Terra Incognita (21 page)

Like all the best camps, there was no generator. After a few minutes, however, I heard the buzz of a snowmobile. When I turned around I saw a bearded figure riding along towing a sledge loaded with pans of ice.

‘Welcome to the tropics,' he said as he got off, hand extended.

The other four were working out at their dive hole, so we unloaded the sledge and drove across. It was only five minutes away, near the walls of the glacier, and they were crowded around a bright yellow machine which looked like a large lawnmower. I soon learnt that this contraption ruled camp with an iron rod. Operated by remote control, it went down to the seabed and took pictures, and all their science depended on it. They were studying the release of debris from the glacier and its dispersal into the marine environment. The vehicle was the only thing in camp which ever got a wash.

Everyone had sunburnt faces and white eyelids. One of the three graduate students (who described themselves as ‘pipettes') was a Lancastrian studying for his doctorate in the States. Mike was six-and-a-half feet tall and taciturn, though when he spoke it was through a wry grin, and he was committed to Wigan, his home town. He had found a spot on the map not far away called Black Pudding Nunatak, and was terribly pleased to find this little piece of Lancashire so far from home. He asked me to guess where he came from by his accent, and then told me that if I had said Yorkshire he would have given me smaller portions on all his cookdays, clearly the most dire threat he could imagine. Besides Ross – the project leader – and the students, the fifth member of the team, the man who had met me, was camp manager. John was softly spoken and looked after the others like a benign scoutmaster.

I was used to the initial awkwardness of being a stranger in camp. It never lasted long so I didn't worry about it any more – quite the reverse, as I relished the thought that these unknown people were about to define themselves to me, as I to them. It was like a lens coming into focus. It was an odd way to live, I suppose; but it didn't strike me as odd at the time.

Every day they lowered the yellow vehicle through a hole in the sea ice covered by a canvas hut. Once the vehicle hit water, Ross controlled it from another hut. He sat in front of a pair of screens which transmitted images from two cameras attached to the vehicle. A hydrophone next to the cameras sent up a beep as regular as a heartbeat. Images of diatoms,
¹
skittering by as the vehicle moved along the seabed 450 feet below us, shone out from the screen in the darkness of the hut. It was like being an extra in
Star Wars
in there. I could see a jellyfish with long, undulating strings threaded with tiny lights, and shrimpy crustaceans circling a tall sponge among luminous branches of hydroids. When Ross tipped the vehicle, the cameras peeked inside a sponge. It was hollow, and dimpled, and when pushed gently, it folded like a ballerina.

‘You know what?' he said. ‘No one's ever seen that before.'

As we got back to camp, I saw that John had put up my bottle-green and maroon tent. I hadn't brought a board to avoid getting soggy in the night, but he had found one in the science crates. We had dinner in another small canvas hut underneath a sign which said ‘Floggings will continue unless morale improves.' The graduate students were engaged in eating contests. Mike had recently won a night off cook duty by swallowing a bowl of cold potatoes and three cans of coke after his dinner. Ross smiled beatifically as they argued over past ignominies and future victories; the dynamics of the group were predicated on an easy and harmonious equilibrium, well oiled now as a long, hard and successful season drew to a close.

On New Year's Eve we went off to make the last dive of the season. The wind was up, so it was chilly. I helped to scoop up platelet ice which had formed over the hole, then settled on a crate in the dark hut. When the yellow machine was travelling to the surface, the screen looked like a bank of rain on a grey day. ‘Like Wigan in November,' Mike said.

I had volunteered to cook a New Year's Eve banquet. They were about to strike camp and return to the real world, so we had a double cause for a celebration, and besides, they had only had one day off all season. People in Antarctica were always looking for an excuse for a party. The first American team at South Pole station threw a birthday party for a dog, and baked him a cake with a candle. In the early days, the Australians made such effective use of
Whitaker's Almanack
that they staged a major feast to celebrate the Anniversary of the Lighting of London by Gas.

I found the absence of any trace of home more refreshing on New Year's Eve than at any other time. I was spared the sickening realisation that once again, despite the passing of another year, nothing had changed except the things that had got worse. None of us at Mackay began spawning good intentions just because a new year was upon us. We were set free from all that.

While rooting around in the iron-hard cardboard boxes next to the dining hut I uncovered four bulbous pink packages labelled Cornish Hens, a misleading name as the birds had clearly never been east of Newark. With these, assorted dried vegetables and a tin of condensed tomato soup I contrived to make a casserole. Once cooked and jointed, the hens produced enough meat to satisfy one hungry scientist, thereby necessitating the deployment of three emergency tins of ‘new' potatoes. I concocted a salad from one flaccid head of lettuce, a tin of olives, a tin of kidney beans and three lethargic carrots. The discovery of a packet of dehydrated strawberries seemed like a small personal triumph, and with dehydrated egg, powdered milk, a tin of butter and a packet of ginger biscuits I made a strawberry cheesecake in a saucepan and left it on the ice to set. Finally I made flowers for the table out of a cardboard box, and napkin rings for the toilet-paper napkins out of the silver powdered egg bag.

The food was enthusiastically despatched, and the occasion proved that a meal is much more than the sum of its parts. Someone had brought a Walkman with speakers, and we listened to Vangelis's
Antarctica
. Jim suggested that at midnight we should go outside to see in the New Year in silence; it would be the first and almost certainly the last silent one in all our lives. Jim, one of the graduate students, was quiet, and handsome, and the others tormented him as his was the shortest beard. The sun was immediately behind the peak of Mount England, and we stood apart from each other, lost at that moment in our own private worlds.

Various bottles – the dregs of the season – appeared among the kerosene tins, and we tried somewhat ineffectually to warm them up before disposing of the contents. At two or three in the morning Ross said he had to listen to Georg Solti's live recording of Beethoven's Fifth with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra before going to bed, so we went outside to hear it soaring over the ice. The glaciers sent the sound up like the walls of a cathedral. All the ice ridges opposite were edged with gold, and I wondered how Beethoven could not have been looking at the same scene when he wrote the music. He had probably made his own journey, but in a different way.

∗

I woke late on New Year's Day, sweating in the bag; the tropical weather had returned. I lay there with the tent flap open, the bottle-green and maroon walls suffusing light over my possessions like a stained-glass window. I could hear the others talking, and when I went to get coffee I found a fried breakfast left for me in the pan. I couldn't face it, and when no one was looking I crept over to our waste hole in the sea ice and watched the food and its puddle of grease slide silently into the depths. Then I took the coffee back to my tent and lay half-in, half-out on my thermarest mat and snapped Alan Bennett into the Walkman as a New Year's treat. He was visiting New York, and described walking past a sign in the Village offering ear piercing ‘With or Without Pain'.

Mike was sitting at an open-air desk made of crates, labelling data. The others were packing up. Then Steve appeared, asking if I wanted to go and collect water with him on the south side of the glacier tongue. He was small and garrulous – the antithesis of Mike – and permanently astounded by the fact that he hadn't washed his hair for seven weeks. Steve spent most of his time at Mackay sitting on the ice feeding out coils of pink tubing attached to the vehicle.

Alistair F. Mackay, Shackleton's doctor on the
Nimrod
, had one of the best glaciers. He went on to die in the Arctic, but in 1908 he had manhauled to the South Magnetic Pole with Mawson and Edgeworth David, and on the way they camped near our spot. It is clear from Mawson's diary that Edgeworth David drove him almost mad. It was Edgeworth David's approach to the mundane detail of daily life that grated – if they had been at home, they would have quarrelled over who left the cap off the toothpaste. Mawson was a fine geologist, and all the scientists I met revered him. It is this which sets him apart from Shackleton, from Scott, from Amundsen and even from Nansen. He is the scientist's explorer. We were discussing this as we prepared the sledges, and when we filled up the snowmobiles, Steve shouted:

‘Mawson was the greatest in the south, and Nansen in the north.'

Douglas Mawson was born in Shipley, in West Yorkshire, but his parents emigrated to Australia when he was two. He went south four times. The most legendary solo trek on the continent was his, and it always will be, no matter how many Beards sally forth. On the Far Eastern Sledging Journey across King George V Land in 1912–13, after the death of his two companions, Xavier Mertz and B. E. S. Ninnis, this naturally enormous man staggered back to Commonwealth Bay at almost half his normal weight. The first person who saw him was a member of the expedition. who knew Mawson very well. This man screwed up his face, peered at the wreck in front of him and said, ‘Which one are you?' Mawson had watched almost all the food go down the crevasse which had killed Ninnis, so he was forced to eat the dogs, eyes and all. He had witnessed the agonised ravings of Mertz, watched him bite off his own finger and cleaned up his acute dysentery. He noted on 11 January that his own body was rotting through lack of nourishment.

Australians tend to speak in awed tones about meeting members of the great man's family, and a Mawson research industry has fuelled the development of the legend. While I was studying the period I received a letter from a distinguished Australian which included this: ‘Mawson, on one of his outback trips, during which the blokes open up under the vast night skies, confessed to an Australian scientist called Madigan that he had eaten part of Mertz's corpse. The story has it that Madigan wrote all this in his diary, which is now locked away so that Mawson's reputation will not be tarnished by the unpalatable revelation that he was a cannibal.'

Mawson was a man of action, little given to introspection and with none of Shackleton's romanticism and poetic flair. His diaries, admittedly not written for publication, are a litany of irritation. Twenty years after Edgeworth David had rendered Mawson apoplectic, Captain Davis provoked even more abundant outpourings of venom. (Davis took the
Aurora
back to pick up Mawson and his team and didn't leave the bridge for seven days and seven nights.) Only after Ninnis has disappeared down the crevasse does Mawson refer to Mertz by his Christian name in his diary. Frank Hurley, who went south with both Mawson and Shackleton, summed up the difference between the two men like this. ‘Shackleton grafted science on to exploration – Mawson added exploring to science.'

The sea ice was flat and free of sastrugi.
¹
Beyond the seals on the other side of the tongue, in front of the Minnihaha Ice Falls and Cuff Cape, Steve stopped abruptly, raised his goggles, pushed out his neck like a tortoise and pointed ahead. Three glossy emperors were standing in a row on the ice, looking expectantly into the middle distance as if a bus were about to appear to transport them to a fish shop. They saw us, and approached immediately. One of them was taller than the other two, though they were all over three feet. Their sleek, deep yellow collars and the mandarin streaks on their lower beaks were glowing in the sunlight, and when they were very close I could see the New Glacier reflected in their soot-black eyes.

That feet looked as if they didn't belong to them: they were grey, scaly and reptilian, ancient-looking, feet made for standing on the ice throughout the polar winter with an egg balancing on top. The tall penguin was squawking and flapping his flippers.

‘The edge of the sea ice is over twenty miles away,' said Steve. ‘I wonder why these guys came all that way?' We thought about this for some time, but neither of us came up with an answer.

The emperor penguin is the world's largest extant diving bird, and the adult weighs seventy pounds. (Fossils reveal that prehistoric penguins were as tall as six feet.) On land he knows no fear. He has no predators: Antarctica's largest permanent terrestrial resident is a wingless midge half an inch long. I knelt on the ice next to the tall penguin, close enough to watch the nictitating membranes close across his eyelids like camera shutters, and I saw how it could have been, between human beings and animals.

∗

That evening, we ate outside. It had been so warm that the streams were flowing. At midnight the boys began throwing a rugby ball around. I sat on a fold-up chair like Old Mother Time as a mist stole over the glacier. I was reading a biography of T. S. Eliot. His asperity, attenuated sensibility and dapper dress sense were a perfect foil for the vast scale of the continent, our wild appearance and the primal face of nature all around us, and his uncertainty stood at the opposite pole to the fastness of the ice. Besides that, he had written that in hot places, like the Caribbean, ‘the spirit sleeps'. The implication was that cold places were conducive to spiritual alertness, and this was my experience. I had been on assignment in Jamaica some months previously and could clearly remember lying on a beach straight out of a tourist board brochure, fanned by a sultry tropical breeze while the lapis ocean sussurated under a blazing midday sun and a six-foot waiter stole soundlessly across the hot sand bearing another vat of some treacherously agreeable cocktail. Think? I don't believe I managed a subordinate clause the whole week I was there.