Terra Incognita (28 page)

He was an endearing eccentric with a heavy East European accent and a big heart. He rang his mother every day on the satellite line (she was 98) and fussed over the other members of his group like a hen. One of them was a well-known Russian geocryologist called David who had spent much of his life drilling into the Siberian permafrost. He was a colourful, chain-smoking character with wild eyes and ink-black hair which hung over his eyes like that of a sheepdog. He referred disparagingly to ‘You Americans', and when I issued a disclaimer, he said, ‘That's better.' His sidekick was a Russian biologist called Sasha, who was as placid as David was irascible, and the team was looked after in the field by a genial Kiwi called Al, who wore a thin plait down his back.

Imre invited me on a day's geologising at Battleship Promontory in the Convoy Range, where he was collecting rocks colonised by microbes. We arranged to meet for breakfast at seven the next day, and climbed into a helicopter shortly afterwards. It took an hour to reach the Convoy Range, flying through vast rock tunnels formed by soaring sandstone ziggurats. When we landed, my heart was singing.

We were deposited in a shallow snowless dell on the promontory, our survival gear heaped around us. The sun was shining: the microclimate was so mild that the previous season a scientist had found a primitive worm in the soil. (The worm was only visible under a microscope, but it was indubitably a worm.) We were standing in a baroque landscape of rich red and old gold rock formations eroded by tens of millennia of wind and microorganisms and mottled by lichen growing under the crust.

‘Like an ancient city,' said David.

‘Underneath here,' said Imre, gesticulating triumphantly at an outcrop of sandstone turrets, ‘just one centimetre under, the rock is singing and dancing with LIFE!' He shouted the word ‘life' and performed a little dance himself.

When I first met him at the conference in Virginia, he had talked of ‘painful beauty', and about his emotional relationship with the Antarctic landscape, which could be expressed ‘only by the German word
heimweh
, a kind of painful longing for a lost home'.

We ate our sandwiches standing up and proclaimed the Republic of Battleship Promontory. David was president, Imre prime minister, Al in charge of home affairs and Sasha KGB officer. I was crowned Queen (it was an unusual kind of republic). The national anthem was the ‘Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. This was Imre's suggestion. ‘You stand here,' he said, ‘and your soul is full of joy.'

I labelled specimen boxes later while Imre and Al shuffled around wielding a geology hammer.

‘In this quarter inch of rock', said Imre, holding aloft a red splinter, ‘we have compressed version of whole rainforest canopy. The micro-organisms slice off rock layer by layer, like salami. One slice of salami takes 10,000 years to cut. So you see here biological and geological timescales overlap.'

The micro-organisms deep froze in the winter. Like desert creatures, they had the ability to suspend life.

‘This rock provides a foothold for life in an extreme environment,' continued Imre, tapping his foot in time with the beat of Al's hammer. ‘If micro-organisms can live through the hostility of the Antarctic winter, there might be some which can live in the Martian permafrost. If there is no life on Mars, it is a bad day for biologists.'

Imre was deeply involved with what he called the ‘quest for life on Mars'. He believed it would answer the most fundamental questions of biology.

‘Will we find life on Mars in our lifetime?' I asked.

‘Maybe in yours – not mine. The limitations are not technological now. They are financial.'

‘What do you think about life on Mars?' I asked Al, still wielding his hammer.

‘It'd be a hell of a field trip,' he said.

David and Sasha were lying on their bellies in a sunny spot, smoking and looking very Russian.

‘This is why the Soviet Union collapsed,' said Imre, waving an arm in their direction.

David was interested in microbial adaptation. ‘If you had been living in Russia for past five years,' he said, ‘you believe in the adaptation of anything.'

The helicopter was due at four, but it was after eight when we finally saw the Battleships spiral away below us. We had covered feminism (this was not a success), religion (Imre said, ‘I know there is no God'), the Nicaraguan debt crisis, and methods of avoiding frostbite while taking a shit. Sasha had done a Russian dance. We finished the second thermos of hot water with the famed spiced ciderbags ‘Containing No Apple Juice', and ate fig rolls containing figs like shrapnel. There was talk of putting up the tents. Imre nodded off. Al strung out the antenna and tried to radio his girlfriend, who was working in a national park hut in New Zealand. This failed. Sasha said, ‘Try another girlfriend.'

∗

Everyone was coming in from the field, and the Crary was swarming with burnt faces and duct-taped parkas. Tribes of the dispossessed were a feature of the Crary. Boots formed queues outside offices, thermal jackets draped themselves over chairs in the lounge and picked-over ziplocks of trail-mix littered the kitchen. Over at Scott Base, the mad microbiologist, his hair still shooting upwards like the flame of the Olympic torch, had been to the top of Erebus to collect his high-temperature microorganisms. He peered down his nose over his glasses and thrashed his arms around as he told me about it.

‘I've been in the tropics, and all sorts of places, but I tell you, up there on Erebus it was like hell.'

I began the ineffably sad task of returning my kit to the Berg Field Center. Afterwards, I sat glumly in the office. The icebreaker had finally struggled in to McMurdo, and it was squatting on the Sound opposite the station, a trail of cracked ice like a runway behind it. Everyone took a great deal of interest in this bright red thing from the outside world. Few in Antarctica were ever interested in actual news from home – world events were like ‘noises off' – but a concrete reminder of life on the other side of the glass, such as the appearance of a ship, that was something else. In the old days the arrival of the ship was the major event of the season. The Australian Charles Laseron was Mawson's assistant biologist on the 1911–14 expedition, and in his rumbustious account of the experience, called
South with Mawson
, he records that when the ship arrived news from the outside world was conveyed to them in the following order. One: Australia had lost the Test. Two: the
Titanic
had sunk. Three: the Balkan War had been waged. Four: Scott was spending another year on the ice.

The captain of the shiny red icebreaker invited me aboard for a couple of days, and he sent a helicopter over to fetch me, which was very decent of him. Thirteen miles offshore, stationary opposite Erebus, the
Polar Sea
was a regal scarlet vision casting its crenellated shadow over the sea ice. It was a Coastguard ship with a crew of 131, and it had just come from the North Pole. We landed on the ice, and I was winched aboard on a crane. The crew, who had just been granted ‘ice liberty', were setting up goalposts on the ice, and soon an enthusiastic game of football was under way. I had watched Scott's men doing exactly the same thing not far from here in Ponting's moving-picture film. Describing ice liberty on the Japanese 1911–12 expedition, a seaman wrote, ‘We were like little birds let out of the cage.'

I loitered around the decks. The crew were unenthusiastic about the south. It had been a long trip, the ship was dry, and they had expected to be home for Christmas. They showed me photographs of initiation ceremonies on the dateline, and when I asked them what it was like in the north, they said the ice was dirty up there.

The Captain had written a book on Soviet Maritime History. ‘Are you more interested in the south?' I asked hopefully as we sat in his private quarters sipping Coca-Cola. He had a drawing of a polar bear by Nansen on the wall.

‘No,' he said. ‘I am bipolar.'

In the wardroom an engineer talked about icebreakers over a bowl of spaghetti. He had previously referred to scientists as ‘customers'.

‘Icebreakers have smooth bottoms, so they roll more,' he said. ‘You can tell she feels at home when she hits the ice. The more effective an icebreaker you make it, the worse ride it gives you in open seas. So icebreaker design is all about compromise.'

It was a sunny evening, and the brash ice in the trail behind us sparkled. The crew milled around, and a pod of killer whales obligingly popped their heads through a hole, revealing flashes of their shiny pebble-grey underside. Skuas landed on the floes, their spindly legs slithering, and behind us, in the distance, the tanker struggled along in the channel we had broken like an elderly relation taken out for an airing.

I sat in the Captain's chair on the bridge, poring over charts with the officers. Finally, at about nine o'clock, the
Polar Sea
began to break ice. The writing in my journal gets very shaky at this point. It was as if a mysterious power had breathed life into the ship. The vibrations made our ears pop, and the officers laid bets on whether particular seals escaped, running out to look behind. ‘You always expect them to burst like a pimple,' someone said. I went on deck to watch jagged chunks of ice with opaque white crusts and translucent blue bellies being squeezed upwards as the ship moved implacably on. Teddy Evans wrote about the noise of the
Terra Nova
breaking ice. ‘The memory of the pack ice hissing around a wooden ship is one of the voices that call,' he wrote. ‘I sometimes feel a mute fool at race meetings, society dinner parties, and dances, and the lure of the little voices I know then at its strongest . . . It is surely that which called Scott away, when he had everything man wants . . .'

∗

The next morning, we woke up near Cape Evans. It had been like sleeping on top of a washing machine. I wandered out on deck to another spectacular day, and the water in our wide trail was as blue and calm as a field of mulberries.

There was another Evans, besides the one who commanded Scott's
Terra Nova
, but he did not have a cape, despite the fact that his sacrifice was greater. Petty Officer Edgar ‘Taff' Evans went south twice with Scott, and was chosen for the final haul to the Pole despite disgracing himself in New Zealand where he had got so drunk that, while trying to lurch back aboard
Terra Nova
, he had missed the ship altogether and plunged into the water. He was the first to die on the trek back from the Pole, and since he was the only team member drawn from the ranks of the ‘men' as opposed to officers, the unsavoury notion that he lacked the moral fibre of the superior classes was whispered in gilded corridors back at home. In the making of the myth, Taff has been conveninently manoeuvred into a corner, and he is barely remembered outside his native Rhossily. He was not represented on a set of twenty-five cigarette cards depicting Antarctic characters and scenes issued by John Player & Sons, though the other Evans got two cards and the manufacturers even deigned to include a mug-shot of Amundsen. One of Taff's rare appearances as anything but the Fifth Man is in Beryl Bainbridge's
The Birthday Boys
, a novel published in 1991. Hanging on the end of a rope with Scott in the
Discovery
days, Taff clings to the formalities of rank. ‘Being down a crevasse together', he maintains, ‘is no excuse for stepping out of line.' When I asked Bainbridge why she gave Evans an erection at that point she produced scientific evidence that, when suspended down crevasses, men do get erections. That may be true, but I didn't believe for a moment that she had flung in the detail for technical authenticity. It served to distinguish the working-class Evans from the four toffs – and besides, she couldn't resist the joke.

∗

Back at McMurdo I had to pack for my flight to Christchurch the next day. I couldn't believe I was leaving. I felt exhausted, depressed, miserable and demoralised, and I had a week's hard travelling off the ice before I got to the British base on other side of the continent. I received a note from Seismic Man, written on graph paper. He said he wasn't going to make it back to McMurdo from CWA before I left. ‘So long, Woo,' the note ended.

I had planned great things for my last night, but in the end I walked to Hut Point and looked at the mountains one last time. The thought that I wouldn't see them again almost broke my heart.

The next day, I took the pictures off the office wall and the W-002 sign off the door, peeled the stickers from the ice axe and the taped label from the goggles, ripped the velcroed name off the parka, unstuck the coloured tape from the neoprene waterbottle and pulled the badge off the yazoo cap. I packed the microcentrifuge earrings, as no one would understand them off the ice.

The flight to Christchurch was delayed six times. Twenty of us were scheduled to leave, and the scientists spent all day playing patience in the Crary. I thought of T. S. Eliot when Auden asked him why he played patience so much. He reflected for a moment and said, ‘Well, I suppose it's the nearest thing to being dead.' The rest of us trailed around like the Ungone, commuting up and down to the Movement Control Center. I tried to count the number of people I had hugged goodbye. At midnight, Art De Vries, the fish biologist, brought me sashimi cut from the cheeks of his
mawsoni
fish. He gave me the earbones, to make into earrings. People lay on my office floor. David the Russian came in to present me with a ring made from the tusk of a north Siberian mammoth.

‘Are you ready to go?' he asked, fiddling with a fresh packet of cigarettes. ‘I mean, ready with your emotions?'

‘No,' I said, feeling the tears well up.

When we drove to the skiway, rays of the butterscotch light of late summer were shining through the stratocumulus. We were travelling on a C–141 Starlifter, and it had taken off for what the pilot described as a ‘test run'. At four o'clock in the morning, after being handed our bagged meals, we boarded the matt grey, windowless plane. We wedged ourselves in, and the man opposite me fished out a battered copy of Aristotle's
Poetics
. The crew retired behind the cargo. It was very hot, and the most exciting moment of the journey was when a Kiwi stripped to his bare chest. I opened my brown bag. The chocolate pudding was there, but at least my last round of American sandwiches weren't filled with peanut butter and jelly.