Terra Incognita (20 page)

I was marooned in a large consulting room hung with posters of Neil Armstrong wobbling about on the moon. In the radiography room alongside it, Eileen had kept the unwieldy equipment from the sixties, in case the new set broke. My mother is a radiographer, and as a small child I used to go to work with her in school holidays. The smell of the chemicals, the labels (
‘Stop Bath'
) and the wire racks on the walls for hanging up the X-rays to dry – well, they took me back. It seemed odd that my childhood should catch up with me at the South Pole.

In 1961 a Soviet doctor at an Antarctic station had removed his own appendix. ‘I've trained the others to do mine,' said Eileen, as if she were talking about having her hair cut. ‘I'd have a spinal anaesthetic so I could talk them through it.' She had also done a short dentistry course.

‘The low temperatures make people's fillings and crowns fall out,' she said. ‘The glue dries out, you see.' You had to use your initiative. Forty years ago a Swedish doctor took out a man's eye. He had never seen an eye operation before, but he was coached by wireless by an ophthalmic surgeon in Sweden.

Nann came to visit me. She was furious that her husband had failed to send her a Christmas present. Before she left, I asked her to fetch my Walkman and two particular cassettes from the Jamesway. I had been storing up a treat in the event of a miserable moment, and I decided its time had come.

‘What are they?' Nann asked when she returned, watching me rip the cellophane off the cassettes.

‘They're a talking book,' I said. ‘The diary of a man called Alan Bennett. He's a living institution in England.'

Nann thought about this.

‘You mean, like Ronald Reagan used to be?'

‘More like the Queen Mother,' I replied.

Fortified by a dose of Bennett, which worked rather better than the oxygen, in the evening I asked Eileen's permission to go over to the galley and sit quietly in a corner for the Present Exchange.

Everyone put a wrapped gift on a table and drew a number out of a hat. Number one would then pick a present, which he or she had to open in front of everyone else. Number two could then either pick a present from the table or steal number one's gift, at which point number one chose another, and so it went on. Gifts ranged from knitted hats and an oil painting of the Southern Lights to a box of cigars and a handful of rocks. Before leaving home, I had been tipped off about the gift exchange and had carefully wrapped up a signed copy of one of my books. Having been carted halfway round the world, it looked as if it had been towed from Hercules Inlet on Susumu's sledge. Nann got it – she stole it from someone else. I had my eye on a handmade journal someone had already unwrapped. It had a felt cover bearing a white appliqué map of the continent with a red arrow at the Pole bearing the words
You Are Here
. When my number was called, I stole it. I was drinking weak tea while everyone else slurped buttered rum punch, but virtue did not save me. The pain in my head returned like a freight train and drove me back to my invalid's bed. Eileen was wonderful. She gave me a massive Demerol shot at two in the morning, and at four she came back, telling me that she'd thought I might be dead.

The Demerol worked, and I dreamt of rain. I was able to walk over to the galley to sit in, at least, on Christmas dinner. They were playing carols on the tape deck, and candle flames were flickering in the foil bands around the crackers. It felt as if someone had cranked up the heating. When they pulled the crackers, however, they did so unilaterally, I mean they each gripped their own cracker with both hands and pulled it. Was this another quaint American custom? They obviously didn't know what a cracker was. (Where the crackers appeared from, I never discovered.)

‘Who's that?' I asked Nann as we put on our paper crowns. A tall woman with a weathered face was sitting at the end of the table, engrossed in conversation. There hadn't been any planes. Where had she come from?

‘Didn't you hear?' replied the oracle. ‘Her name's Liv Arnesen. She's Norwegian. Skied alone from Hercules Inlet, pulling all her stuff on a sledge. Took her fifty days.'

‘That's amazing,' I said. ‘It's the
second
expedition that's arrived during the short time I've been here!'

‘Not a coincidence,' Nann replied, still grappling with the contents of her cracker. ‘There's only a small weather window in which you can trek on the plateau. Given the distances involved, that means if more than one person sets out in one season, they're almost bound to reach the Pole around the same time.'

‘That's why at home we get a flurry of Beard stories in the press at Christmas,' I said.
¹

‘You got it,' said Nann. ‘Hey, the joke in this cracker isn't funny.'

‘They're not supposed to be funny. That's the point of crackers – unfunny jokes.'

When everyone had finished eating I moved around the table and met Liv. She was sitting next to Ironman Tony, who was plying her with technical questions about the trip. She had begun with a load of 222 pounds, 132 of which was food, and her radio had failed.

‘God,' said Tony. ‘That must have been a disaster.'

‘Actually, it wasn't,' she said guiltily. ‘I was so happy not being able to communicate!'

Liv was forty-one years old. She spoke excellent English with the quiet, vibrant confidence of someone who has attained their goal and thereby dislodged all their anxieties in a stroke. Unlike Susumu, who had spent his thirty-nine days arguing with the television crew, she had developed an inner peace during the long weeks of solitude.

‘Were you ever lonely?' asked Tony.

‘Once. At the beginning of the last week I awoke one night in the tent, and thought. “What is wrong? I feel like I am in a dream.” Then I realised the wind had dropped. I had been in this wind for six weeks, and you know, it had been a companion.'

‘It must have been odd walking straight into Christmas lunch here.'

‘Amazing . . .'

‘What was your first impression?'

‘I go into a bathroom for the first time in fifty days and see myself in the mirror. I see my grandmother's face. It is a shock – how much I am aged by this trip.'

‘What made you do it?'

‘When I was twelve years old my father was working in Nansen's house in Norway. The caretaker showed me round one day – and that was the start of it. I began reading all the explorers, and it became a dream to reach the South Pole. I grew up on skis, so I knew I could make the trip. The worst was raising the money. I think that comes more easily to Americans, don't you?' She looked at me conspiratorially.

‘What does your husband think?' asked Tony.

She bristled amiably.

‘Did anybody ask Susumu about his wife?'

‘Did you read at all in the tent?' I asked.

‘I read Ibsen's
Peer Gynt
, and skied to its rhythm in my head. And I had a volume of Norwegian poetry with me. One line echoed in my mind as I crossed the plateau – how shall I translate it? “A country in my heart that no one can take from me.”'

After dinner, we read out passages from the journals of the early explorers. There was a Swede on station, near enough to a Norwegian, we thought, and he had been pressganged into playing Amundsen. Ironman Tony did Scott with gusto, though it was difficult to imagine anyone less suited to an American accent than Scott. During the march to the Pole, Bowers was cooking on their last Christmas Day, and he scraped together two spoons of raisins for each man's tea, five sticks of chocolate, and ‘a good fat hoosh, two-and-a-half inches of plum duff, four caramels each and four squares of crystallised ginger.' For once, snug in the tent, they ate until they were sated. ‘We shall sleep well tonight,' Scott wrote, ‘no dreams, no tightening of the belt.' On an earlier occasion, in the Cape Evans hut, Bowers had rigged up a Christmas tree from a ski pole and skua feathers. Shackleton, out sledging one Christmas, boiled a six-ounce plum pudding in an old sock and served it garnished with a sprig of holly he had found on the ship.

After the readings we rampaged through a few carols. Then we went downstairs to dance, and someone remembered it was traditional to smoke cigars at the Pole on Christmas Day, so the box of cigars was found underneath a pile of wrapping paper and we rushed outside into the dazzling sunshine. It was all an elaborate hoax to stop us feeling sad that we weren't at home.

CHAPTER SEVEN

We came to probe the Antarctic's mystery, to reduce this land in terms of science, but there is always the indefinable which holds aloof yet which rivets our souls.

Douglas Mawson

S
EISMIC MAN
had sent me a letter on a resupply plane returning from the deep field. In it, he asked when I was going to visit. He even wrote in a Texan drawl. I also received a letter from my grandmother in the west of England. She commented, ‘I suppose even you are beginning to feel that youth has passed you by.'

The day after I arrived back at McMurdo it was snowing, so nobody could go anywhere. Scotty, the Scott Base cook, invited me to the Kiwis for dinner. They put on an Italian night, and even produced
ciabatta
. An Andrés Segovia tape was unearthed; they admitted he was Spanish, but Antarctica taught you to improvise. Afterwards we took the flexikites out behind the pressure ridges, an area out of bounds to McMurdo residents. As a red parka betrayed a trespasser for miles, I had borrowed yellow and blue Kiwi kit.

‘You'll have to pretend you're not American,' Scotty said.

With two or three kites on one cord we could sit down and ski on our bottoms. The kites twisted in arcs, whirls and vertiginous turns, confounding the salt-encrusted pupils of a Weddell seal. The clouds melted into shifting layers of gauzy gold, and between them glimpses of the Royal Society range appeared, like the suggestions of heaven shimmering behind the trees in a painting by Botticelli. The Royal Society was the sponsor of the
Discovery
expedition, and these mountains were cursed with its name. It reminded me of Fitzroy Maclean crossing the Oxus in a boat called
Seventeenth Party Congress
.

I wanted to get out to Seismic Man's camp for New Year's Eve. He was working at a remote deep field site on the ice sheet called Central West Antarctica, a place so notoriously difficult of access that its acronym had been elongated into Continually Waiting for Airplanes. Either the weather had closed in at CWA, or a system was about to descend upon Ross Island, or the planes were broken. The camp was regularly resupplied – at least in theory. I went to the skiway four times to hitch a ride on one of these resupply flights, only to languish for hours on the padded blue plastic chairs and scuff my feet on the sky-blue lino smudged with dirty snow. I even took off once, but the Hercules, which was older than I, had problems with its landing apparatus and boomeranged after five minutes in the air. On base I had said goodbye so many times that people began laughing when I reappeared. I developed an intimate relationship with the two other prospective passengers, both support staff assigned to relief work at CWA. Evelyn was a woman in her forties with biscuit-coloured hair and José, also in his forties, was a diminutive Mexican-American biker who grinned like a satyr and called me Kid.

In good spirits, I checked in for the fifth time for my flight to CWA, but after a long morning had drained away it was postponed all over again, this time for at least a week, as the one Hercules on station had developed a serious ailment. I felt interminably depressed, as I didn't want to spend New Year on base. I retrieved my bags and decided on impulse to call into Helicopter Operations to see Robin, the helicopter queen and the personification of American can-do culture.

I had been intending to visit a group of geologists at Lake Mackay, and decided to try to get out to them while waiting for the next plane to Seismic Man's camp. Ross, the project leader, had invited me, and as it was only an hour away by helicopter at 76 degrees south 162 degrees east I knew I could catch a lift fairly easily. Ross had listened patiently to garbled radio messages from various parts of the continent announcing my imminent arrival, an event which had never taken place. Robin studied her schedule for a few moments, seized a pencil and inscribed W-002 in large letters on the manifest of one of the last helicopters before the holiday. It was heading for a camp further inland. ‘They can drop you off,' she said cheerily. ‘Happy New Year.'

An hour later I was clamped into the back of a helicopter following McMurdo Sound in the direction of Terra Nova Bay and listening to the pilots arguing about whether an eruption of Erebus would offer better odds than either of them scoring at the McMurdo New Year's Eve party.

The small camp was empty when I arrived, a
Marie Celeste
of the ice, and before I took off my headset the pilot asked doubtfully, ‘Will you be okay?', shouting out of the window as an afterthought, ‘Mind the crevasses, won't you?' It was a still and cloudless day, only five below, and the surface of the ice was hesitantly yielding, like a block of butter on a spring morning. I took off my parka, hat and gloves and contemplated the scene.

They had pitched camp in a large embayment covered by sea ice facing the Mackay Glacier Tongue. Mount England and the granite and dolerite cliffs opposite, striped in glossy chocolate browns, cast squat shadows over the streaky cliffs of the glaciers and the frozen folds of sea, and in the middle five small tents spread into a crescent. Above, an arc of lenticular clouds floated against the Wedgwood sky. I cannot say it was beautiful; it was beyond all that.