularly changed the paper, no one could tell me what this instrument was doing. It was rather gratifying, after Tony's window on the cosmos.

The Skylab tower was one of the largest buildings at the Pole, and from the outside it resembled a giant orange Tardis which had just landed from another planet. It was reached through a tubular under-ice corridor off the back of the dome. To get to the top, I climbed a series of staircases, walked along narrow corridors past mysteriously labelled doors which no one ever went through, and the final assault consisted of a ladder. Three men worked up there making spectroscopic and interferometric studies of airglow and auroral processes in the upper atmosphere. They seemed to be struggling against almost insuperable odds. The project leader waved desperately at the humidity barometer, which was hovering between zero and one.

‘We are working here', he said in a tone of quiet desperation, ‘on top of thousands of feet of ice, so we are not grounded, or earthed as you British say. Every instrument works when you pack it into the box at home, but it's not working when you get it out of the box here. It's a conspiracy.'

∗

When I came out of my Jamesway one evening I crossed paths with a man carrying a case of beer. He said, ‘Want to come for a beer with us?' In another Jamesway, half a dozen people were draped over a sofa and a few armchairs, or leaning on a wooden bar, grasping cans and smoking in the gloom while Eric Clapton pumped out of the speakers. A huge video screen dominated one corner, and the walls were graffitoed with the signatures of previous residents. ‘John F. Baker, summer '90–'91. So long guys, it's been a party.' It was the South Pole's equivalent of the Corner Bar. I was gratified that it hadn't taken me long to find it.

A construction worker with hair the colour of custard was sitting on a stool at the bar. She had grown up on the coast, but she said she only realised how much she missed the ocean when she saw it again. They often talked about sensory deprivation. One of their favourite topics was the rush of arriving in New Zealand after leaving the ice, and they always mentioned specifically darkness, trees, colours and smells. (I had noticed how much the absence of smell affected people at Fryxell, when one day I had put on a dab of perfume from a sample bottle I found in the bottom of a bag. When I went into the Jamesway they reacted as if I had poured a bucket of Chanel over my head.) On three separate occasions over the past decade a pair of skuas had flown to the Pole in midsummer, stayed a day or two and disappeared. As they were the only wild living creatures ever seen on the polar plateau these birds were a topic of perennial interest at ninety south.

A tall man who had been leaning silently on the bar picked up his parka and left without a word.

‘Man, is he toasted,' said the woman with custard hair.

‘What does toasted mean?' I asked.

‘It means you've been here too long!' she said. ‘You kind of wander off when people talk to you.'

‘How long has he been here then?' I asked, gesturing at the empty space recently occupied by the tall man.

‘Thirteen months. He's a science technician. Leaving this week.'

It was a long time to go without any topographical features to look at.

‘You know what, though?' custard-hair went on, leaning towards me. ‘I bet you he comes back next season. Everyone leaves saying they're never coming back. But they do. They get home and realise they haven't got a life anyway, so they might as well come back here. We have a saying at Pole that “never” means “yes”.' With that she disappeared underneath the bar to fish out more beer.

‘By the end of January', I overheard someone say behind me, ‘there's no such thing as an ugly woman here.'

∗

That this place – the South Pole – was discovered at all was probably due more to the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen than to any other single figure. He looms over the Heroic Age like an Old Testament prophet, though he never went south. Everyone who followed learnt from him: even Scott asked his advice. Nansen boosted Norwegian national pride at a crucial juncture in the country's history, and the role model he provided gave his countrymen the confidence to pull it off in the south. When he was welcomed back from his epic attempt on the North Pole in 1896, he was greeted by Bjørnson, the national poet, in front of a crowd of 30,000 enthusiastic Norwegian nationalists, with the words, ‘And the Great Deed is like a confirmation for the whole nation.'

Nansen was practical and romantic – even mystical. What drives men to polar regions, he said, is
the power of the unknown over the human spirit
. He was a formal, aloof man, but his frailties were very human. He fell in love with Scott's wife, and of course he had wanted the South Pole for himself. But Nansen was drawn into other areas, becoming Norway's ambassador to London, and felt, eventually, that it was right to give way to the younger man, and that it was best for Norway. He lent Amundsen his ship, the
Fram
, and years afterwards he said that when he saw Amundsen sailing away in her it was the bitterest moment of his life.

One story about Nansen illustrates the importance of choosing companions carefully. He decided he could only have one man with him on his longest and most arduous journey in the north, and selected Hjalmar Johansen. Long afterwards Nansen confessed that at the very first camp after leaving the ship he realised that he had chosen a man without any intellectual interests whatever. It must have been a bleak moment.

∗

I signed up to help in the kitchen before Sunday brunch. The galley was the heart of the community, and the six Galley Queens made it beat. The food they prepared was delicious too; my first meal was calzone with spinach and cheese and lentil salad. Sometimes a Hercules brought freshies, but the station was largely dependent on the frozen food stacked in boxes under the dome. (Freezers were unnecessary, though elsewhere on the continent I saw scientists using fridges to stop things from freezing.) During the winter, when the station was isolated for over eight months, they had no fresh food at all except whatever came on the mid-winter drop, when a C-141 plane flew over from Christchurch and dropped cargo on the plateau. The previous season the crew had pushed out one hundred dozen individually bubble-wrapped eggs, and only two had broken.

I was taken over to view the COBRA telescope by an electrical engineer who always wore a cowboy hat. The COBRA project (Cosmic Background Radiation Anisotrophy) looked for minute deviations in the smoothness of cosmic background radiation, itself the after-effect of the early years of the expanding universe. The telescope was positioned ten feet off the ice on a wooden platform, and looked like an enormous inverted fez.

The engineer was taking care of the telescope for the astronomers who built it. It was not an easy job.

‘If a part goes down on the telescope at forty degrees below, it takes three people an hour to fix it,' he said, pushing back his cowboy hat. ‘At home it would take one man no more than five minutes.'

‘Why bother then? Why not do it at home?'

‘The thin air here means we have less stuff to look through to see into outer space.'

‘You must hate this thing sometimes,' I said, unfreezing my eyelashes with my fingers.

‘Hell, no. Most people go to the office, I go to the telescope. It's just another instrument to me – like a toaster.'

∗

In the evenings people sprawled on the sofas in the library under the dome, swathed in candlewick bedspreads. It was like a nest. Once a week, fifteen of them went off to the station poetry group. They each put a word into a box, and everyone had to write a poem about the one which was pulled out. All the words were white, like marshmallow, or cloud, or chalk.

The pool room next to the library was festooned with framed letters celebrating the establishment of the station. After Scott and his party left the Pole in January 1912 it was abandoned until 31 October 1956, when Admiral George Dufek stepped out of an R-4D plane called
Que será será
. The following month Americans began parachuting in materials, and construction of the first South Pole station began. In 1947 Admiral Richard Byrd had flown over the Pole. It was his second attempt, and he said it was like flying in a bowl of milk. Byrd was a towering figure in the short history of Americans in Antarctica, though not a popular one, and several of his claims, such as his 1929 ‘flight over the South Pole' are regarded with suspicion. People told stories about him falling drunk out of planes. He made five journeys to the ice, and when asked what men missed most on Antarctic expeditions, he would reply with the single word, ‘temptation'. Harry Darlington, an American who took his wife south some years after Byrd, was asked the same question. He replied also with one word. It was ‘variety'.

Byrd's second expedition, only twenty-two years after Scott, was the most spectacular.
Discovery
, the book he wrote about it,
¹
includes an account of the return to Little America, Byrd's base on the Bay of Whales, after four years. Together with several companions, he dug down into the mess hall. As they were standing there under six feet of accumulated snow, the telephone rang. It was an internal system, of course, and a colleague in another part of the base had found the button and pressed it. ‘If Haile Selassie had crawled out from under one of the bunks,' said Byrd, ‘we couldn't have been more taken aback.'

Alone
is Byrd's best book. It tells the story of four-and-a-half months alone at Bolling Advance Weather Base in 1934. It was night all the time he was there, and very cold; he was living in conditions ‘like those when man came groping out of the last ice age'. He injured his shoulder before the support team left and almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning. It taught him, he wrote, ‘how little one really has to know or feel sure about'. Only when he became almost certain that he was going to die did he understand Scott's last words, ‘For God's sake look after our people.'

This is how he described the departure of the sun.

The decision to inaugurate an International Geophysical Year in 1957–8 encouraged the Americans to build up their Antarctic programme. In addition, the Soviets were known to be nurturing a desire to build a station at the Pole. When the U.S. government learnt of this, the project was quickly hustled down the corridors of bureaucracy and out on to the ice. The station was completed in February 1957, and no more was heard of the Soviet plan.

Paul Siple, Byrd's protege, took on the old man's mantle. He oversaw the construction of South Pole station, was among the first to winter there, and invented the wind-chill factor. A biologist and geologist, Siple wrote a book, published in 1959, called
Ninety Degrees South
. The subtitle was ‘The Story of the American South Pole Conquest', and in it he wrote, ‘One striking characteristic of my six Antarctic expeditions is that almost all the men were of the he-man type.' Siple regularly worked himself into a fury on the subject of the fecklessness of young people. No alcohol was permitted on his expeditions, and on one occasion, when chief scientist and second-in-command Tom Poulter discovered thirty cases of liquor smuggled in by the doctor he poured it all on to the snow. The doctor then declared himself sick (presumably from a broken heart). Shortly after this, they ran out of tobacco, though Siple himself no longer smoked, of course, and spent much of their time searching for discarded cigarette ends. One man held butts to his lips with long-nosed pliers.