Terra Incognita
by
Sarah Wheeler

Other books by Sarah Wheeler

Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile An Island Apart:
Travels in Evia

RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK

Some names have been changed to protect people's privacy.
Copyright C) 1996 by Sara Wheeler All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.  Published in the
United States by Random House, Inc. New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
This work was originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a
division of Random House ilK, London, in 1996.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for pernission to
reprint previously published material:

THE ERSKINE PRESS: Excerpt from a poem from The Quiet Land by Frank
Debenham (Norwich, Norfolk, ilK: 1992).  Reprinted by permission of the
Erskine Press.
HARCOURT BRACE & COMPANY AND FABER AND FABER LIMITED: Excerpt from "The
Wasteland" and from "Little Gidding" from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by
T. S. Eliot.  Copyright (:) 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company.
Copyright C) 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot.  Rights outside the United
States are controlled by Faber and Faber Limited.  Reprinted by
permission of Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Limited.
RANDOM HOUSE, INC.  : Twelve lines from Atlantis from 1M H. Auden:
Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson.
Copyright 01945 by W. H. Auden.  Reprinted by permission of Random
House, Inc. A. P. WATT LTD: Four lines from "The Cold Heavenr from The
Collected Poems of W B. Yeats.  Reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt
Ltd.

on behalf of MichaelYeats.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-AND-PUBLICATION DATA Wheeler, Sara.

Terra incognita: travels in Antarctica / Sara Wheeler.

p. cm.

Originally published: London: Jonathan Cape, 1996.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-679-44078-X 1. AntarcticaþDescription and travel.  I. Title.

G860.  W48 1998 919.  8'904 dc21 97-34528

Random House website address: www.  randomhouse.  com Printed in the
United States of America on acid-free paper

24689753

First Edition Maps courtesy of Jonathan Cape Book design by Caroline
Cunningham

To Mark Collins, finally

"You wait.  Everyone has an Antarctic.  "

THOMAS PYNCHON
CONTENTS

Introduction .

ONE The Big Wh .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

PART ONE Map: The Antarctic Continent

TWO Terra Nova Bay 27

THREE Landscapes of the Mind 44

FOUR The Other Side of Silence 61

FIVE The Naked Soul of Man 78

six At the South Pole SEVEN Feasting in the Tropics EIGHT The Response
of the Spirit NINE Igloos and Nitroglycerine.  . .

TEN Icebreaker.  . . . .

, .

, :

1

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

PART TWO Map: The Antarctic Peninsula ELEVEN From New Zealand to the
Falklands197

TWELVE One of the Boys 208

THIRTEEN Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks .  231

FOURTEEN Afloat in the Southern Ocean 263
FIFTEEN Wooville I: The Erebus Glacier Tongue .  . 281

SIXTEEN Wooville II: Cape Evans 305

SEVENTEEN Restoration 326

EPILOGUE: Ulysses 335

APPENDIX: Bread-and-Butter Pudding 339

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 343

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 349

 "It is the last great journey left to man, " Shackleton said.
He didn't mean that we all had to pack our crampons and set off, ice
axes in hand.
For Shackleton, Antarctica was a metaphor as well as an explorer's
dream.  "We all have our own White South, " he added.  It is true that
for me Antarctica was always a space of the imaginationþ before, during
and after my own journey.  No cities, no bank managers, no pram in the
hall.
It has been said that before the ice came Antarctica was the site of
Atlantis, the ancient civilization that disappeared in a cosmic gulp.
When I went there I learned that Atlantis is within us.
Until I was 30, my relationship with Antarctica was confined to the
biannual reinflation of the globe hanging above my desk, its air valve
located in the middle of the misshapen white pancake at the bottom.  As
far as I was then aware, the continent was little more than a testing
ground for men with frozen beards to see how dead they could get.
Then, in 1991, I traveled several thousand miles through Chile for a
book I was writing.  As I prodded around in the hinterland of the
national psyche I discovered that the country did not come to a stop in
Tierra del Fuego.  A small triangle was suspended at the bottom of
every map.  They called it Antartida chilena.  So one day in February I
hitched a lift from Punta Arenas to King George Island, off the tip of
the spindly Antarctic peninsula, on an antediluvian Hercules belonging
to the Chilean Air Force.
With nothing but Chile on my mind and a carpetbag on my shoulder I
climbed down the steps of the plane into the rasping air and shook the
bearpaw extended by the wing commander who had been appointed as my
minder.  I looked out over the icefields vanishing into the
aspirin-white horizon.  Above them, a single snow petrel wheeled
against the Hockney blue.
Much later I climbed a snowhill with a Uruguayan vulcanologist.
There was no sound on the top of the hill except the occasional taptap
as the vulcanologist scraped snow into a specimen tin, and as the
shadows lengthened on the rippling Southern Ocean I looked beyond the
small base in the foreground and thoughtþthat's an ice desert bigger
than Australia.  Antarctica is the highest continent, as well as the
driest, the coldest and the windiest, and nobody owns it.  Seven
countries might have "claimed" a slice for themselves, and there might
be almost two hundred little research camps, but it is the only place
on the planet not owned by anyone.
Standing on the edge of the ice field in a wind strong enough to lean
on, squinting in the buttery light, it was as if I were seeing the
earth for the very first time.  I felt less homeless than I have ever
felt anywhere, and I knew immediately that I had to return.
When I left, wedged into the same decrepit Hercules, I wrote Terra
Incognita on the cover of a virgin notebook.
I discovered that the ancient Greeks had sensed it was there because
something had to balance the white bit at the top of the globe.  *
Medieval cartographers had a stab at mapping it and called it Terra
Australis Incognita, the Unknown Southern Land.  For centuries,
everyone thought it was rich, fertile and populous and that finding it
would be like winning the National Lottery.  It was Cap * Conceiving as
they did of an equilibrium in nature, they decided that the arktos, the
"bearU in the north, must be balanced by an antz-arktos in the south.

xiv \D \. , t

Introduction

tain Cook, the greatest explorer of all time, who sent the message back
to the Naval hydrographers fidgeting through the long reign of

George III that no, down here there are no golden fields or burgeoning
trees or tall people with flaxen hair.  Down here there is only cold
hell.
After that most people forgot about Antarctica for a while, and when
all the other white spaces on the map had been colored in, they came
back to it.  The British were especially keen on Antarctica, as they
had done Africa and spent much of the nineteenth centuty fretting over
the Arctic.  By the time the twentieth century rolled around they were
fully engaged in the great quest for the south, and it culminated in
the central Antarctic myth, that of Captain Scott, a man inextricably
woven into the fabric of the national culture.
Once I had glimpsed it, the Antarctic remained lodged in my mind's
eye.
I forced my friends to sit in empty cinemas whenever Charles Frend's
1948 film Scott of the antarctic resurfaced and we watched John Mills
stride across a psychedelic backdrop that made the continent look like
a seventies album cover.  Bernard Shaw had used Antarctica as a
metaphor, T. S. Eliot recycled Antarctic material in The Waste Land,
and I found it in Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Vficlav Havel, Doris
Lessing and Thomas Keneally.  When I went to the National Theatre I
found that Tony Kushner had set a whole scene of his epic Angels in

America down there.
All places are more than the sum of their physical components, and I
saw that Antarctica exists most vividly in the mind.  It has always
been a metaphorical landscape, and in an increasingly grubby world it
has been romanticized to fulfill a human need for sanctuary.
Mythical for centuries, so it has remained.
It took two years to organize the journey.  During that period I was
accepted as the first foreigner on the American National Science
Foundation's Antarctic Artists' and Writers' Program.  The two years
unraveled in a seamless roll of letters, interviews, meetings,
conferences on two continents, endless freelance work, exhaustive
medicals and long walks through the bowels of the Foreign Office in

London to get to Polar Regions, which was a long way from anywhere else
in the building and the temperature dropped as I approached it.
Nobody knows what my dentist and I went through to satisfy the punitive
requirements of the U. S. Navy.  My tattoo was logged in the
Disabilities and Disfigurements section of the British Antarctic
Survey's medical records.  Three weeks before departure I had to
undergo various unpleasant tests to document that my heart murmur was
not one of the uncommon kind likely to stage a rebellion on the ice.
The cardiologist in Harley Street who applied himself to this task was
Brazilian, and I had made an appointment to collect the results at
eight o'clock on the morning after Brazil won the World Cup.  I sat
taut with tension on the steps outside his elegant practice, clinging
helplessly to my dream until he fell at my feet out of a taxi, his tie
undone, shouting "You have the best heart I have ever seen."  At the
British Antarctic Survey predeployment conference in Cambridge I was
woken each morning by the padding footsteps of a dog handler in the
chilly corridors of Girton College, and on the last night I sat in
candlelight under dour oil portraits of tweedskirtedVictorian scholars
in the Great Hall, listening to Barry Heywood, the head of BAS, telling
us in hushed tones that we were about to experience the time of our
lives.
I sat in Scott's cabin aboard Discovery in Dundee and stood in pouring
rain on the Eastern Commercial Docks in Grimsby among excitable
relatives waiting for the James Clark Ross to arrive at the end of its
long journey from Antarctica.  Week after week Shirley, the obliging
information assistant at the Scott Polar Research Institttte in
Cambridge, unlocked the dust-encrusted basement so I could get at the
fiction section, which was hidden behind dented tins of film spools and
cardboard boxes of dog food.  At the same Institute I worked my way
through blubber-splashed pages of leather xvi Introduction notebooks
inscribed by the men who gave Antarctica a history.  Reading them all
was like looking at an object through the different angles of a glass
prism.  On assignment in India, I escaped to find the headquarters of
the Indian Antarctic Programme in the asphyxiating concrete heartland
of New Delhi.  When I reached its ramshackle eighth-floor offices, the
air-conditioning had just sighed to a stop and a tall secretary in an
orange said was fanning herself in front of a photograph of a pristine
snowscape.  I drank warm beer outside railway stations in the south of
England, waiting to be collected by veteran explorers long since
retired, and later, in their neat homes, liver-spotted hands turned the
stiff black pages of cracked photograph albums.  In Hampshire I was
entertained by Zaz Bergel, granddaughter of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the
Antarctic explorer's Antarctic explorer, and when I put on my coat to
leave she said, "Grandfather was much happier there than anywhere
else.

n There were psychological preparations too, though these were more
difficult.
In the Foreword to a seminal book about the opening up of the continent
I read, "Some of the most prominent challenges of polar living fall
into the provinces of mind and emotion, rather than muscle and
matter.
" In the same book a man with many years' experience on the ice wrote,
"The Antarctic generally wields a profound effect on personality and
character and few men are the same after a stay there."  I wasn't
afraid of loneliness, I had learned that it doesn't arrive on the
coattails of isolation.  All the same, I was apprehensive about where
Antarctica would take me, and about seeing my life sub specie.
Robert Swan, who walked to both Poles, told me that going to either is
like wiping away your life on a child's magic slate.
A scientist who went south with both Scott and Shackleton coined the
phrase "polar madness, " and Admiral Byrd packed two coffins and twelve
straitjackets when he led one of the earliest U. S. Antarctic
expeditions.  Soon I was familiar with the folldore, the base commander
who torched all the buildings in camp, the man who started talking with
a lisp, the chef who set to with a meat cleaver, the Soviet who killed
a colleague with an ice axe during a game of chess (to ensure it didn't
happen again, the authorities banned chess).  One of the earliest
behavioral findings in Antarctica was Mullin's discovery of spontaneous
trance states, and a number of papers have been written since then on
alterations in consciousness induced by exposure to Antarctic
isolation.  At the same time, Antarctica had melted frozen hearts.  "At
the bottom of this planet, " wrote Admiral Byrd, the first man to fly
over the South Pole, "is an enchanted continent in the sky, pale like a
sleeping princess.  Sinister and beautiful, she lies in frozen
slumber.
"
"There, if anywhere, " said another explorer, "is life worthwhile.
" The people lighting my way had one thing in common.  They were all
men.
It was male territory all rightþit was like a gentleman's club, an
extension of boarding school and the army.  Only the U. S.

program had a relatively balanced ratio of men to women.  Alastair
Fothergill, who produced the Life in the Freezer television series and
wrote the accompanying book, told me that for British men, going south
was still like going to the pub.  "My experience has been, " Sir Edmund
Hillary said between mouthfuls of chocolate cake over tea in New
Zealand, "that the scientific community in the Antarctic regard it as
their property and bitterly resent any outsiders venturing there.  "
Men had been quarreling over Antarctica since it emerged from the
southern mists, perceiving it as another trophy, a particularly meaty
beast to be clubbed to death outside the cave.  Mike Stroud, who played
Boswell to Ranulph Fiennes's Johnson when the pair attempted an
ambitious trek across the continent, was more honest with me than most
of the Frozen Beards.  "Sometimes I think I didn't have time to stop
and appreciate it, " he said.  "I walked across, but most of the time I
was miserable."  xviii

e

r '

V. ,

i,

B,

. , e , , * The Antarctic continent is shaped roughly like a
cross-section of the human brain, with a grossly misplaced finger
tapering toward South America (this is usually shown coming out on the
left at the top, depending which way round the map is drawn).
More than 99 percent* of this landmass is permanently covered with ice
formed by thousands of years of tightly compacted snowfalls.  The other
0. 4 percent consists of exposed rock.  Like glutinous white icing
flowing off a wedding cake, the layer of ice on the surface of
Antarctica is slowly but persistently rolling toward the coast, forcing
its way between mountains, turning itself into glaciers split by
crevasses before inching its way into a floating ice shelf or
collapsing into the Southern Ocean.  As a result, ice shelves surround
the jagged Antarctic coastline.  One of them, the Ross Ice Shelf, is
larger than France.
The continent consists, broadly speaking, of two geological zones
divided by the Transantarctic mountain chain.  Greater Antarctica (also
known as East Antarctica) is generally thought to be one stable
plate.
Lesser Antarctica (or West), on the other hand, consists of a lot of
smaller, unstable plates, which is why it is studded with volcanoes.
Besides the Transantarctics slicing down the middle, mountains form a
ring around much of the continent.  Beyond these coastal heights,
topography in the interior tends to disappear into thousands of miles
of apparently flat iceþthe enormous polar plateau.
Mountain ranges as high as the Appalachians are hiding under this flat
ice.
The South Pole, the axis of the earth's rotation, is located in Greater
Antarctica, on the polar plateau.
For much of the year, Antarctica enjoys total darkness or total
daylight.  The cusps between the two are short and exciting, as few as
eight weeks might pass from the moment the sun makes its first * 99.

6 percent is the latest figure from the BASSSPRI satellite map.

appearance over the hodzon to the day it never sets.  The summer
season, broadly speaking, runs from mid-October to late February.

One of Antarctica's most salient charactedstics is that of scale.

The continent, one tenth of the earth's land surface, is considerably
larger than Europe and one and a half times the size of the United
States.  It has 90 percent of the world's ice, and at its deepest, the
ice layer is over 15, 000 feet thick, pushing the land under it far
below sea level.
Thousands of cubic miles of ice break off the Antarctic coast each
year.
It is, on average, three times higher than any other continent.
It never rains and rarely snows on most of it, so Antarctica is the
ddest desert in the world.
Into this land of superlatives I plunged.  My plan was to fly in from
New Zealand with the Amedcans in November, just as the austral summer
was under way.  Their main base is on one of the many hundreds of
islands scattered around the Antarctic coast, and from there I could
travel to a vadety of field camps on the continent itself, perhaps make
the Pole for Chdstmas, and later hook up with the New Zealanders, who
were based nearby, and the Italians in Mlctoda Land only a couple of
hundred miles away.  At the end of January I was going to make my way
over to the British Antarcticans, all working on the peninsula, the
finger tapedng off toward South Amedca.  As this was on the other side
of the continent, I had to travel back to New Zealand on an Amedcan
military plane and take a fiendishly roundabout route to the Falklands
(it was so diabolical that I ended up back in my own flat in London in
the middle) in order to catch a lift on the British Antarctic Survey

Dash-7 plane down to the Antarctic Peninsula.  I was going to travel
with my compatdots for two months, by which time night would have begun
its swift descent, and then sail up the peninsula in an icestrengthened
ship and ardve in the Falklands in early Apdl.
In my grandmother's youth a restless spidt would probably have got her
as far as Spain, then as exotic as Xanadu.  The world has shrunk, and I
was able, now, to go to its uttermost part.

xx By the end of the beginning I understood something, that Scott was
dght when he endorsed Nansen's exhausted remark, "The worst part of a
polar expedition is over when the preparation has ended and the journey
begun."  When someone asked Jonathan Raban why he was making his way
down the Mississippi he said he was having a love affair with it.
Antarctica was my love affair, and in the south I learned another way
of looking at the world.  What I want to do now is take you there.
As Shackleton said, "We all have our own White South, " and I believe
that the reach of the imagination extends far beyond the snow fields.

PART ONE.

Antarctica left a restless longing in my heart beckoning towards an
incomprehensible perfection for ever beyond the reach of mortal man.
Its overwhelming beauty touches one so deeply that it is like a
wound.

EDWIN MICKLEBURGH, Beyond the Frozen Sea

S e f , ,

THE ANTARCTIC CONTINENT

ANTARCTICA SOUTH

vook

NKANTARCTIC C ROS

. 1+ bICE SHELFX ldirns lq CATo convert the Celsius Scale (which we
used to call Centigrade) to Fahrenheit, multiply the temperature by
nine fifths and add 32.  In reverse, take 32 from the Fahrenheit
temperature and multiply by five ninths.  Taking 0þC as equivalent to
32þF, thus we obtain, -50þC = -58þF -30þC = -22þF -20þC = -4þF -10þC =
14þF - 5þC= 23þF 5þC = 41þF 10þC = 50þF 20þC= 68þF 30þC = 86þF 50þC =
122þF The absolute zero temperature (the lowest possible) is -273.

15þC.

A temperature of-40þC =-40þF.

ONE.

The Big White Come, my friends.  Tis not too late to seek a newer
world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows, for my
purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the
western stars, until I die.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, from Ulysses

Each day was hotter than the last, and I soaked up the November
sunshine like a lizard.  Two Sundays after landing in New Zealand I had
to present myself at nine in the morning at the headquarters of the

U. S. Antarctic Program in Christchurch in order to be issued my
Extreme Cold Weather clothing.  I borrowed a mountain bike and cycled
along deserted roads to the snoozing outskirts of the city.  The bike
had a matching helmet with a tiny rearview mirror protruding from the
side.
I swung up to the entrance of the institutional snow-white building
where a sprinkling of fellow travelers had settled on the low walls and
warm grass.  I couldn't unstrap the helmet and was obliged to solicit
the help of a vulpine Russian glaciologist.
At nine sharp we were ushered inside to take our places in a windowless
room festooned with posters of icescapes, and there we waited for the
last arrivals in the silence of strangers while a man ticked off our
names on a clipboard and scowled like Beethoven.
I felt very alone at that moment, in a strange country bound for a
stranger continent.
The safety video began, optimistically, with Scott's "Great God, this
is an awful place" delivered in a sonorous thespian voice and
accompanying footage of well-clad individuals crashing into
crevasses.
When it was over we trooped through to the changing rooms.
There were three other women, and our room was bare except for four
pairs of tagged, overstuffed orange fabric bags the size of medium
suitcases.
The bags yielded a bewildering array of footwear, underwear, headwear,
handwear, eyewear and perplexing, unidentifiable items.  At the bottom
of one of my bags, underneath an enormous vermilion parka, lay a coiled
chain and a pair of metal dog tags engraved with my name and a long
number.  I arranged my clothes in neat piles on the carpet and eyed the
others.  They were beginning to try things on, so I tackled a pair of
thermal long johns with a willy-slit at the front.
At one end of the room a curtain shielded us from a long counter to
which we returned ill-fitting items to a blue-overalled clothing
assistant who would scuttle away to pluck a different-size pair of wind
pants or polypropylene glove liners from unseen mountain ranges of gear
lurking in the hinterland.
As we pulled, zipped, laced and unrolled, my companions began to
talk.
One was a cook, another a senior ice corer and the third a NASA
technician.  The ice corer had six seasons of "ice time, " and she
showed me how to switch on the white rubber bunny boots.  They were
insulated by air and had a valve on the side that you had to open and
close on aircraft.
When we had satisfied ourselves that no part of our extensive new
wardrobe would chafe or pinch or expose our soft flesh to frostbite, we
packed up our bags and the scowler dispatched us

I

The Big White into the sunshine, marking our names down and issuing
threats about the consequences of arriving late for the plane.
The sun made me squint as I cycled back along the straight artery into
town.  I groped around in my addled mind for the dream that had brought
me here to the other side of the planet, but it seemed to have
evaporated in the heat.
I was a guest in Christchurch of Roger Sutton and Jo Malcolm, who lived
in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of the city.  Roger's sister
Camilla was an old friend of mine from her wild London days.
The entire clan had embraced me as one of their own, and I enjoyed
their company enormously.  Jo was a news reporter on New Zealand
television and Roger bought energy for SouthPower.  He was obsessively
committed to the outdoors and flung off his suit to go running or
bicycling or climbing at the first opportunity.  That evening they
drove me to Lyttelton, a potent toponym in the history of Antarctic
exploration and the last stop for most voyages early in the century.
We went, on the way, to KinseyTerrace and the clifftop house where
Scott had stayed with his New Zealand agent, signing his name above the
fireplace, and emerged from the high passes overlooking Quail Island,
where he grazed his second-rate mules.  In Lyttelton I saw hollow-eyed
Russian seamen and tired brothels.  The town was quiet, and
old-fashioned even by New Zealand standards.  It seemed to dwell in
another age.  In one bar, the table soccer was equipped with small
wooden teams of Jews and Nazis.
The crews of the first ships to drop anchor off the unknown southern
continent reported pleasing success with the women of Lyttelton, noting
in their journals that mention of imminent departure for Antarctic
exploration was the most effective chat-up line they had ever
deployed.
"No mere ship's officer had a chance against a polar explorer, even if
only in the making, " one of them wrote.  Roger suggested keenly that I
should test the contemporary application of this theory, and stopped
the car outside several bars, urging me inside and saying that he would
pick me up later.  Apparently it still works, at least for men.  I read
in a textbook on Antarctic psychology published recently by Victoria
University of Wellington that when two men placed a personal ad in a
magazine asking for "active female companionship for a week for fit men
about to go to the Antarctic, " they were inundated with offers.
When we got home I called my friend Cindy in London, I needed to speak
to her before I left.  She said she was glad I'd rung as she wanted the
recipe for pisco sours, which they were planning to have before
lunch.
I was furious that they were going to drink pisco sours without me, as
I had discovered them in Chile and introduced them to my friends.
Still, I told her how to make them, and at the end of the conversation,
as we said good-bye, she said she felt as if I were disappearing into a
black hole.
The taxi arrived at four, and Roger struggled out of bed to say
goodbye.
It had rained in the night, and the tarmac glistened in the deserted
roads, the only trace of life a cat rubbing its ear in a pool of light
from a sodium streetlamp.  At the airport I found my orange bags in the
changing room, layered up in my new cold-weather garments and slipped
the dog tags around my neck so that in the event of a crash my charred
remains could be air-mailed to my parents.  Then I joined 30 other
dim-eyed people in the lobby, and we all shifted from foot to foot
while the pilot of our LC-130 turboprop, a ski-equipped Hercules,
barked out the drill for the eight-hour flight.
"The toilet facilities on board, " he said, "are primitive at best.
They consist of a urinal and a honey bucket.  I advise y'all to go for
the major purge before departure, to avoid the honey bucket."  As the
first creeping glow of dawn hesitated above the eastern skyline, we
carried our gear through to the customs building observed by a handful
of saturnine U. S. Navy personnel.  Then weed died around a machine
that dispensed plastic cups and squirted out an inch or two of weak
Nescafe until we were marshaled into line in front of our baggage by
short-haired men in combat fatigues accompanied by a sniffer dog.
At this point we were dispatched into the watery dawn light and across
the grass to have breakfast in the mess canteen.  I was desperate for
real coffee, but the shadowy form of a honey bucket loomed between me
and the pot.  In the strip-lit dining room, an American football game
screaming from the television, we sweated in our thermals and ate eggs
and hash browns while a biochemistry graduate from North Dakota who had
recently learned the rules of cricket discoursed upon them at length.
It took the rest of the table some time to grasp the basic
principles.
I dealt confidently with all appeals, as custodian of this British
rite, * didn't matter that I, too, had never understood the rules.
Those elysian Sunday afternoons on the edg of sunlit village pitches
never seemed to have much to do with cricket.
Two hours later we boarded the plane, a line of bulky vermilion parkas
differentiated only byMelcro strips on the breast pocket emblazoned
with our names.  As I stepped inside the belly of the plane, someone
handed me a brown paper lunch bag and pointed to the end of a row.  I
strapped myself into a red webbing seat, wedged up against a stack of
cargo crates, and looked around, like Jonah.
The man next to me was an astrophysicist involved in the study of
supernova explosions.  He planned to send a balloon up over Antarctica
to record the spectral properties of gamma rays.  We pushed in our
earplugs and the plane rushed down the runway and into the morning sky,
and then it was too noisy to hear any more about his balloon.  I
couldn't see a window either, so I hurtled toward Antarctica in my own
private capsule.
I slept fitfully, squashed between the astrophysicist and the cargo.
None of us could find space for our enormous feet, and our legs crossed
in the aisles at our ankles like upside-down guards of honor.
After an hour the temperature rose swiftly from glacial depths to
tropical heights, and we struggled out of our parkas and balaclavas and
neck gaiters just in time to feel it plummet again.  The Russian
glaciologist sat with his head in his hands for most of the journey,
staring at the floor, while the astrophysicist gazed benignly into the
middle distance, serene and untroubled, floating along like one of his
balloons.  At a certain point he smiled beatifically and shouted in my
ear that we had passed the PSR.  Months later I found out that this
stood for Point of Safe Return, which means over half the fuel has
gone.  It used to be called Point of No Return, but it frightened
people, so they changed it.
We picked at our sandwiches and muffins and long-life chocolate
puddings in plastic pots.
When we landed and a crewman opened the door, it was as if he had
lifted the lid of a deep freeze.  Bloodless icefields stretched away to
mountains below softly furred cumulus clouds, and ice crystals came
skittering toward us through the blistering air.  The Hercules had
landed on the frozen sea between Ross Island and the Antarctic
continent, and along the wiggly island coast land met solid sea in a
tangle of blue-shadowed pressure ridges or the pleated cliffs of a
glacier.  I began to readjust my perception of "land" and "sea."  Not
far off, a tabular iceberg was clamped into the ice, its steep and
crinkled walls reflecting the creamy saffron sun.  The sky was a rich
royal blue, marbled up ahead bythe volcanic plumes of Mount Erebus, and
a paler blue sheen lay over the wrinkled sea ice like a filmy
opalescent blanket.  A spur reached from the island toward the
continent, and on a hump at the end I saw a wooden cross, man's tiny
mark.
It was Vince's cross erected in 1904 by Scott's men in memory of a
seaman who fell down an ice cliff during a blizzard.  When I looked, it
gave me an almost Proustian rush, I had been here so often in my
dreams.
Tucked into a hollow between the spur and an arc of hills, and at first
obscured, a hundred buildings huddled on the ice-streaked volcanic rock
of Ross Island.

The Big White

l x , .  , t I was prepared for McMurdo, the largest of the three
American bases in Antarctica.  It did not shock me to find what looked
like a small Alaskan mining town with roads, three-story buildings, the
ill-matched architecture of a utilitarian institution and a summer
population of more than a thousand people.  The lower echelons of other
Antarctic communities, none of whom had been anywhere near the place,
are fond of parroting diatribes against McMurdo because of its size and
sophistication, by implication asserting the superiority of their
experience of "the real Antarctica."  I liked Mactown from the
beginning, as one is drawn to certain anomalous characters in films,
and my affection for it never faltered.
After a hundred introductions I was allotted a bedroom in a
chocolate-brown dormitory block.  It was a pleasant room with two beds,
two wardrobes, two desks and several sets of drawers, and it shared a
shower and toilet with the room next door.  I obviously had a roommate,
but she was nowhere in evidence.
I duly layered up in my multiplicity of cold-weather garments, but when
the wind dropped, the ambient temperature on Ross Island was no colder
than a particularly bitter winter's day in London.
Although the mean annual temperature at McMurdo is minus 17.  7 degrees
Celsius, in summer it can rocket to plus eight (it plunges as low as
minus 50 in the winter).  In those balmy days of summer when I first
arrived the temperature hovered around minus five.  It is true that if
the mercury touches minus five in London the weather is headline news
and the trains grind to a standstillþand one doesn't stroll around
swaddled in three layers of polypropylene, two layers of fleece and an
industrial-strength parkaþbut for many of the Americans on station,
winters at home are a good deal colder than summers on the edge of
Antarctica.
What no one ever quite gets used to is the brutalizing effect of the
wind.  The average wind speed at McMurdo is ten miles per hour (12 knots) .  Extremely high winds, common all over Antarctica and
terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds.
That, effectively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a
highly dangerous injury but one that can soon become fatal if
untreated.  A wind racing along at 35 miles per hour (56 knots), for
example, which is fairly usual, reduces an ambient temperature of minus
six degrees Celsius to a windchill factor of minus 28.
The Crary Lab was a long wet-cement-colored building on stilts, the
showpiece of American science in Antarctica.  It consisted of
mysterious enclaves of petri dishes and microcentrifuge tubes,
wellheated offices, antiseptic conference rooms, and a lounge presided
over by a scrofulous penguin in a glass case.  Each lab door bore a
number corresponding to the project number of its occupants.
These Science or S-numbers were the key to many things in McMurdo.  The
small and unfunded Artists' and Writers' Program, in which I was a
participant, dispensed W-numbers (for Writer), and my number was W-002,
a textbook writer from the Midwest had got W-001.  On some doors, a
metal sign had been stuck under the project numbers.  Most of these
signs were self-explanatory, such as Penguin Cowboys or Sealheads, but
some were more gnomic, the Bottom Pickers, I found out later, were
investigating the seabed.
The best thing about the Crary was the view from the window that ran
the length of the lounge.  It looked directly over McMurdo Sound at the
Transantarctic Mountains.  They stuck up like the bones of the
planet.
I had been given an office, and its door sign said W-002, WHEELER.
It was a windowless room about eight feet square with two modern desks,
a set of bookshelves and a blackboard.  Around the corner, in the wide
corridor, a collection of startlingly uglyAntarctic fish leered out
from glass cases under bell jars labeled with Latin names.  Among them
a bright blue plastic fish with yellow protrusions and goggle eyes
glared out of its own jar of formaldehyde.
Later that day I was inducted into the intricacies of the Waste
Management Program.  I learned that there were 18 different kinds

The Big White

of waste, ranging from Light Metal to Cooking Oil, though for
complicated reasons a broken glass did not belong in "Glass" nor should
a cereal box be thrown in "Cardboard."  This explained the behavior of
people I had seen standing in front of a row of bins clutching a small
item in one hand and scratching their heads with the other.
Hazardous Waste constituted an entirely separate department of even
more byzantine complexity.  The sprawling piles of rubbish once
photographed by Greenpeace were a distant memory.  Only veterans could
remember the barrel that had been roped off between McMurdo and Scott
Base after it allegedly fell off the end of the Geiger counter.  The
413-ton nuclear reactor brought to the station in 1961 was long
forgotten, as were the noxious brown clouds that used to billow from
the high-temperature incinerator every Saturday.  Two decades ago,
waste was simply left on the frozen sea until the ice melted.  This
practice was outlawed by the U. S. Antarctic Program in 1980, however,
before Greenpeace entered the fray.  Burning, too, had subsequently
been outlawed, and waste was now retrograded to the United States to be
burned there, or used as landfill, or recycled.  The reactor was
removed in 1972.
The American presence in Antarctica, financed and managed by the
National Science Foundation, a government agency, and maintained by a
private contractor based in Colorado, has outgrown its Naval origins.
With a budget hovering just below $200 million, the Antarctic program
represents 6 percent of the NSF budget.  As the U. S.
Department of Defense has contracted, so the U. S. Navy (more properly,
a joint military force) has been withdrawing from Antarctic operations,
a process that seems set to continue.
At breakfast one day I sat next to a man with a chipped tooth and a
ponytail who was fortifying himself with boiled eggs before setting off
to collect meteors from the polar plateau.  He had already discovered
meteors from the moon, and he reckoned he had some from

Mars, too.  He told me this quietly over his yolky toast, explaining
how he could identify whence the rocks came as someone else might tell
the story of a film he had watched on television the previous night.
It happened that the elderly Oscar Pinochet de la Barra, the
distinguished head of the Chilean Antarctic Institute, was then at the
end of a short honorary visit to McMurdo.  He had published widely on
Antarctica and, like any self-respecting Chilean, had written poetry
about his experiences.  I sought him out, and we sat in a hut
overlooking the frozen sound, talking about Chile.  He was an
enthusiastic character who seemed grateful to speak Spanish.  The more
famous Pinochet was his cousin, and he muttered uncomfortably, "We are
not friends."  In the midst of my grand passion for Antarctica, I
occasionally looked over my shoulder at Chile, guiltily, as if at a
lover I had betrayed.  As I got up to go, Oscar touched my arm, and
with his fingers resting in the crook of my elbow he said gently,
"Chile is Chile, my dear.  But Antarctica is about much more than
ice.
" Many images of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration have burned
themselves into our imagination, but the wind-blasted huts are its most
potent symbol, frozen set pieces of old socks and tins of Fry's
cocoa.
I was longing to see the huts.  I wanted to pay homage, and I hoped it
would help me understand the most highly charged chapter of the
continent's history.
The Heroic Age began at the Sixth International Geographical Congress
at London's Imperial Institute in 1895.  On August 3 those present
passed a resolution "that this Congress record its opinion that the
exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of
geographical exploration still to be undertaken, " and went on to urge
scientific societies throughout the world to start planning.  Six years
later, on a balmy summer's day in 1901 in the middle of a glittering
high-society yacht week off the south coast of England, a smiling King
EdwardVII stepped aboard Discovery and pinned the insignia of Member of
the Victorian Order on the chest of her barely known young captain,
Robert Falcon Scott, wishing him Godspeed on his journey to the ice.
The period drew to a close little more than two decades later, on
January 5, 1922, when Sir Ernest Shackleton clutched his heart and died
in the cramped cabin of his last ship, Quest, off the lonely island of
South Georgia.
Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Ronne Amundsen and Douglas
Mawson, the Big Four.  These were the heroes of a generation of
children who pored over images of bergs towering above wooden ships and
men and dogs straining in front of sledges.  Queen Victoria had been
dead only six months when Discovery steamed away from the Isle of
Wight, and the twentieth century hadn't yet gathered momentum, when it
did, it would steamroller these and many other dreams.
Scott, as English as overcooked cabbage, led two expeditions, setting
out first in 1901 in the specially commissioned Discovery and ten years
later in the spartan converted whaler Terra Nova.
During the second expedition he reached the South Pole a month after
Amundsen.
When he saw the Norwegian flag flapping in the distance Scott wrote in
his journal, "The worst has happened."  Two men died during the march
home, and Scott and his two remaining companions perished in their
tent, holed up in a blizzard eleven miles from a supply depot.
Shackleton was an Anglo-Irishman who first went south aboard Discovery,
under Scott's command.  On that expedition he sledged to the 81st
parallel with Scott, but was eventually invalided home with scurvy.
In 1907 Shackleton set out aboard Nimrod as leader, at last, of his own
expedition, and on that journey he reached within 97 nautical miles of
the South Pole.  It was, at the time, the farthest south any man had
ever gone.  In 1914 he went again, leading an ambitious expedition in
which two ships, the Endurance and the Aurora, deposited parties of men
on opposite sides of the continent.  The plan was for one party, led by
Shackleton, to sledge across Antarctica while the other laid depots on
the opposite side.  It didn't work out quite like that.
Endurance was crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea, and Shackleton
was obliged to embark on an epic struggle to save himself and his
men.
It was an exceptionally difficult ice year, and on the other side the
Ross Sea party also encountered severe difficulties.
After the First World War, Shackleton took off again, this time aboard
Quest, with the aim of mapping an unknown sector of Antarctic
coastline.  On the journey out, he died.
Together with Ibsen and Grieg, Ronne Amundsen brought his young country
out of the shadowy realm of northern mists.  He had had extensive
experience in the north, made the first transit in one vessel of the
Northwest Passage, and traveled with Fridtjof Nansen, the greatest
polar explorer of all.  Amundsen was planning to reach the North Pole,
but when he heard that Frederick Cook claimed to have got there, he
decided to go south and set out in 1910 aboard Fram, though he didn't
tell the crew or the rest of the world his true destination until he
reached Madeira, off the North African coast.  Until then, only his
brother knew.  Amundsen and four companions reached 90 degrees south on
December 14, 1911, and raised a Norwegian flag on the brick-hard ice at
the South Pole.
Mawson was a scientist.  A British-born Australian, he first went south
with Shackleton, aboard Nitrod.  Mawson was one of three men to reach
the South Magnetic Pole, the south pole of the earth's magnetic field
(as opposed to the geographic South Pole, which is the southern point
of the earth's rotation).  In 1911 he led the Australasian Antarctic
Expedition, also aboard Aurora, and made a legendaryone-man journey,
walking hundreds of miles back to base after his two companions had
died, one of them disappearing down !  , [, [ [i

The Big White

a crevasse with almost all the food and the other going mad from food
poisoning.  Sixteen years later Mawson led a joint British, Australian
and New Zealand expedition to Antarctica.  He ended his career as
professor of geology and mineralogy at Adelaide University.
On the Discovery expedition Scott's men built a hut on the spur
protruding into McMurdo Sound.  The spur became known as Hut Point, and
the hut was primarily used for storage, though they also performed
plays in itþlarky rituals being de rigueur.  It was subsequently used
as an advance base by other sledging parties.
McMurdo had risen up less than a mile from the point.  The wind was
blowing steadily at about 25 miles an hour when I first walked down to
the hut, and the exposed flesh between my goggles and balaclava
immediately began to feel as if it were burning.  I quickly covered
every square inch.  I was already used to subzero temperatures, but I
only had to take off my gloves and glove liners for five seconds to
feel what would happen to me in a high wind if I failed to dress
properly.  Trying to take a photograph without my glove liners in
hard-blowing wind, however speedily I went about setting up the shot, I
almost invariably lost sensation in one or two fingers.  I couldn't
begin to imagine what the old explorers had suffered when they pushed
farther south, month after crucifying month.  I saw them with fresh
eyes then.
When I entered the hut, the stillness came upon me like a
benediction.
There was a mummified seal, a frozen mutton carcass, and stacked tins
of Huntley & Palmer biscuits.  It was colder than a sepulchre.
They used to light a blubber stove, but the heating was always
inadequate, according to the diaries.  Shackleton wrote later that "the
discomfort of the hut was a byword of the expedition, " and when he was
back there in 1908 he reported that some men preferred to sleep outside
in their tents, as * was warmer.  In the sixties a New Zealander
stepped on a mousetrap that had been brought down by Scott's men to
protect the food stores.  I wouldn't have fancied a mouse's chances in
those temperatures.
Of course, the Heroic Age didn't suddenly appear on the global
landscape like a meteor.  It grew out of what had gone before.
Nineteenth-century explorers had been gobbled up byVictorians hungry
for role models embodying the aspirations of the age.  As Peter Fleming
wrote in Bayonets to Lhasa, his book about the 1904 British invasion
of Tibet, "By the end of the nineteenth century there were few major
enigmas left on the African continent.  Save for Antarctica, whose
austere secrets were already arousing the competitive instincts of
explorers, Tibet was the only region of the world to which access was
all but impossible for white men .  . . " But Tibet was small fry.
Press attention shifted from the Dark Continent to the Arctic and
thence to Antarctica, and the conquest of the last white spaces became
a metaphor for the triumph of imperialism.  The cultural vacuum of

Antarctica provided the perfect tabula rasa on which to play out a
vision.  At Scott's farewell dinner Leonard Darwin, president of the
Royal Geographical Society, said in his speech, "Scott is going to
prove once again that the manhood of our nation is not dead and that
the characteristics of our ancestors who won the Empire still flourish
among us."  Twenty-four-hour daylight was desynchronizing, and watching
Mount Discovery glittering away busily in the small hours felt like
stealing a march on time.
Although McMurdo had two bars, as well as a coffee shop where temperate
people sipped cappuccino, the best place to go drinking was an
unofficial nightspot on the gloomy top floor of a dorm.  It was known
as the Corner Bar, and any reprobate who arrived on

The Big White

the ice was drawn toward it like iron to a magnet.  It was not
advertised, it was not even spoken of very often, and some people spent
whole seasons on base without knowing of its existence.  Yet anyone
with lowlife inclinations appeared at the Corner Bar within 48 hours of
arrival.
The Corner Bar was the creation of four enterprising support staffers
who had turned their two-bedroom-plus-connectingbathroom configuration
into a communal lounge bar and four-bed bedroom.  No money ever changed
hands there.  The bar, presided over by a hyperactive carpenter called
Mike, ran on goodwill, and customers contributed bottles or cash or
sent care parcels from New Zealand at the end of their tour.  As the
curtains were never drawn back, the room was as Stygian and smoky as a
shooting gallery.  The Corner Bar kept erratic hours, but its schedule
was simple, if the door was shut, then so was the bar.  It was equipped
with a large, low, smoked-Plexiglas table and bar paraphernalia ranging
from a huge Budweiser clock to a life-size model penguin with the
concentric circles of a shooting target painted on its chest.  There
was constant through traffic, and new faces would loom out of the smoke
among the hard-core movers and shakers.  It was a great place.
I met a seismic geologist from Texas in the Corner Bar.  He had blond
hair, come-to-bed eyes and been-to-bed clothes, and one night he said
to me, "Being in McMurdo, I feel I've come halfway round the world to
find the outskirts of Austin."  I often heard people expressing
disappointment at finding modern conveniences on Antarctic stations.
I never felt sorry or guilty or upset about it, bases are the tiniest
fragments of human life on a vast, unspoiled white continent.  It was
like complaining about a couple of specks of dust on the Bayeux
tapestry or one inharmonious note in a Mozart sonata.
Before moving out of McMurdo and into a field camp, I was required to
attend Survival School, a training course that would equip me to handle
tents, stoves and radios and enable me to swing nimbly out of a
crevasse or come to a halt should I slide uncontrollably down an ice
hill.  "Survival School" sounded more like a group therapy class you
might come across on the Upper East Side, or in Islington.
People called it Happy Camper School, and as Americans are often not
strong on irony I thought the nickname was promising.
First was a snowcraft lecture.  It took place in the Crary lounge and
the teacher, a field leader called Bill with eyes the color of
cornflower hearts, produced a fistful of frozen sausages from a glove
to illustrate the danger of frostbitten fingers.
The Berg Field Center managed the practical aspects of life off base,
and in it tents languished in various states of undress, stoves lay
dismantled and sleeping bags were stacked in neat rows and categorized
according to temperature requirements, the ones at the bottom marked
"Snowy Owl.  Minus Fifty."  Ice axes stood menacingly in close-ranked
battalions among small armies of harnesses, ropes, thermarests,
neoprene water bottles and first aid kits.  A large poster hijacked
from colleagues in the Arctic warned of the dangers of polar bears.  It
was at the Berg Field Center one mild, sunny morning the ambient
temperature minus 12 degrees Celsius, that 14 of us loaded up a tracked
vehicle in preparation-for Survival School.  There were two
instructors, one of whom was Frozen Sausage Bill, and eleven pupils
besides meþthree Navy personnel and eight scientists.  Everyone was in
high spirits.
We headed out a few miles onto the ice shelf.  By the time we embarked
on the first session, at the foot of a snow hill, a band of clouds had
descended and visibility had shrunk to 30 feet.  The morning culminated
in techniques for self-arrest while sliding down a snow hill on your
back and upside down.  You plunge your ice ax into the snow at your
side with the blade pointing toward the sky, twist your legs over, and
roll and pivot yourself around the ax until you are lying facedown,
head at the top, with the weight of your body over the ax, knees in and
bum up.
Afterward, we trooped off for lunch.  In a small hut on the ice, Bill
discoursed on the niceties of stoves as the rest of us concentrated on
trail mix, expedition cheese, crackers and chocolate and sucked on
cartons of cranberry juice.  Between bouts of eating we mastered
pumping and priming and nodded gravely about the dangers of carbon
monoxide poisoning.  When we had finished, we walked across the ice
shelf toward Mount Erebus to learn how to build igloos.
Erebus is an active volcano, and to those who love the south it is more
perfect than FUji even Hockney's Fuji.  The most recent measurement of
its height, gnerally agreed to be the most accurate, is 3, 793 meters
(12, 444 feet).  It is the Eiffel Tower of the continent.
Named after the ship in which James Clark Ross fought through the pack
ice to almost 79 degrees south in the sea now named after him, on one
side Erebus overlooks the Ross Ice Shelf.  Called the Barrier by the
early explorers and formed by ice flowing off the continent, this shelf
consists of a roughly triangular slab of floating ice the size of
France, which is glued to the continent on two sides.  The third side
meets the ocean.
During the summer months, when the thinner sea ice breaks up, the edge
of the ice shelf crumbles off as bergs.  "The ice shelf is a region of
unearthly desolation, " Edwin Mickleburgh wrote in Beyond the Frozen
Sea, "a place of strange forebodings stirred by the loss of horizons
into an endless encirclement of the ice invading the explorer's mind.
" Helicopter pilots called it "The Big White."  During the course of
the afternoon, we engaged ourselves enthusiastically in building a snow
mound, sawing ice bricks, constructing a wall and digging a trench.
Frozen Sausage showed us how to spiral bricks into an igloo, this was
very difficult.  After we had accom pushed these tasks, we put up our
tents and the instructors handed us a radio and went off to stay in the
hut half a mile away.
I shared a Scott tent with a scientist sporting a beard like Trotsky's
(it seemed dangerous, with so many ice axes about), and we ate our
dehydrated dinners sitting on our snow-brick wall.  It wasThanksgiving
Day and, gathered chummily around the two stoves, we toasted it with
more cranberry juice, though not being American I felt a bit like an
imposter at a Masonic ceremony.  One of the Navy men, a chief petty
officer, was about to embark upon a mission to recover a radioisotope
thermoelectric generator (RTG) powering an automatic weather station at
a remote spot on the polar plateau.  A number of small RTGs had been
working nicely in Antarctica before anyone began to worry about the
environmental impact of radioactivity.  All the others had been
removed, but the last one was so inaccessible that no one had got
around to retrieving it.  The RTG hadn't been seen for ten years, and
whether this man and his team would ever find it was clearly a matter
of conjecture.  He didn't seem worried, anyway.
We had an English-accent competition, easily won by an amiable
Norwegian-American graduate student called Lars who was subsequently
disqualified when he revealed that he had lived in Britain for five
years.  Lars had opted to sleep in the covered snow trench we had
builtþa terrible mistake, it turned out, as it rained ice on him all
night.  He planted a Norwegian flag outside and called the trench
Framheim after Amundsen's base camp.  Late in the night Lars and I
strapped on cross-country skis and headed out over the ice shelf.
He reminded me of a big shaggy dog.
When we awoke the next morning, great snowdrifts had formed around the
tents.  I had forgotten to stow my water bottle in my sleeping bag, and
the water had frozen.  Everything had frozen.  But it didn't matter.
Trotsky was laboring over some feeble joke while rehydrating sachets of
oatmeal when Frozen Sausage and Mike reappeared.  They said something
about "scenario training, " so after dispatching the oatmeal we struck
camp and headed off.
A handful of new recruits were waiting in the hut.  "Right, " said Mike
as we arranged crates in a circle and sat on them.  "Go round the
circle, introduce yourself, and say something personal, like whether
you prefer blondes."  This was a difficult question.  I began compiling
a mental list of ex-boyfriends to see if it revealed a predilection for
a particular hair color.  Once I got back to 1990 I became muddled as
to who came where, so I fished out a pen, straightened the wrapper of a
granola bar, and wrote a column of names next to a column of dates,
with a third column for hair color.  In some instances I seemed to have
an extremely hazy recollection of hair, and of course there was the
boxer in 1989 who was totally bald and had to be struck off the list
altogether.  I was engrossed in this important task when Mike called my
name.
"Um, " I stammered, "can't seem to find any evidence of a preference
for blonds.  . . " I pulled myself together.  "No beards, though.  "
Everyone looked at me stonily.
Scenario training involved responding to a simulated plane crash
outside the hut.  We were asked to list our skills so that roles could
be allocated.  Among them, the Navy men had almost every known skill
covered, and they suggested helpfully that my role could be to write
the best-selling book of the coming disaster.  In the end I was
consigned to communications.  Having rigged up the high-frequency
antenna from bamboo poles in the snow and headed off a short burst of
machine-gun fire, I found the Field Operations Communications Center on
the airwaves and checked in our party, disguising my English accent in
case I said the wrong thing.  "Reading you loud and clear, Sara, " came
the crackling reply.  Trotsky and the others were busy stretchering a
supine Bill into the hut, so I strolled aboutþno doubt in gross
dereliction of dutyþand enjoyed the scenery.  It was a clear morning,
and I could pick out Mount Discovery and Mount Morning as well as White
Island, Black Island, and Minna Bluff.  It was all starting to look
familiar.
Back at base, a series of urgent messages was waiting.  I had been
invited to the Italian station at Terra Nova Bay a couple of hundred
miles away, and a helicopter would be leaving the next day.
Although I had been in touch with the head of the Italian Antarctic
program, Mario Zuccelli, from London and he had invited me to Terra
Nova Bay, I hadn't been expecting the visit to materialize yet, I had
scarcely expected it to materialize at all.  It was embarrassing to run
away from my American hosts the minute I was qualified to do so and
before I had been anywhere with them.
For the rest of the day I occupied myself by climbing Observation Hill
overlooking McMurdo.  The team Scott left behind at the hut had put a
jarrah wood cross on top as a memorial to the five men who died on the
trek back from the Pole.  Just before the Terra Nova left Antarctica,
they had inscribed it with the last line of Tennyson's Ulysses, "To
strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."  They had got the idea
from Nansen, who had used this quotation to pay homage to

Amundsen's voyage through the Northwest Passage.
Tennyson was their poet, though Browning came a close second, and once
they even held a competition to decide who was better.  It was
difficult to imagine members of a contemporary expedition sitting
around arguing over the merits of Auden andYeats.
The disparate buildings of the station were spread out in the hollow
below Observation Hill, adding a pattern of dull color to the icescape
around it.  My eye followed the coastline of Ross Island.
In places, especially where it had been engulfed by a glacier, it was
difficult to distinguish where the island ended and the frozen sea
began.  The topography of the island was powerful and muscular, bulging
with volcanic unrest, and it was a relief to turn away to hundreds of
miles of flat, frozen sea.
Beyond the sea, the mountains on the fringe of the continent were too
distant, and too perfect, to seem threatening.
They were frosty sentinels, unassailable and infinitely desirable, a
tease.
Although I hadn't yet experienced anything of "the real Antarctica, "
already I had a profound sense that I was in the right place.  To start
with, the relief of actually getting there was incalculable after the
interminable preparations.  But it was more than that.  In some bizarre
way I had an atavistic sense that I had come home.  I couldn't imagine
what this meant, but I didn't seek to understand it then.  I had only
just arrived.
The next morning I carried a packed bag and a set of coldweather
clothes to my office and attempted to locate my helicopter.  It turned
out that it had already flown to Scott Base, the New Zealand station
two miles from McMurdo.  As these bases are linked by telephone, I
managd to track down an Italian climatologist called Claudio who
announced that they were delighted I was joining them on the journey to
Terra Nova Bay.  He would call me, he said cheerfully, when departure
was imminent.  We hung up.
Trapped in my office for four hours, waiting for a call, I had my first
esson in the logistics of Antarctic travel.  Part of the journey was
about learning to keep still.
When the telephone rang a Kiwi pilot introduced himself.  He was very
sorry but he couldn't possibly take me as the helicopter was already
overloaded.  He had no idea when there would be another trip.
Ten minutes later, as I was still sprawled miserably in my swivel
chair, the telephone rang again.  Another Italian.  Mario, I
established, had ordered Claudio off the flight so that I could take
his place.  "You come to Scott Base immediately!  " I heard this
unknown voice demanding, and I obediently began pulling on my
cold-weather clothes.
Scott Base has been called a suburb of McMurdo, so close that a shuttle
bus runs between the two stations and Americans make daily raids on the
tiny shop run by the New Zealanders.  It was usually possible to catch
a lift, and this I did.  Scott Base was probably about one twenty-fifth
the size of its neighbor, a neat collection of pale green buildings
overlooking the frozen shore and a bank of pressure ridges strewn with
Weddell seals.  I found the entrance and stood in the lobby, waiting
for whatever was going to happen next.
A tall, athletic figure burst through a door.
"Are you our passenger?  " he asked brightly, and as I nodded he
stretched out his hand.  "I'm Ben, the copilot.  Pleased to meet you.
You must be a very important person."  I wondered, as I shook his
gloved hand, how such erroneous information had made its way into the
system and what the consequences might be when everyone found out that
I wasn't important at all, but this was no time for petty worries.
Within ten minutes I was reaping the fruits of the misconception,
wedged into the back of a smart orange-and-white Squirrel helicopter
emblazoned with the ItaliAntartide logo next to several bulging
cardboard boxes and three ice axes.
On the other side, a mechanic was fixing a headset for me.
With only a very shaky idea about where I was going and with whom I was
traveling, and no idea when I might return, if ever, we took off over
the frozen sound toward the Transantarctics, the sky a brilliant blue
and sunlight flashing off distant glaciers.  I caught a glimpse, in
those first few moments, of what I might learn in Antarctica.
The world seemed freshly made, and the future cast all its terrors away
on the timeless snow fields.  First, however, I had to learn about
Antarctic weather systems.
The Italian Antarctic program leased three Squirrels, four pilots and
an air mechanic from a New Zealand company, and the five
non-Italian-speaking Kiwis spent the austral summer at Terra Nova Bay
supporting the science program.  Two of them were already there.
The other three, my companions, were looking worried.  After we had
traveled about 50 miles, a low bank of clouds appeared on the
horizon.
Over the headset I heard them weighing our options.  The weather
reports sounded gloomy, and we hadn't even reached the refueling
depot.
The pilot decided to return to Scott Base.
Back we trooped into the pale green
buildings, disrobing in the boot room and settling in the galley to
drink tea until the weather changed.  As far as I knew, they could have
been talking about minutes or months.
Embarrassed at walking into a base and drinking their tea without
having the smallest idea who lived there, I introduced myself to a very
nice man in a Batman T-shirt who immediately invited me to stay for
dinner.  I was horrified during our meal to meet the displaced Claudio,
but he was beaming like the Cheshire Cat.  I began to think that
perhaps I had done him a favor.
At seven o'clock in the evening the pilot proclaimed that the flight
was off for the day.  The Squirrel had to be flown back to McMurdo,
there being no tie-down facilities for OVERNIGHT parking at Scott Base,
so I hitched a lift home.  All three of the crew came on the
five-minute flight and I offered them a drink before they headed back,
leaving my bag strapped deep in the net on the side of the helicopter
as I hadn't the heart to ask them to retrieve it.  The plan was that,
after our drink, they would return to Scott Base and telephone me in
the morning, when they had weather information and a revised departure
time.
The Southern Exposure was a regular American bar with a shuffleboard,
popcorn machine, video screen and no windows, so it was dark all the
time, neatly reversing the environment outside the door.
Knots of scientists sat around marking frustrated time while they
waited to get into the field and start work, delayed by weather or a
broken plane, or both.  When dancing broke out, I noticed Trotsky
wobbling around on the floor.  Everyone said he was one of the most
brilliant scientists of his generation, in line for a Nobel Prize.
When I ran into him at the popcorn machine, he was yawning.
"I keep waking up at five o'clock, " he complained.  "I've got this new
alarm clock, and I can't work out how to use it."  At midnight we were
still in the Southern Exposure.  I hadn't even changed out of my
cold-weather clothes, though several layers had been peeled off, and I
was traipsing about in my huge boots like Gulliver.
One drink had slid seamlessly into another, and to make matters worse,
or better, the blond Texan seismic geologist had appeared halfway
through the evening.  Most New Zealanders are game for a party at any
given moment, and these three were no exception, not least because
there was no bar at Terra Nova Bay.  This might be the last one they'd
see for a couple of months.  They operated on the principle of the
camel's hump.
As for Seismic Man, I had never met a more natural party animal.
We left at twelve-thirty, but only because the bar closed, and
staggered off to consume several vats of coffee and numerous slices of
toast in the galley.  After this the Kiwis were finally induced to walk
back to Scott Base, leaving Seismic Man and me to fritter away what was
left of the evening.
The telephone rang at some brutally early hour.  We were leaving in ten
minutes.  I slammed down the handset, used my absent roommate's
toothbrush (mine was strapped to the side of the helicopter), and
layered up hastily once again.  As I careered over to the helipad I saw
Seismic Man running down the hill.
"I heard them starting the helo, " he said.  "I came to say goodbye.
" As I climbed into the back of the Squirrel it occurred to me that I
probably ought to tell someone in charge that I was leaving.  I
wriggled out and ran up the steps to the National Science Foundation
Chalet, the administrative center of the base.  It had a sign on the
door saying it was closed for Thanksgiving.  I took a pencil out of my
pocket and scribbled a note on the sign, "Gone to Terra Nova Bay in a
Squirrel.
W-002."  Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven That seemed
as though ice burned and was but more ice, And thereupon imagination
and heart were driven So wild that every casual thought of this and
that

Vanished.

W. B. YEArs, from The Cold Heaven I pulled out the map from my pocket
and unfolded it as we flew along McMurdo Sound.  The Pole was at the
top, so on paper we were going down to travel north.  Scott and
Shackleton had sent science teams out all over this area, dotting their
names across the landscape.  It made it all seem so English.
We landed on a cape first sledged during Shackleton's Nimrod
expedition.  The party named it Cape Roberts after Ellliam C.
Roberts, their cook.  The large-grained surface snow was glittering
like millions of tiny mirrors, and two bearded and grizzled figures
emerged from a Scott tent among clusters of black volcanic rocks.
This modest camp was the embryonic heart of one of the most ambitious
cooperative projects ever conceived in Antarctica.  To investigate the
late Cretaceous to mid-Cenozoic history of the Ross Sea region,
geologists from five countries were proposing to drill offshore rock
cores that would yield information on millions of years of tectonic and
climatic change.  We went into the hut for a cup of tea.
The others chatted, the two Beards couldn't stop talking.
William Roberts kept drifting into my mind.  I wondered what had
brought him to the bottom of the world.  As a cook, it could hardly
have been a career move.
At the turn of the century a great number of men had signed up to go
south.  Many did it for money.  Carsten Borchgrevink, who stood on the
cusp of the Heroic Age and whose expedition was the first to winter on
the continent, wrote in 1900, /'The Antarctic may be another Klondike
.
. . there are fishþfisheries might be established .  . .

here is quartz in which metals are to be seen."  Some British explorers
claimed to be motivated by national rivalry, and an entrenched belief
that it was Britain's right to be first.  Others had demons to escape,
but they probably found them again, waiting on the ice.  "Man strives
for complete knowledge of his world just as a small boy climbs an apple
tree, " wrote Frank Debenham, Scott's geologist on the Terra Nova,
"even if there is no apple at the top."  In addition, after all those
long, hard centuries, it was widely believed that man had attained the
most alluring geographical goal on earth.  He had reached the North
Pole.  Just as people tired of the moon after 1969, in 1909 eyes sated
on the north turned south.
As Scott noted in his diary, the bloated body of Arctic literature
contrasted sharply with the skeletal material on its southern
counterpart.  At the beginning of the Heroic Age an editorial in the
Daily Express commented, "The South Pole has never caught the popular
imagination as its northern fellow has done .  . . it is inconveniently
distant from any European base, so its environment remains a kind of
silence and mist and vague terrors."  Arctic discovery dated as far
back as the late Norsemen, who performed epic feats of discovery in
Greenland and beyond, and by the nineteenth century the far north
constituted another space on a map to be painted with the

$

0 l. d

Terra Nova Bay

queasy colors of British imperialism.  The loss of Sir John Franklin's
fleet as it searched for the elusive Northwest Passage in 1847 had
ignited the imagination of the nation and stoked the ideal of glorious
death in remote spots in service of the motherland.  It spawned a whole
colony of art, too, notably Edwin Landseer's famous Man Proposes, God
Disposes, depicting a pair of polar bears gnawing at the remains of a
sailing ship, and Frederick Church's Icebergs.
Until Captain James Cook set out on his second voyage in 1772,
Antarctica had been little more than a shadow crouching on the white
horizon of the European imagination.  Seafarers had charted
sub-Antarctic islands that they surmised were the great southern land,
but nobody really had any idea what, if anything, was down there.
Before Cook, it was a myth.  It had always been a myth.
In A. D. 150 Ptolemy drew a continent on his map called Terra

Australis Incognita, the Unknown Southern Land, and the existence of
Antarctica became fixed in the collective imagination.  The fires
Magellan saw burning on Elerra del Fuego in 1520 fueled the notion of a
great land still farther to the south.  If people lived that far down,
why not farther?  When Drake got around Cape Horn in 1578, he declared
that there was nothing beyond it because he could see the union of the
Pacific and the Atlantic.  Nonetheless, Plancius's Planisphere,
published in 1592, shows both the continent and circulus antarcticus.
Plancius, Mercator and other medieval cartographers struggling to make
sense of it all interpreted Spanish and Portuguese voyages in light of
medieval theory.
They decided, on at best flimsy evidence, that this land must be very
big, hard of accessþand populated.
From the sixteenth century on, at least until Cook's second voyage,
cartographers were kept busy lopping off b*s of Antarctica that didn't
exist, pruning their unruly tree.  One cartographer, Oronce Fine, gave
the continent the snappy name Terra australis nuper invent sed non
plene examinata (the lately discovered but not completely explored
southern land).  This failed to catch on.  The ghostly image of a
fertile Shangri-La was finally laid to rest by Cook in the latter part
of the eighteenth century.  His second voyage made all the Antarctic
exploration that had gone before him look insignificant.
He discovered that there could be no people there after all, it was too
cold.  The myth died.  They were hoping for fertility and riches, the
land of their dreams, and all they got was an interminable icescape.
We landed again shortly after leaving the two Beards.  The Kiwis
refueled the Squirrel from a drum line, eyed beadily by a line of
skuas, the ugly brown migratory gulls ubiquitous around the coast of
Antarctica in summer.  The fuel cache was located on the edge of the
continent itself, a hundred miles along the sound from McMurdo.
In the background the faces of the ransantarctic Mountains zigzagged
downward in gradations of creamy blue.  The sky was mottled with
cirrostratus like fish scales, and shafts of sunlight fell on the
creased surface of an ice tongue, a massive projection fed by two
glaciers.  Beyond it, ink-dark seals lay around their holes.  On one
side mountains sank into glacier snouts, and on the other the sea ice
had melted into a berg-studded ocean that rippled lightly, like a wheat
field touched by the wind.
"Look, " said Ben, disengaging the fuel pump and pointing at a field of
crevasses on the side of a mountain.  Each rift was miles long, and no
doubt miles deep.  So often it is the landscapes most inimical to life
that are the most seductive.  In this respect they are like
boyfriends.
It doesn't seem fair.
Before the Resolutton sailed out of Sheerness on June 21, 1772, under
Captain Cook, more than half the crew deserted.  Cook was under
Admiralty instructions to find the great southern land.  He had always
suspected that there was no such thing, despite the fact that the
weight of the scientific establishment at home insisted upon its
existence.  Joseph Banks, the brilliant naturalist who sailed ii, with
Cook, recounts in his logbook that on the Endeavour, Cook's companion
ship on the 1772 voyage, the men were divided into two camps according
to their opinion on the existence of Antarctica.  They called
themselves "we Continentsn and "no Continents."  In 1770 the "no"s
thought they had sailed around what constituted definitive proofþbut
they were still footling about off New Zealand.
Cook was "Yorkshireman without formal education who worked on the
Whitby coal carriers before signing up with the Royal Navy and applying
himself to the cutting edge of eighteenth-century science.  He was
measured and, like Shackleton, always had his finger on the pulse of
his men, who were frequently drunk.  Cook took care to learn from those
who had gone before him, and unlike the crews battling around
Antarctica over a century later, Cook's men never got scurvy.
In the end the pack ice stopped him.  He wrote that the sea was so
"pestered" with ice that land was inaccessible.  In the Resolution he
crossed the Antarctic Circle, the first man to do so, and discovered
the circumpolarity of the Southern Ocean.  In January 1775 he claimed
South Georgia, though he wasn't impressed with the island, writing in
his journal that the land he had seen was "a country doomed by nature
never once to feel the warmth of the sun's rays, but to lie buried
under everlasting snow and ice, whose horrible and savage aspect I have
not words to describe."  As he sailed away he concluded, "There is not
the least room for the possibility of there being a continent, unless
near the Pole and out of reach of navigation."  Four years later, when
he was only 50 years old, he was stabbed to death with an iron dagger
by Hawaiian natives in the clear blue waters of Kealakekua Bay.
After Captain Cook, sealers and whalers ushered in the next phase of
discovery as they eddied around southern waters in the 1820s.
The continent probably wasn't sighted before 1820, and * was almost
certainly the Estonian Fabian Bellingshausen who saw it first.
Born within a year of Cook's death, and dispatched south by Tsar
Alexander I, Bellingshausen took up Cook's baton and turned out to be a
great explorer.  The British Edward Bransfield and the American sealer
Nathaniel Palmer also made early sightings.  Palmer was 21 when, in
1820, he rang the bell of the Hero in thick fog off the coast of the
South Shetland Islands.  He thought he was hundreds of miles from
another ship, and then he heard a bell clanging in reply.  It was from
Bellingshausen's ship.  The admiral quickly put on his regalia and
formally invited Palmer aboard the Vostok.
James Clark Ross crossed the Antarctic Circle and penetrated the sea
that now bears his name during the Royal Navy voyage he led between
1839 and 1843.  He discovered great swathes of the ice edge.
Ross joined up when he was 11, went off to the Arctic with his uncle to
look for the Northwest Passage, the geographical grail of its day,
became a scientist and located the North Magnetic Pole.  He was said to
be the most handsome man in the Navy.  When he reached home, after more
than four years in the south, he was knighted.  He was also married,
but only after his father-in-law had extracted a contract from him that
there would be no more polar voyages.  He settled in a small village
near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where he now lies in the
churchyard.
In 1898 the Belgic expedition became the first to winter in the pack
ice.  Amundsen was on it, and so was Frederick Cook, the man who later
claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole.  Seven nationalities
were represented.  As T. H. Baughman put it in his book Before the
Heroes Came, "The Belgic expedition was a fugue in seven voices.  "
The ship was not properly equipped for an Antarctic winter.
Many of the crew showed signs of scurvy, and each man made his own
private journey into despair during the long, dark months of the polar
night.  When a lieutenant died, it almost broke their spirit.

Terra Nova Bay

Carsten Borchgrevink went south aboard the Southern Cross at the turn
of the century.  Although it was a British expedition, Borchgrevink was
a naturalized Australian whose father was Norwegian, and to the British
geographical establishment of the day this alone was evidence of
ineptitude.  He got along so badly with physicist Louis Bemacchi that
the latter refers to Borchgrevink in his diary as l'enfant.
Still, the dogs they had brought with them proved remarkably successful
when harnessed to the sledges, with groundbreaking results for the
expedition.
Another unsung hero, William Spiers Bruce, led the Scottish National
Antarctic Expedition in 1902-4.  The artist of the voyage, W.
G. Bum Murdoch, wrote a book called From Edinburgh to the antarctic,
which he ended with an expression of malaise about the land they left
unexplored, "And so we returned from the mysteries of the Antarctic,
with all *s wh*e-bound secrets still unread, as if we had stood before
ancient volumes that told of the past and the beginning of all things,
and had not opened them to read.  Now we go home to the world that is
worn down with the feet of many people, to gnaw in our discontent the
memory of what we could have done, but did not do."  We flew over the
ice-locked Inexpressible Island, and the cockpit dials showed that
50-knot katabatic winds were flying down from the

Reeves Neve.  The Inexpressible Island was whereVictor Campbell was
stranded for eight months with five men in their summer clothes and two
months' rations during the Antarctic winter of * Wends that cool, grow
denser, and therefore rush downward.  A neve is a snow field at the
head of a glacier that has yet to become compacted into glacier ice.  A
typical configuration of ice from the inland plateau passes from neve
to glacier, thereupon to ice sheet ice shelf, sea ice, and then,
eventually, to liquid sea.  Neve snow squeaks when you plunge in your
ice ax.

1912.  They suffered from a painful condition they called "igloo back,
" their lives so troglodytic and their faces so caked with blubber that
they were recognizable only by their voices.  Yet they enjoyed concerts
on Saturday nights, and issued copies of a newspaper called The Ade'lie
Mail.
Victor Campbell was an Old Etonian, a scientist and first officer on
the Terra Nova on Scott's second expedition.  He went to Antarctica
partly because his marriage was rocky.  Having been conveyed to the
edge of the Ross Ice Shelf by the Terra Nova in January 1911, the
intention of the Eastern Party, which consisted of Campbell, three
seamen and two officers, was to carry out extensive surveying work, but
they failed to find an eastern landing.  Initiative being the key to
Antarctic science then as now, they went north to Cape Adare instead.
On the way, much to the surprise of both groups, they met Amundsen and
the other Norwegians in the Bay of Whales.  When the watchman of the
Framþclearly a man who liked to hedge his betsþsaw the Terra Nova
sailing past, he brought out his Jarman gun, which he loaded with six
bullets, and an English phrasebook from which he quickly learned to
say, "Hello, how are you this morning?  " The encounter was cordial,
and they inspected one another's quarters.  The British were astonished
at the efficiency with which the Norwegians handled their dogs, and
Amundsen recorded in his diary that after the visitors left all the
Norwegians caught colds.
At Cape Adare, Campbell and his five men waved the ship good-bye and
renamed themselves the Northern Party.  After a fruitful season the
Terra Nova picked them up again and dropped them at what became
Inexpressible Island, supposedly for six weeks.  But when it came to
fetch them that time, it could not get through the pack ice and
returned to New Zealand, leaving Campbell and his men marooned in an
ice hole for eight months.
The men got used to a meat and fat diet, though its high acid content
meant that some frequently wet themselves.  After eight months on the
edge of endurance, they had to trek 230 miles back to the hut on Ross
Island, and when they got there, they learned that Scott and the others
had perished.
Beyond the island, a flash of color caught my eye.  I realized it must
be the Italian station, crouched on the edge of Terra Nova Bay.
In five minutes the rotor was shuddering to a stop on the helipad in
front of the base.
The main building was on stilts, with Prussian blue corrugated metal
walls, a Siena orange roof and Beaubourgesque chimneys.
From it emerged Mario.  He was a dark-haired and olive-skinned man in
his late forties who wore glasses and a permanently hunted
expression.
He welcomed me, looking anxiously over my shoulder at the helicopter
cargo, of which there was very little.  We walked in, but he was
distracted, so I tried to keep a low profile, not an easy task when
thrust among 40 Italians eager for new blood.  I was introduced to
almost everyone at once and propelled into the Operations Roomþla sala
comando.  It was a long, narrow room with one continuous window
overlooking the helipad and a great sweeping panorama encompassing the
whole bay, frozen as far as the Campbell Ice Tongue and beyond that
disappearing into the beckoning turquoise of open water.
Presiding over * all was Mount Melbourne, the 2, 900-meter (9, 514-foot)
volcanic cone named by Ross after the British prime minister.  It
dominated the Italian presence as completely as Mount Erebus dominated
the Americans and New Zealanders.  The operations room was run like a
wartime bunker by Gaetano, a wiry lieutenant colonel aged around 30 who
flew about the room, spluttering like a grenade, and gave the
impression of constant and almost fatal overwork.  He thrust a VHF
radio into my hand and barked a few sentences of unintelligible
acronym-laden Italian.
Shortly before supper Mario asked sheepishly if I minded sleeping on
the floor of a laboratorio.  The dorms were full, and the alternative
was an isolated outbuilding.  I didn't mind.  The laboratory was a
narrow room with a sink, shelves lined with bottles of lurid
substances, a smell of formaldehyde and a camp bed.  When I opened a
cupboard door, a deluge of syringes rained down on me.
I tried to disconnect the long rubber tube from the tap so that I could
clean my teeth in situ, but the project failed amid geysers of very
cold water.
The accommodation, the kitchen, the sala comando and most of the labs
and offices were located in the main building, which meant that you
didn't have to face whiteouts to get to breakfast.  In the evening cena
was eaten at the civilized time of eight-thirty and in this department
the Italian nation excelled.  Not only was wine-in-a-box provided at
both lunch and dinner, but the chef, an endlessly cheerful Neapolitan
called Ciro who was like a small rubber ball, created unbelievably
delicious meals.  His kitchen was not resupplied regularly with fresh
foods, and I never understood how he managed to perform his culinary
feats.  When I asked him, he said the important thing was to cook con
amore.
On top of this, an industrial-size espresso machine in one of the two
lounges was permanently connected to the water supply.  This was, for
me, akin to attaining nirvana.  The lounges were furnished with brown
Dralon sofas, a fridge containing soft drinks and mineral water (the
Italians drink bottled water on the ice, a habit held up by veterans of
the British Antarctic Survey as an example of wanton profligacy and the
moral turpitude of Foreigners), and a video screen.
In a small room next door there was a table soccer game, and those who
hunched over it regularly worked themselves into a frenzy.  After
dinner, the Italians enjoyed lounging around in the corridor outside
the dining room and jabbering over tiny cups of espresso.  Mario often
used this time to inform the team of his latest project.
"I have decided, " he said one night, throwing his head back and
gulping down a mouthful of espresso, "to bring the Pope out to the
ice.
" He paused to allow for digestion of this information.
"What do we all think of that?  "
"Well, " said Gaetano, spluttering
quietly, "I cannot really see His Holiness on a snowmobile."  There
were three women on station, and they used to gather for a cigarette
outside the metal shower cubicles in the bathroom.
"How are you finding our base?  " the eldest one asked me during one of
these breaks.  She was a woman of feisty spirits and Chaucerian
ribaldry whose role at Terra Nova Bay I was never able to ascertain.
"Fine!  " I said.
"Look, don't panic if the men seem desperateþyou know, for women.
They are just talkþ" she finished the sentence by imitating the working
of a jaw with her fingers and thumb.  "In this very cold, " she
continued, whereupon the other two began laughing, as if they knew what
she was going to say, "their little Cassie become this tiny, " and she
held her thumb and forefinger half an inch apart.  With that, she
slapped me on the back with one hand, stubbed a cigarette out in the
sink with the other, burst through the swing door and sailed down the
corridor.
During the day the base exuded a permanent sense of urgency.
It was a summer-only station, * which put everyone under pressure, and
besides this, the Italians were a long way from their nearest
neighbors.  It all contributed to a kind of frontier spirit, as did the
fact that the history of the Italian presence in Antarctica was shorter
* Approximately 30 of the 200 research camps in Antarctica are
operational all the year round.

than a decade.  They still referred to their presence as una
spediioneþan expedition.  Perhaps Terra Nova Bay recaptured the
excitement and energy of American and British bases operating thirty
years before the Italians headed south.
I had just divested myself of my cold-weather clothes after a bracing
walk around the bay when Gaetano's voice boomed over the tannoy
announcing that an elicoterro was waiting for me, his tone suggesting
that each minute that elapsed would precipitate the base further toward
nuclear fission.  I rushed to pull on my coldweather clothes again,
jamming the zip of the parka.
Ben was resupplying a pair of biologists working on a penguin project
at Edmondson Point on the other side of Mount Melbourne.
It was not a beautiful spot.  Only partially snow-covered, it was
heavily invested with skuas on the lookout for penguin eggs.  The huge
Adelie penguin colony dominated the landscape, and as the Squirrel
began its descent we could see individual birds waddling about with
stones in their beaks.
When we opened the doors, a sulfurous gust of wind blew in a blizzard
of fine ice and rock particles.  Edmondson Point reminded me of a
curled old photograph I had seen of an early British base on the
Antarctic Peninsula with the words "semper in excreta" above the door
of the hut.
A permanent low murmur hung on the air.  Edward Wilson, Scott's
confidant, said that walking up to a penguin rookery was like
approaching a football ground during a match.
The two women came to meet us.  They had been living at this bleak spot
with thousands of penguins for three months.  Later I watched them
capturing nesting birds with what looked like a large black butterfly
net, stowing the egg lying under each one in a skuaproof box, tying the
bird up by its feet, weighing it on a weighbridge, opening its cloaca
to determine its sex, measuring its beak, passing an infrared wand over
it and painting a number on its back.

Terra Nova Bay

The penguins kept quite still throughout this ordeal and settled back
afterward on their stone nests with a quick wing flap as if little more
than a minor inconvenience had occurred.
One of the women, Francesca, was about 25 and had never lived in the
field before, when they weren't working she seldom strayed far from the
tent.  Raffaella, the other one, probably wasn't older than 30, but she
had years of field experience behind her and seemed much more at ease
in the landscape.  I imagined that the penguins felt safer with her.
"Don't you get bored?  8 I asked Raffaella in my sketchy Italian.
"No, " she said, pushing her hair behind her ears.  "I bring a skipping
rope.  The penguins are good company, though I like some better than
others.  Take that one over thereþthe one poking his nose into someone
else's nest.  Miserable diavolo!  "
"How do you tell which is which?  "
"How you tell which man is which?  "
"Er, well, they sort of look
different."
"Yes, so do penguins look to me."  And that, it seemed, was that.
We headed south along the coast to pick up a pair of scientists at
Dunlop Island.  Below us, suffused in a primrose light, seal pups were
slithering over ice sheet, and in the distance the last remnants of sea
ice lay still on the bright blue water.
A geomorphologist and his alpinistaþthe Italian version of the field
leaderþhad already struck camp when we arrived and were waiting next to
a mound of rucksacks and boxes.  We milled around for a few minutes,
then loaded up.  The geomorphologist wanted to take samples at Depot
Island some way to the south.  He and I were dropped there while Ben
and the alpinista went off to refuel.  The small, snowy island had been
discovered by Mawson and the South Magnetic Pole party at the end of
October 1908 and was named after a cache of rock specimens.
The geomorphologist grew increasingly excited about the soil he was
digging, and gabbled away happily in Italian.
Later that day we landed at the snout of the Mawson Glacier for a
picnic.  The alpinista was a sturdy little marine commando called
Nino.
After dispatching several wedges of bread and salami, the
geomorphologist strode off to repeat his earlier success while Nino,
Ben and I sprawled in the sun.  I struggled to translate for them.
That morning, we had heard over the radio that a coalition of
opposition parties in Rome was on the verge of bringing down the
government.
Swallowing the last mouthful of chocolate, Ben asked Nino what he
thought about it.
"Not much, " said Mno.
"You must think something!  It's your bloody country!  "
"Look,
politics in Italy has had no surprises since Caligula proposed a horse
for senator, " said Nino, who came from a village in the high Alps.
"Besides, all that seems so trivial here."  Yes, I thought, Antarctica
represents everything beyond man's little world.
Most of time and space is like Antarctica, untouched and unowned.
Sometimes, in the evening, a group of us would repair to the
pinguinatolo, a wooden hut among the outbuildings.  The walls were
graffitied with the imprimata of a generation of Italian Antarcticans,
and half-consumed bottles of grappa from seasons past loitered on the
shelves.  The Italians never got drunk.  They enjoyed wine with their
meals but never took more than two glasses.  It was the Kiwis and I who
took to the wine box when the spirit moved us.  There were many
cultural differences between the New Zealand air unit and their Italian
employers.  While the New Zealanders were frequently frustrated by
their hosts' emotional outbursts, they recognized their technical
abilities, if a helicopter part needed fixing, it would come back from
the electronics engineer not only mended but also improved.  The
Italians did everything stylishly.  They had the best gear and far
outclassed any other nationality on the ice with their red tute
bodysuits and red-and-white rucksacks.  They made the British look as
if they hadn't left the continent since 1912.
"It's Giuseppe's birthday today, " someone told me one evening in the
pinguinatolo.
"Which one is Giuseppe?  " I asked.
"You know, the fellow from Umbria."  They talked often about where they
came fromþthis was a vital part of their identity.  "You see, Sara, I'm
from Spezzio .  . . n someone would say, and in the dining room they
took every opportunity to deliver a paean to some special dish from
their region.  Whenever one of these dishes made an appearance, a huge
portion would be set before me while arguments raged about variations
on the recipe.  It was very endearing particularly as it was obvious
that none of them ever went anywhere near a kitchen at home.
On Sunday evening I offered to cook a traditional English dish.  I
decided on bread-and-butter pudding and spent half the morning in the
kitchen.  Ciro bounced around, searching out a starched white chef's
hat for me and changing the cassettes of Neapolitan music that blared
out of the sticky kitchen.  I made two big trays, and just as I had
taken them out of the oven, five minutes before lunch, I was called
over the loudspeaker to the ops roomþ McMurdo wanted me on the radio.
When I came back down I saw that they had piled their plates with
antipasti and bread-and-butter pudding and were enthusiastically
seasoning it all with salt, pepper and olive oil.
One day they took me up to the polar plateau on a survey to plot sites
using hand-held Global Positioning System units.  By transmitting to a
series of satellites, they could receive accurate latitude and
longitude readingsþinvaluable navigational information for scientists
who need to return to the scene of an experiment.  Before we left base,
Nino made me a thermos of tea, and Franco the doctor stuck a label on
it saying "teeth Sara."  They treated me like a doll, and would wander
around looking for me, singing some Italian song involving Sara and the
primavera.  I was referred to as la principessa, and schemes were
devised to induce me to stay for the whole season.  I felt vaguely
guilty as I smiled vacuously.  But not guilty enough, obviously.
I took off in a helicopter with Ben, a geophysicist and Nino.
The air was full of diamond dust that day.  We chatted over the
headsets, interrupted by Gaetano who kept breaking in from base.
"Don't touch Sara, " he said.  Then Ben put on a Strauss tape.  The
snow at the bottom of the Priestley Glacier was beaten into wide dunes,
like a bleached Sahara, and as we wheeled upward the pitted pale blue
glacier rushed beneath us, reflecting the violet streaks of the limpid
sky.  We crested the ridge, momentarily buffeted by a gust of wind, and
then, ahead, we saw the polar plateau.
Life felt very sweet, at that moment.
We landed at flagged points, to take observations.  It was minus 25 degrees Celsius and very windy.  I learned about the 30-Knot Club,
entry into which involved pissing into a 30-knot wind without
splashback.  It was quite a sophisticated club, with a president and a
secretary.  I trailed around behind Nino, and we found a small
meteorite.
Nino seemed impervious to the cold.  Watching him work, I thought of
Birdie Bowers, who died in the tent with Scott.  He was so resilient to
cold that people have written medical papers about him in learned
journals.  It was 77 below zero Fahrenheit when he undertook the Winter
Journey to Cape Crozier with Bill Wilson and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and
he didn't need the outer layer of his bag.
One more Hercules was scheduled before the runway on the sea ice
melted.
After that, they would have to wait for the ship.  I had to hitch a
ride on this last plane as far as McMurdo, and awoke that day feeling
unutterably depressed.  Life had been easy atTerra Nova Bay.  The rest
of the journey wasn't going to be as straightforward.
I made a little speech of thanks in Italian over the loudspeaker and
was presented with a satellite map, signed by everyone, with the places
I had visited marked with yellow asterisks.  Instead of Victoria Land,
they had printed Sara Land.
Almost everyone at the base camp came over to the ice runway to see me
off.  The LC-130 eventually hove into view above the farthest mountain
and the Italians started jabbering as if they hadn't really believed *
was going to come at all.  The plane was flown by a crew from a
Pisa-based squadron of the air force.  It made the round trip from
Italy via Christchurch, and shut down for one night at McMurdo on the
way fromTerra Nova Bay back to New Zealand.  After a batch of
scientists had emerged from the hold, and much arm-waving and kissing
and a slew of mouthed imprecations to write, I walked up the ramp and
into the back of the plane.
A pair of Italian fire engines chased us up the runway as we took
off.
Even then I hadn't left them, Gaetano had radioed the captain, a friend
of his, and told him to let me sit next to him.  I was ushered straight
up to the flight deck.
Landscapes of the Mind Landscapes of the Mind .  . . people are trying
to fathom themselves in this Antarctic context, to imagine their
coordinates, how they are fixed in time and space.

BAKRY LoPEr, Gary Lab dedication talk, McMurdo, 1991

A Frenchman appeared in my office shortly after I returned to McMurdo,
someone had told him I spoke French.  He was an ice corer enroute to
Vostok, the Russian base in the empty heart of East Antarctica.  Vostok
was a potent name in the history of the continent.
There they had recorded the coldest temperature in the world, minus
129.  3 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 89.  2 Celsius.  The annual mean
temperature at Vostok was minus 55 degrees Celsiusþfive degrees colder
than at the South Pole.
The Russians had also drilled there deeper than anyone else, so they
had the world's oldest ice.  The harsh conditions at the base had
earned it a reputation as a southern gulag.  The French ice corer knew
* well.
"It's not unusual to wake up to fistfights outside the bedroom door, "
he said airily.  In the sixties, at the height of the Cold War, the
Soviets had used Vostok as a behavioral test bed for the Salyut space
program.
Before my departure I had read a book by the geophysicist who was
station chief atMostok in 1959.  Despite dabs of Russian color, such as
frequent references to cabbage pie and the October Revolution, the text
was painfully guarded.  Besides the bitter temperature, the Russians
had to cope with the problems of living at an altitude of 4, 000 meters, andViktor Ignatov, the author of the book, reports grimly that
potatoes boiled at 88 degrees Celsius and took three hours to cook.
High and remote, Vostok cannot be adequately supplied by air, so each
summer a convoy of Kherkovchenka tractors heavily laden with food, fuel
and other essential goods sets out from Mirny, the Russian station on
the east coast.  I once saw a film of this traverse, shot in the late
sixties.  The Amsterdam Film Museum found the spools languishing in its
archives, restored them, put them on video and sent me a copy.
It told a story of polished Ilyushin planes, white huskies, a solitary
grave (well tended), grubby calendars with days crossed off and men
sunbathing in pneumatic bathing trunks on the deck of a vast icebreaker
and polishing stiff, lace-up shoes when they saw land.  It ended with a
little girl's face, eyes tightly closed and thin arms clutching her
weeping father's neck.
The somber military music played over the footage of the traverse made
it seem as if the grim procession were marching across the steppe into
Siberian permafrost to defend the motherland against a marauding
barbarian horde.  When the tractors arrived atMostok they were greeted
with bear hugs and a tray of vodka.  The fact that I couldn't
understand a word of the narration only made the film seem more
exotic.
The Frenchman eventually left forVostok, and on the same day Seismic
Man and his group finally took off for their deep-field destination.
They had been delayed by both weather and planes for two weeks, and
some of them had checked in for their flight 15 times.  Most of them
hadn't known one another before they came south, but during the waiting
period they had knitted together as a team.  I was jealous of that,
especially as I got to know them as they lounged over the sofas on the
top floor of the Crary and wandered the corridors like nomads.
I was sorry to see them go, though they had invited me out to their
camp later in the season, an invitation that wouldn't, in theory, be
difficult to take up as their project was supported with a large number
of fixed-wing resupply flights.  They called me Woo after my W-002 label, and as we waved good-bye they shouted that when I arrived they
would have a Welcome Woo party on the West Antarctic ice sheet.
It was seven o'clock on Saturday night, and I felt depressed.
I sat in my office, listening to the people next door arguing about
fish bait.
When they were out of their office, which was most of the time, they
put a sign on the door saying GONE FISHIN'.  Going fishing involved
drilling holes in the sea ice and hauling up primeval creatures that
survived the depths of the Southern Ocean by producing their own
antifreeze.  The project leader was an old Antarctic soldier who first
came to the ice the year I was born.  His name was Art DeVries, and he
appeared in my doorway brandishing a small, dead fish.
"Come fishing tonight!  " he said imperiously.  I decided to follow his
orders.  I kept a set of cold-weather clothes under my desk, so I put
them all on and w"Iked out of the door.  A tracked vehicle with DR COOL
stenciled on the fender was warming up outside, and various members of
the team were fiddling with equipment in the back.  Art had a knack for
assembling disparate research scientists and graduate students, from
ex-janitors to an antifreeze specialist he had met at an airport.  They
were all good fun, and they all smelled of fish.
We drove to a small wooden fish hut on the sea ice in which a
battery-operated winch positioned over a hole in the floor was lowering
bait 1,500 feet into the spectral depths of the sound.  The Landscapes
of the Mind bait consisted of fish brought in from New Zealand.  Much
winching later, the fish that emerged weighed 125 pounds and looked as
ancient as the slime from which we all at some point crawled.
"Dissoshchus mawsoniþAntarctic cod to you, " said Art as he heaved it
off the scales.  "Phenomenally small brain."
"Can you eat them?  " I asked.
"Sure you can.  Sashimi cut from the cheeks is kind of nice.
But it's the antifreeze everyone's after.  Aircraft manufacturers want
it to develop a product to prevent airplane wings from freezing.  "
When a row of fish was lying on the floor, the biologists started
arguing again, this time about which to keep, talking about "nice
shaped throats" as if they were judging a beauty contest.  Most of them
were named after explorers, mawsoni bernacchii, borchgrevinki.
Art had his ownþa deepwater bottom dweller called Paraliparis
devriesi.
The Channichthyidae "ice fish" that live in slightly warmer Antarctic
waters have no hemoglobin at all, their blood is white.
The Chapel of the Snows was a pink and powder blue Alpine chalet with a
stained-glass penguin at one end looking out over the Transantarctic
Mountains.  It was serviced by a Catholic priest and a Protestant
minister, and on Sunday morning I went to mass.  The priest called us
the Frozen Chosen.  It was after this service that I 00 met Ann
Hawthorne, a photographer in her early forties who was , over six feet
tall, with salt-and-pepper hair down to her waist.
She t came from North Carolina and spoke in a beguiling southern
drawl.
Ann was also on the Artists' and Writers' Program, and we saw a good
deal of each other while we were at McMurdo.  She had first come south
to take pictures ten years previously, and on that trip she had fallen
in love with a pilot and subsequently married him.  It hadn't worked
out as she had hoped, and I got the feeling that she was back laying
ghosts to rest.  Ann had an eye for a party, and if we had spent any
more time together than we did, we would doubtless have got into
trouble.  As it was, we came close.
"Hey, I've borrowed a tracked vehicle, " she said to me triumphantly
one morning.  "I figured we could go to Cape Evans for the day and hang
out in Scott's hut.  It's about twelve miles along the coast.  What
d'you say, babe?  "
"Can we really drive over the sea ice?  " I asked
skeptically.
"Sure we can.  n "What happens if it gets thin?  "
"We fall in.  But
that won't happen.  We'll get out of the vehicle every so often and
drill the ice to test its thickness.  If it's thinner than thirty
inches, we turn back.  Trust me."  Cape Evans was the site of Scott's
main hut on the Terra Nova expedition.  It had almost pushed the
smaller one I had visited on Hut Point out of the history books.  Hut
Point was not intended as a permanent "home" and was never used as
such.  The Cape Evans hut, on the other hand, erected in January 1911,
was occupied continuously for two years.  In 1915 one of Shackleton's
sledge parties from the ill-fated Aurora arrived, and the men in that
group also lived in it intermittently for a couple of years.  Preserved
by the cold, and recently by the efforts of the New Zealand Antarctic
Heritage Trust, it stands intact on its lonely cape, like an
icyValhalla.
Scott named the cape after Lieutenant Teddy Evans, later Admiral Sir
Edward, who went on four Antarctic expeditions.  He returned home sick
in 1911, after almost dying of scurvy and exhaustion on the 750-mile
march back to the hut from the top of the Beardmore Glacier.
Two years later he went back to Antarctica, in command of the Terra
Nova, to pick up Scott and the other men who had remained on the ice.
As the ship sailed up to the hut, the officers' dining table was laid
for a banquet.
Evans, pacing the deck, was worried about the Northern Party.
Then he spotted Campbell on shore.  They had made it!
Landscapes of the Mind "Is everyone all right?  " he yelled across the
pack ice.
Campbell hesitated.  "The polar party have perished, " he shouted
back.
Every death is the first death, and so it seemed, at that moment, to
Teddy Evans.
For generations, the myth that had been created obscured the fact that
Scott was a human being.  Just as the image of the band on the Titanic
playing "Nearer My God to Thee" is cemented onto the British national
consciousness, along with tuxedoed gentlemen standing to attention as
water rises over the razor creases of their trousers, so Scott was
institutionalized as a national icon, and for many years criticizing
him was a heretical act.  Yet he wasn't universally popular in
Antarctica.
Among the four he took on the last haul to the Pole, Titus Oates wrote
home to his mother, "I dislike Scott intensely."  And at times, Scott's
leadership was questionable.  When everythingþfood, tents, fuel and
depotsþwas arranged for four-man units, he decided at the eleventh hour
to take five to the Pole.  The perfect hero of the great English myth
never existed, just as our national emblems, the lion and the unicom,
never roamed the South Downs.
All the same, there is much that is heroic about Scott.  His
expeditions still constitute landmarks in polar travel.  As a man,
rather than a Navy captain, Scott was much more than a wooden product
of his background.
Like all the best people, he was beset by doubt.  "I shall never fit in
my round hole, " he wrote to his wife, Kathleen, and on another
occasion, "I'm obsessed with the view of life as a struggle for
existence."  He was a good writer, especially toward the end of his
journey, and you grow to think me only fitted for the outer courtyard
of your heart?  D he asked Kathleen.  The Antarctic possessed a
virginity, in his mind, that provided an alternative to the spoiled and
messy world, and he wrote in his diary about "the terrible vulgarizing
which Shackleton has introduced to the Southern field of enterprise,
hitherto so clean and wholesome."  Through his writings, Scott elevated
the status of the struggle.
It was no longer man against nature, it was man against himself.
The diaries reveal a sense of apotheosis, the terrible journey back
from the Pole was a moral drama about the attainment of
selfknowledge.
Scott failed to return from the last journey, but even in failure he
found a far more precious success.  Defeat on this earthly plane was
transfigured.  The journey becomes a quest for selffulfillment, and
Scott's triumph is presented as the conquering of the self.
Similarly, after George Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappeared into the
mists of Everest 12 years after Scott perished, everyone quickly forgot
what had actually happened and glorified the climbers' transcendental
achievements.  At their memorial service in St. Paul's Cathedral, the
Bishop of Chester used a quotation from the Psalms to establish a
connection between Mallory and Irvine's climb up Everest and life's
spiritual journey, referring to "the ascent by which the kingly spirit
goes up to the house of the Lord."  So it was, too, that out of the
tent on the polar plateau rose the myth of the saintly hero.
By nimble sleight of hand in their portrayal of Scott, the mythmakers
reversed the David and Goliath roles of Norway and Britain.
Scott was the gentlemanly amateur who didn't rely on dogs.
Amundsen, on the other hand, was a technological professional who
cheated by using dogs.  Frank Debenham, Scott's geologist on the Terra
Nova expedition, wrote in Antarctica, The Story of a Conttnent,
published in 1959, that both Scott and Shackleton deployed techniques
that were slower, more laborious, and failed, but that to criticize
them for doing it their way instead of Amundsen's "is rather like
comparing the man who prefers to row a boat across a bay with the man
who hoists up a sail to help himself."  Landscapes of the Mind Scott's
advocates made a virtue of the fact that he hauled himself to the Pole
without dogs or ponies, and they still do, but this is disingenuous.
He had been perfectly prepared to use Caterpillar motor sledges and
took three south on the Terra Nova (these were a failure).
Furthermore, as Debenham himself wrote, "The fact of the matter is that
neither Scott nor Shackleton, the two great exponents of manhauling,
understood the management of sledge dogs."  As he lay dying, Scott
somehow found the language to invest the whole ghastly business with
the currency of nobility.  This is his greatest achievement, and with
it he paved the way for the making of the legend.
"Had we lived, " he wrote famously, "I should have had a tale to tell
of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would
have stirred the heart of every Englishman."  He even had the presence
of mind to recognize the emotive value of altering "To My Wife" on
Kathleen's envelope to "To My Widow."  In a few pages he scorched
himself into the national consciousness.  By the time the letters and
diary reached home, the spiritual and the national coalesced
perfectly.
The Times said of Scott's last venture, "The real value of the
expedition was spiritual, and therefore in the truest sense national
.
. . proof that we are capable of maintaining an Empire."  King George
expressed the hope that every British boy could see photographs of the
expedition, "for it will help promote the spirit of adventure that made
the empire."  On the wilder shores of journalism Scott actually became
the nation, "Like Captain Scott, " proclaimed World's Work, "we are
journeying in a cold world towards nothing that we know."  True
enough.
Scott touched the imagination of the country and exemplified not just
England but a strain of Edwardian manhood.  Later, Apsley
Cherry-Garrard, who was on the expedition, wrote of Scott and his dead
men, "What they did has become part of the history of England, perhaps
of the human race, as much as Columbus or the Elizabethans, David,
Hector or Ulysses.  They are an epic."  In the Great War, Scott became
a handy placebo for the soldiers floundering in muddy trenches.
Over 100, 000 officers and men in France alone saw expedition
photographer Herbert Ponting's movingpicture film, and in his book The
Great White South, Ponting quotes from the following letter, dispatched
by a military chaplain ministering to the front-line troops.
I cannot tell you what a tremendous delight your films are to thousands
of our troops.  The splendid story of Captain Scott is just the thing
to cheer and encourage them out here .  . . The thrilling story of
Oates' self-sacrifice, to try and give his friends a chance of "getting
through, " is one that appeals to so many at the present time.
The intensity of its appeal is realised by the subdued hush and quiet
that pervades the massed audience of troops while it is being told.
We all feel we have inherited from Oates and his comrades a legacy and
heritage of inestimable value in seeing through our present work.
We all thank you with very grateful hearts.
When Kathleen Scott died, scores of crumpled letters from the front
lines were found among her papers, the soldiers telling her they could
never have faced the dangers and hardships of the war had they not
learned to do so from her dead husband's teaching.  With Scott, they
believed they could rise above it.
Would Scott have become the myth that he is had he lived?  I doubt
it.
The most powerful hero is the dead hero, the one who never loses his
teeth.  Like Peter Pan, he must never grow old.  It is central to the
myth of Mallory and Irvine that they died on Everest.  Lytton Strachey,
who was passionate about Mallory and his Dionysian good looks,
perceptively noted before the 1924 expedition Landscapes of the Mind
even sailed from Birkenhead that the legend of Mallory would only
survive if the climber died young.  "If he were to live, " Strachey
wrote, "he'll be an unrecognisable middle-aged mediocrity, probably
wearing glasses and a timber toe."  Instead, Mallory became Sir
Galahad, like Scott before him.
Though it is tempting to indulge the belief that a national preference
for dead heroes is a peculiarly British phenomenon, an examination of,
say, Russian polar literature also reveals a large cast of heroic
dead.
Like most cliches, however, this one is woven with a thread of truth,
and Scott would probably have had to stagger back to the hut to pass
muster with Americans.
When Tryggve Gran, one of Scott's men, emerged from the tent on the
plateau after he had seen the three frozen bodies that had lain there
through the long polar night, he envied them.  "They died having done
something great, " he wrote.  "How hard death must be having done
nothing.  "* The ice was more than four feet thick wherever we drilled
it, and an hour after we set out for Cape Evans, around Big Razorback
Island, we lay down among the Weddell seals.
"Listen to that, " said Ann.  It was a faint scraping sound, like hard
cheese on a grater.
"The pups are weaned, " she announced.  "It's their teeth raking
against the edge of the ice holes."  Adult Weddells weigh up to 1,000 pounds and are able to live farther south than any other seals because
they can maintain an * The importance of SCOH'S death was brilliantly
illustrated in a seven-part Central Television series, The lsst Place
on Earth (screened on PBS in the States), based on Roland Huntford's
book.  Amundsen, back in Norway after his great triumph, is soaping
himself in the bath.  His brother and confidant appears in the doorway
to tell him that SCOH died on the journey back from the Pole.  "So he
has won, says the actor playingAmundsen quietly.

open hole in the ice with their teeth.  Ann went off to photograph them
doing it, and I pressed my ear to the ice and heard the adults
underneath calling their ancient song, ululant and ineffably sad.
Later, I recognized the gabled ridged roof and weatherboard cladding of
the hut in the distance.  It was a prefabricated hut, made in England
and shipped south in pieces.  I once saw a picture of it taken when it
was first erected, not at the foot of a smoking Mount Erebus but in a
grimy urban street in Poplar in London's East End.
The men had stitched quilts with pockets of seaweed to use as
insulation between the walls.
When I pushed open the wooden door I smelled my grandmother's house
when I was a childþcoal dust and burned coalþ and it was chilly, as it
used to be at six o'clock in the morning when I followed my grandfather
downstairs to scrape out the fireplace.  The Belmont Stearine candles
Scott's men had brought were neatly stacked near the door.  The boxes
said, "Made expressly for hot climates, " which some people would say
summed up Scott's preparations.  The wrappers bore the picture of a
West Indian preparing something delicious on a fire under a palm
tree.
It was the familiarity of the surroundings that struck my English
sensibilityþblue and-orange Huntley & Palmer biscuit boxes,
green-and-gold tins of Lyle's golden syrup, blue Cerberos salt tubes
and the shape of the label on Heinz tomato ketchup bottles.
Atora, Lea & Perrins, Fry's, Rising Sun yeast ("certain to rise"),
Gillards Real Turtle Soupþthe brand names cemented in our social
history.
A single beam of sunlight fell on the bunk in Scott's quarters, the
small space immortalized by Ponting and described byTeddy Evans as the
"Holy of Holies."  On the desk, someoneþa good artistþ had drawn a tiny
bird in violet ink on the crisp ivory page of a pocket notebook.
Unlike Shackleton, Scott separated the quarters of men and officers,
and the difference is often deployed to illustrate their contrasting
styles of leadership.  Wayland Young Baron Kennet of the Dene and
Kathleen Scott's son by her second mar Landscapes of the Mind riage,
has set out a convincing defense of Scott's decision.
Young wrote that class divisions in the Navy were "unchanged for 1,000 years, so to complain about it now is no more interesting or original
than to complain about it in the army of Wellington, Marlborough,
HenryV or Alfred the Great."  Scott's crew was extremely resourceful.
Clissold, the cook, rigged up a device whereby a small metal disk was
placed on top of rising dough, and when it reached the right height *
came into contact with another piece of metal and an electrical circuit
rang a bell next to his bunk.
The battered books included Kipling (of course) and a tiny edition of
The Merry Wives of Windsor, held together with string in the fly of
which a spidery hand had inscribed Milton's "When will the ship be
here/Come sing to me."  There is something disingenuous about Scott's
hut, however, just as there is about the myth.  The mummified penguin
lying open-beaked and akimbo next to a copy of the Illustrated London
News had been placed there by the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage
people, and Ponting's photographs show that Scott's desk is not the
original (the replacement was brought over from the Cape Royds hut).
The historic huts were often plundered in the early days.  Richard Pape
visited Cape Evans in 1959 with one of the American Operation Deep
Freezes under Admiral Dufek.  In his very bad book, Poles Apart, he
records quite candidly that he pocketed "a glass inkwell on which R.

F.

Scott' had been painted, also a bottle of Indian ink marked Wilson.  "
Still, I saw them everywhere.  A gap in a row of cup hooks, the dented
rubber of a tossed Wellington boot, a carefully rerolled bandage, the
whiff of Ponting's developing fluid in his tiny darkroom, a half-spent
candle in a chipped candlestickþperhaps it was the whistling of the
wind, but I could have sworn if I turned around I would find them
tramping back, spent dogs at their heels.
Later, the British public manipulated Scott's myth according to its own
needs and ends.  A crackpot society called the Alliance of

Honour, founded in 1903 and devoted to purity, had spawned flourishing
branches in 67 countries by the 1930s.  The alliance was vigorously
opposed to masturbation, and the following quotation is culled from its
voluminous literature, "We may safely assert that among the heroes of
that dreadful journey from the South Pole there were no victims of the
vice which the Alliance seeks to combat."  Secondhand bookshops are
rife with musty first editions of the diaries inscribed in a Sunday
School teacher's best copperplate, rewarding a child for good
attendance.  I found a 1941 bus ticket pressed inside one of them.  It
was a tough time to be living in London, and perhaps the diaries
helped.  During the Second World War the calls of the legend were
legion, and they were often voiced by cranks.  In 1941 Kathleen
received a letter from a woman in New York who said she had borne
Scott's illegitimate child when she was 15.
A handwritten note on the envelope said, "The lady is now dead."  A few
years after the war, hundreds of schoolchildren marched through
provincial towns and into cavernous cinemas to watch Scott of the
antarctic.  John Mills had already played countless war heroes, so he
was a prepackaged role model.  By the mid-fifties, however, liberals at
least were suspicious of the myth and had lost faith in the concept of
England.  PeterVansittart recalls, in his recent book, In the

Fifties, a game he devised during that period to test the objectivity
of his intellectual peers.  He would read out a passage from Scott's
diaries, including "We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a
bold spirit, fighting it out to the end .  . . " Assuming
thatVansittart was being ironic, the audience tittered.  Later he
amended the reading to make it sound as if it had come from the Warsaw
Ghetto in 1944, or from Mao Tse-tung and on those occasions his friends
applauded respectfully.
Scott soon became a cliche, and then fodder for satire.  In the Monty
Python television sketch "Scott of the Sahara, " the captain fights a
25-foot electric penguin.  Similarly, Scott appears as an astronaut in
Tom Stoppard's 1972 play Jumpers.  Scott, the first En Landscapes of
the Mind .  , N , .

,' .  , f ) .  S S f , , I glishman to reach the moon, sees his triumph
overshadowed by the plight of his only colleague, Astronaut Oates.
Scott kicks Oates to the ground at the foot of the spacecraft ladder
and pulls it in behind him with the words, "I am going up now, I may be
some time."  Historical revisionism is as unavoidable as the grave.
In the 1970s, when imperialism was widely reviled, Roland Huntford
published his joint biography Scott and Amundsen (called The Last Place
on Earth in the States), a passionate book that sought to demolish the
Scott myth, suggesting not only that Scott was mortal, but that he was
an unpleasant character and a poor leader.  According to Huntford, he
used science only as an excuse to participate in the race, unlike
Amundsen "who did not stoop to use science as an agent of prestige.  "
Nobody had criticized Scott before, and Huntford did so
comprehensively.
Many felt inclined to agree with him, while the keepers of the flame
would have had him torched.  The book whipped up a blizzard of angry
protests, vitriolic reviews, and a furious exchange of correspondence
and "statements" in national newspapers, including a lengthy debate
provoked by Huntford's assertion that Kathleen Scott had had sex with
Nansen while her husband was slogging up a glacier and was worried
about becoming pregnant.  The central argument was over how she had
recorded the arrival of her periods in her diary.  How disappointing it
had to come to that.
WaylandMoung wrote an article refuting Huntford's criticism of

Scott for Encounter magazine in May 1980.  He demonstrates the
weaknesses of Huntford's scholarship.  Others had pressed Huntford on
these same points, and in October 1979 he was obliged to admit on
national television that his description of Scott staring at Oates in
the tent at the end to try to force him to his death was based on
inhuihon.  In short, he got carried away by his own argument.
Prejudice is not necessarily fatal in a biography, however, and
Huntford's book is intelligent, gripping full of insight and elegantly
written.  I enjoyed it as much as any polar book I have read, and a
good deal more than most.  It is a pity that Huntford was quite so
obsessed with the destruction of the legend, for if he had reined in
his prejudices he could have produced a masterpiece.
A similar controversy raged in the Norwegian press after a book was
published that portrayed Amundsen as a bounder and Scott as worthy of
beatification.  Kare Holt's The Race, published in English in 1974, was
admittedly a novel, it was nonetheless a useful counterweight to
Huntford's book.
"The Scandinavians, " Huntford told me when I met him at Wolfson
College in Cambridge for lunch in a dining hall smelling of boiled
cauliflower, "by and large set out from a country at ease with
itself.
They have no need for an ego boost.  They are not play-acting.
The Norwegian will always look for a glimpse of the sun, because he
actually wants to be happy."  Self-delusion, he said, was the besetting
sin of the British.
"Scott and Amundsen inhabited totally different mental worlds, " he
added, leaning across the table conspiratorially.  "You mustn't be
deluded by the fact that they were contemporaries.  The Scandinavians
live in a landscape which has enormous natural power, so that when they
go to the polar regions it's sort of an extension of what they are.
" Huntford lived in Scandinavia for many years ("mainly because I like
skiing").  He writes exceptionally well about polar scenery, so well
that it is hard to imagine him not hankering to go south himself.
When I put this to him, he prevaricated.
"No, " he said eventually.  "These are landscapes of the mind, you
see.
" At McMurdo, the project leaders were giving a series of weekly
science lectures.  An eminent geologist among them had developed
theories on the prehistoric supercontinents in which Antarctica
Landscapes of the Mind was attached to South America.  His name was Ian
Dalziel, and I found him nursing a whiskey in the Corner Bar.
"I used to be a respected geologist, " he said, "but now I move
continents around like armchairs."  His wife called it playing God.
He was Scottish, had defected, but still displayed the characteristic
dry wit of the Scots.  He had an easy manner that was self-assured
without being confident, and was a repository of stories.  He could
remember the geologist who used live baby penguins as toilet paper and
reported that it was important to keep the beaks out of the way.
As nature's satire on humanity it was part of the penguin job
description to provide mirth for the colonizing hordes.  Before anyone
had heard of environmental awareness, officers would paint bow ties on
penguin breasts and set the birds loose in the messroom, Navy
construction workers flung them down seal holes "to watch them shoot
up, " and the 1956 Personnel Manual for Williams Field Air Operating
Facility on Ross Island laid out procedures for obtaining a stuffed
penguin.  Now, abusing a penguin carries a stiffer fine than harassing
a person.
I found myself reading a good deal about deserts while I was in the
south, and at that time I was engrossed in Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian
Sands.  Like Antarctica, the heart of the desert was devoid of human
history.  Both places could be perceived as a gigantic reflection of
all you had known of emptiness and loss, if you were minded to
internalize the landscape in that way.  I felt the opposite.
Even sitting in a base that resembled a small Alaskan mining town, I
had similar intimations about the cold southern desert to those which
Thesiger had in the hot sands of Arabia.  "Here in the desert, " he
wrote, "I had found all that I had asked, I knew that I should never
find * again."  I finished the book in my office late one night, and
the light from the Anglepoise lamp spilled into the dark corridor.
Hans, a Danish fish biologist on Art's project, came in and installed
himself on the spare chair.  We must have been the only people in the
building and it was as silent as a mausoleum.  He made small talk for a
few minutes, but he was fidgeting as if he needed to release an object
that had got stuck between the layers of his garments.  When he started
saying what he had come to say all along it spewed out like a torrent
of coins from a slot machine.
He had fallen in love five weeks before coming south.
"Britt is fifteen years younger than I, but one day after I met her, I
was in love, " he said in his musical Danish accent.  "The next five
weeks were like rushing towards a waterfall, becoming faster all the
time.  I find a branch to cling to and everything would be okay for a
while, but then I would be swept away again.  Then comes the day when
no branches are left."  He wrote every day, and once a week he sent a
present, too, a commitment that must have tested his imagination as
there weren't any shops except the Navy store, and that offered a
limited range of out-of-date film, Tampax andY-fronts.
"I am an all-or-nothing man, " he said seriously, zipping himself into
his vermilion parka and setting off to write another installment.

N

t r,

F O U R

The Other Side of Silence .  . . A thousand visages Then mark'd I,
which the keen and eager cold Had shaped into a doggish grin, whence
creeps A shivering horror oter me, at the thought Of those frore
shallows.  While we journey'd on Toward the middle, at whose point
unites All heavy substance, and I trembling went Through that eternal
chillness .  . .

DANTE, from the Disine Comedy

A series of arid valleys runs off the Antarctic continent opposite Ross
Island, created by the advances and retreats of glaciers through the
Transantarctic Mountains.  These dry valleys, free of ice for about
four million years, are dotted with partially frozen saltwater basins
and form one of the most extreme deserts in the world.  NASA wanted to
test robotic probes there before sending them on interplanetary
missions.
"It's as close to Mars as we can get, " one of the engineers said.
At the orientation conference in Virginia I had met Brian Howes and Dale
Goehringer, coastal ecologists working at Lake Fryxell, the first of
the three frozen lakes in the Taylor Valley.  They had invited me to
stay at their camp, so three weeks after I arrived in Antarctica I
checked out a set of equipment at the Berg Field Center, sorting
through tents, thermarests and crampons and painting my initials on a
shiny blue ice ax, and one morning I hitched a lift in a helicopter
resupplying a camp farther up the valley.
Less than an hour after leaving McMurdo, the pilot put down on a rocky
strip of land between a parched mountain and a large frozen lake.
He signaled for me to get out.  It had not rained here for two million
years.
A hundred yards from the edge of the lake, a figure darted out of an
arched rigid-frame tent known as a Jamesway.  I had heard a good deal
about Jamesways.  They were ubiquitous in long-term American field
camps and constituted the heart of camp, too, like the kitchen in a
farmhouse.
An invention of the military, Jamesways are portable insulated tents of
standard width and height but variable lengthþto make them longer, you
add more arches.  They have board floors and a proper door, and in
Antarctica are heated by drip-oil Preway burners.
The figure trotting toward me from the Jamesway had long straight hair
the color of cinnamon sticks and was waving.  It was Dale.
At home she ran a lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in
Massachusetts.
"Welcome to Fryxell!  " she said.  Taking my arm, she propelled me
toward the Jamesway.
Inside, a man was slumped over a mug at a long table next to an
inflated plastic palm tree.  He was short, with a cloud of tangled
black hair and a hat like a thermal doughnut.
"This is L. D. , " said Dale.  "It stands for Little Dave, and he's a
grad student in marine biology.  He's been up for thirty hours."  L.

D.

raised his head to flash me a Mephistophelean smile before resum j, ,
ing the slumped position.  On the back of the door was an Annoyo-meter
with an arrow that swiveled from Vaguely Irritating through to
Murderously Provocative.
"Who's the baby?  " I asked, pointing at a large, chubby face smiling
down from the canvas wall.
"That's Mary, " said Dale.  "She's one year old.  I planned the birth
so that I only missed one field seasonþthis is my eighth.
Season, I mean."  She put two insulated mugs of coffee on the table.
"Before I forgetþall waste from the DryValleys is retrograded to
McMurdo, and that includes gray water and human waste."
"What's gray water?  " I asked.
"Dishwashing water, " she said.  "We empty it into a drum out the
back.
As far as going to the bathroom is concerned, there's an outhouse we
use behind here"þshe gestured to the back of the Jameswayþ"and in it a
funnel connects to a drum.  There's a shit can for solids.  And you
need to take a pee bottle with you when you go for a walk, too."
"So you can't just pee on the ground?  " I asked.  "Even when you're
miles from camp?  "
"Nope.  We're trying to maintain a pristine
environment.
" There was a pause.  "Listen, " she said in a low voice, as if she
were about to breach the Official Secrets Act.  "Take my advice.  When
you want to go to the bathroom in camp, use a pee bottle and decant the
contents, rather than struggling to pee into the funnel.  A tall man
fixed the funnel in position to suit his own aim."  She sat back in her
chair.
"God, " she said, "it's good to have another woman here."  Going to the
bathroom, I wondered if there was any lavatorial situation Americans
deemed too primitive for this dignified term.
I had even seen a translation of the Bible in which King Saul entered a
cave "to go to the bathroom."  Later, I put up my tent among a
sprinkling of others behind four small laboratory huts (it was typical
of the scientists' attitude to their work that the labs were more
luxurious than the accommodation).
At the far end of the lake the Canada Glacier, grubby with dust,
blocked the northern horizon.  Much of Antarctica is officially
classified as a desert, and nothing proved it more effectively than the
salt efflorescences on the shoreline of Lake Fryxell, thin white crusts
like the salt pans of northern Chile.  Some ponds in the Dry Valleys
are so saline that they won't freeze at minus 60 degrees Celsius, and
the water is like molasses.  On others the ice crusts, like lenses,
concentrate so much solar energy that the bottom layers can reach
temperatures of 25 degrees Celsius (or 77 degrees Fahrenheit).
In the afternoon I strapped on my crampons and walked out over the ice
with L. D. and a hydrologist called Roland (L.  D. said, "I do mud, he
does water").  The lake was surrounded by a thin layer of "moat ice"
which, as it was still early December, was frozen solid.  By late
January the moat ice would be gone.  The 15-foot ice lid that covered
the rest of the lake never melted.  It was filled with tiny white
bubbles and twisted into apocalyptic configurations.  Every now and
then a wrong foot would send us crashing down a foot or so, through a
pocket of blue neon air and onto the next layer of ice.
In the small hut in the middle of the lake, L. D. and Roland fiddled
with their instruments.
"The lake was formed about twelve hundred years ago by meltwater from
the Canada Glacier, " L. D. explained.  "It's the forty eight feet of
water underneath the ice that interests us.  The permanent ice lid
facilitates a uniquely stable water column."  When the door of the hut
was shut, natural fluorescent light shone up through the hole in the
board floor.  They had 18 instruments in the lake at the time, and when
they brought water up from the bottom it was so full of sulfides that
it smelled of rotten eggs.  While they pumped, they stowed the tubes
inside their shirts.  Like a lot of Antarctic scientists, they were
engaged in a constant

The Other Side of Silence

battle against the big freeze.  L. D. showed me his mud, he called it
"very young rock."
"What I'm into, " he drawled, "is phytoplankton on their long journey
to oil and rock."  As the light never changed, the team was tied to the
clock only by its daily radio schedule with McMurdo.  Although they
always ate dinner together, it had to be convened well in advance by
radio and could be as late as four in the morning.  * Brian, the team
leader, said that his body clock had died years ago.
It was nonetheless an easy rhythm to follow.  If I wasn't out on the
lake with one of them, I sat outside the Jamesway listening to the moat
ice crackling and watching the tobacco-yellow plumes of Mount Erebus
staining the cobalt sky.  I took my turn to make water, dragging a cart
over to the frozen moat and chipping ice into pans.  The salts had been
frozen out, and the water tasted delicious.
Three days after I arrived I spent a whole day out on the lake with
Steve, an oceanographic consultant, and George, a benthic biologist in
his fifties.
"I'm happiest in the first ten inches of sediment, " said George.
The pair had dived together off Nantucket for years, and they both
enjoyed gethng away to Antarctica.
"It's like stepping out of your life for a few months, " said Steve.
The seventh member of the team was Craig a bacteriologist studying
photosynthesis cycles.
"Looking under these lakes is literally like going back in time, " he
said.  "It's a microbial wonderland."  Brian was a marsh and coastal
ecologist and a biogeochemist.
He was much revered by the team, but I only ever saw him exerting
authority when he stood outside the back door of the Jamesway beating a
large frying pan against an even larger saucepan in order * They
free-cycled, to use the standard physiological term.

to wake up L. D. and Roland.  Brian had his finger on the pulse of camp
dynamics, and if he was tired, the whole camp began to deteriorate.
The fact that it was harmonious and well oiled was in large measure a
tribute to him.
One afternoon I crouched next to Brian in the hut in the middle of the
lake.
"Nitrates are the single biggest cause of coastal erosion and
pollution, " he said.  "That's why we're here, finding out more about
them.
Oceans do have an assimilative capacity for nitrates, but they
shouldn't be introduced beyond that capacity.  Many areas of the world
are already way beyond their limit, and they're in big trouble.  "
Brian believed that science in Antarctica meant adapting to the
environment, not foisting techniques onto it.  He had worked out that
using paper plates was ecologically more sensible than burning fuel to
melt water to wash plastic plates, so he had installed a trash
compactor in the Jamesway.  He and Dale had fought not to have
snowmobiles at their camp, and, like all passionate ecologists, they
had made themselves unpopular on many occasions.
"No amount of money, " he told me as he pulled a lurid intestinal tube
from the soupy water, "could create an environment like this.
" The XE-6 helicopter crewsþthe airborne squadron of the U. S.
Navyþcalled in almost every day.  VXE-6 did most of the flying for the
U. S. program.
They called themselves the Ice Pirates.  I called them Testosterone
Airways.  Sometimes they brought fresh food and they always brought
news from McMurdo.  If they couldn't call by, they would buzz us,
swooping low over camp.  They kept up a running competition to see who
could drop a roll of newspapers nearest the doormat, a gesture only
rendered more touching by the fact that the papers were weeks old and
never read.

The Other Side of Silence

A week after I arrived at Fryxell, I climbed the lowest peak of the
Asgard range behind camp, and from the summit I could see the top of
the glaciers at either end of the lake.  I could see Roland, too,
squatting outside the hut in the middle of the lake and spooling out
cable.  This was known as being the "mule."  The cable ran into the
hut, where it was winched into the water by L. D. I switched on my
radio so I could listen to them.
Roland was the only team member who hadn't been south before, and he
had taken over from L. D. as general factotum, a role he accepted with
equanimity, even when Brian staked the use of him for two days in a bet
with a project leader from a neighboring camp.  L. D. s specialty was
self-deprecatory humor accompanied by facial contortions.  A typical
anecdote featured an old man out walking with his small grandson.  When
the man spotted L. D. squatting on the steps of the Woods Hole lab
where he worked, smoking a cigarette, he told the child, as if
delivering a moral lesson of great import, "See him?  He's a bum.  "
"That's enough cable now, " L. D. was saying to Roland.
"Stop!  For Christ's sake, stop!  What's your problem?  "
"I have
stopped, " whined Roland.
"Why didn't you stop when I first asked?  Got a wedgie or something?
"
"What's a wedgie?  " I interrupted, keen to learn a new scientific
term.
"It's when your underwear rides up, " said L. D.
Later that day I hiked over to the face of the Canada Glacier.
When I sat on the ground and ran a handful of soil through my fingers,
I half expected to find a flint arrowhead, some small sign of a human
past.
What I heard there went beyond quietness.  It was George Eliot's "roar
which lies on the other side of silence."  In a famous passage in
Middlemarch she wrote that it was like hearing the grass grow or the
squirrel's heart beat, but that our ears didn't pick it up because we
walked about "well-wadded with stupidity."  The scorched Atacama Desert
of northern Chile kept flashing into my mind.  Two years before I had
traveled through the Atacama for weeks, much of it in a jeep with a
peripatetic Australian man I had tripped over in the corridor of a
doss-house.  Nothing lived there, it was as hostile as Antarctica.  And
just as it did now, the cone of a volcano always hovered on the
periphery of our vision.  Despite the candent heat and the dust that
settled on us and our possessions like fur, it was a curiously
agreeable trip.  Sometimes, after hundreds of miles of caramel pampa,
we came across geoglyphs on the desiccated hillsides, crude drawings by
members of an unknown and long-gone tribe.
Although they had been crushed by the conquistadors, the tribesmen had
left their imprint, and it was as if the desert still belonged to
them.
Here in Antarctica there was no concept of ownership.  If the continent
had something to teach me that was more important than nitrate data, it
was not about humanity.  The landscape drew my thoughts away from
worldly things, away from the thousand mechanical details of my outward
life.  I had found the place where, loosed from my cultural moorings, I
could find the space to look for the higher power, whatever it was,
that loomed over the snow fields.
I had a secret plan not to return to McMurdo immediately, but instead
to hop up the Taylor Valley from camp to camp.  With some help from Dale
and a few conversations over the radio, I arranged to hitch a ride up
to Lake Hoare.  L. D. and Roland had been asking me for something
English, so the night before I left I whipped up a bread-and-butter
pudding.  The seditious effects of a heavy meal resulted in three of
them falling asleep at the table.
"Wake up!  " shouted Brian at two o'clock in the morning.
"Time for the after-dinner entertainment."  They had to retrieve a
cassette sampler that had been lying under the ice all winter, its 80
hydraulically fired syringes busily collecting water samples.  It was
the big event of the season and the only
time I saw all seven of them on the ice at the same time.  At four
o'clock, after a short burst of intensive activity, most of it under a
space blanket, the instrument emerged like a newborn baby.  It was a
prototype instrument which had cost somewhere in the region of $18,
000.
"What happens if I slip?  " drawled L. D. as he grasped one end of the
instrument and negotiated a sharp overhang of ice.
"Well, " said Brian, "it would be like tossing your BMW off a bridge.
Ohþand you wouldn't have a job anymore."  The camp at Lake Hoare was at
the near end of the lake itself, in the lee of the Canada Glacier.
When I arrived, the residents were hovering around outside the
outhouse, the toilet had just exploded.  It was a propane-fueled
mechanism known in the valleys as a rocket shitter, and on this
occasion it had backfired, causing a loud explosion that it was feared
could interfere with seismic data.
An early model of the rocket shitter once caused the Heavy Shop at
McMurdo to burn to the ground.  There were no fatalities, but the new
fire engine, which was inside the shop at the time, was lost.
Even the rocket convenience, however, had not acquired the notoriety of
a high-tech ecotoilet introduced, and swiftly phased out, in the
eighties.  It was known as the Stealth Bomber.
The camp at Lake Hoare was the most sophisticated in the Taylor Valley,
with a smart new hut fitted out with a kitchen, and, predictably
enough, it was devoid of character.  It did have solar panels, however,
which powered laptops and meant that a generator rarely blighted the
silence.
The eight residents of the Hoare House (as they themselves inevitably
called it) were graduate students working with the Long Term Ecological
Research program, a National Science Foundation global project.
I put up my tent near the others and walked out onto the lake.
It was named after Ray Hoare, a member of a team fromVictoria
University of Wellington who had worked in the DryValleys in the
1960s.
There were some photographs of Hoare's team in the hut, and even
bundled up in all their gear they looked like the early Beatles.  Some
of the pictures showed them pulling one another stark naked over the
lake in sledges.  It was frontier territory then, the days of mapless
land and nameless places.
The hut was divided down the middle, one half containing the kitchen
and a long table and the other a set of bunks and a couple of desks.
The kitchen window looked straight at the cliff of the glacier,
fissured with slits like the walls of a medieval castle.  Although
chunks of ice (which they called "glacier berries") regularly fell off
the ice cliff and were used to make water, everyone was nevertheless
acutely aware that water was a precious commodity.  When I began
washing the dishes after dinner someone piped up, "Hey, how come you
get to wash your hands?  " In the evening, people drifted off to their
tents or lay in the bunks in the hut.  The camp was more a collection
of individuals than a team, you could feel it straightaway.  I went to
bed early, and when I opened my bag I found a cloth ration pouch
inscribed with my name and the words "from all your friends at Lake
Fryxell."  Inside they had put a Woods Hole sweatshirt, a sew-on patch,
bars of chocolate and other treats.
Everyone seemed to be feeling better in the morning, they talked to one
another in polysyllables, anyway.  A helicopter arrived with the post,
and * took away the charred rocket toilet.  One of the students
received an Advent calendar in the post.  It was already December 9,
and most of the windows had popped open in transit, causing the
chocolate animals lurking underneath to slip to the bottom,
disintegrate and turn magnolia white on their passage through
multitudinous temperature changes.
Two scientists appeared with the helicopter, and one, a snow and ice
physicist and mountaineer called Ed, was planning to hike up the valley
to his camp at Lake Bonney later that afternoon.  When he asked me if I
wanted to go with him, I leaped at the chance, as I was longing to
travel overland.  It turned out to be one of the best walks of my
lifeþand of his.
I left my tent and sleeping gear behind, and someone agreed to put it
on the next helicopter to McMurdo.  We strode off up Lake Hoare, the
sky smeared with clouds like a lazily cleaned pane of glass and Ed
delivering diatribes on ice formation.  At the far end Hoare blended
imperceptibly into Lake Chad.  One of the early explorers got diarrhea
there, and the story goes that the lake was named after the brand of
toilet paper favored by the expedition.  Chad petered out into
moraine.
The bank of black debris, pushed along by the Suess Glacier, blocked
our way up the valley.  Ed, who had climbed Denali and in the Himalaya
and had spent half his life in the wilderness, told stories about
falling into crevasses.  His words bounced back at us from the wall of
the Suess, like voices calling in a dream.  We passed a mummified young
seal on the moraine, its adolescent form coated with a mossy green
fur.
"You are now, " said Ed slowly and dramatically, "in a place which
knows no degradation."  I know a good metaphor when it leaps out at me,
and this was the perfect illustration of the timelessness so often
associated with Antarctica.  As an American journalist who came south
with the U.

S.

program in the fifties wrote, "Antarctica knows no dying."  Propped up
in my sleeping bag the previous night, I had written a letter to Jeremy
Lewis, the Patron of my expedition.  We had often talked about the
symbolic properties of Antarctica.  "Can't help thinking I'm in
Never-Never Land, " I wrote.  The absence of decay, such a salient
characteristic of my surroundings, reinforced my perception of the
continent as a kind of Shangri-La (the residents of which enjoyed
perpetual youth, also a key element in the legend of dead Antarctic
explorers).  Jeremy had steadfastly refused to accept that the notion
of Antarctica as Arcadia was anything but bizarre, definitive proof (as
if further evidence were required) that I was "an odd fish."
"An Eden has to be lush, " he would protest as we downed glasses of
wine at crowded literary parties to which we may or may not have been
invited.
"Comfort and the abundance of nature and warmth are its intrinsic
properties.  Think of the centuries of visual representationsþall
verdant and pastoral.  Have you ever seen an Arcadia strewn with blocks
of ice and peopled by indistinguishable characters with iced-up beards
and swaddled in thermals?  " Then he would extend his glass-holding
hand in the direction of a passing waiter.
When I got there, I knew I was right.  Everything was a symbol, in the
context of Eden, and it made no difference whether the setting
consisted of rolling green fields or thousands of miles of ice.
The discomfort inevitably caused by a hostile environment like
Antarctica was irrelevant.  When he received my letter, Jeremy wrote
back with the grudging concession, "I suppose James Hilton's original
Shangri-La was reached via near-Antarctic extremities of cold."  It
seemed like a small victory.
Ed led the way up an ice slope to the defile on one side of the Suess,
and we hiked along a narrow path next to walls of beaten ice that led
to a rocky escarpment and down to Mummy Pond.  Ed wanted to "get a feel
for the ice, " and he knelt down on the pond as if he were bowing to
Mecca.
He had told me earlier that for anyone who studies ice, coming to
Antarctica was like making the hajj.  "The history of the planet is
calibrated in the ice, " he said.  He had been an English graduate
before turning to science, and tried to persuade me that mathematics
was a language like any other language, even stopping, when it got
complicated, to draw equations in the sugar snow with his ice ax.

The Other Side of Silence

The skyline of the Transantarctics was now straight ahead of us, and
over to the right loomed the Matterhorn, marked on Ed's map in pencil as
the Doesn't Matterhorn.  As we continued over rippling plateaus of
coarse alluvial sand between vast sculpted, triangular, wind-formed
rocks, Ed said, "Not many people have seen this."  He turned to me with
a broad smile, hand extended.  "Here's to it!  n Then we began the
approach to Lake Bonney, the twin peaks ahead the only thing between us
and the polar plateau.  These triumphal gateways of promise were
back-lit against a pearly blue sky, and the dimpled Taylor Glacier at
the end of the lake was lit up above the dark, brooding opacity of the
moraine.  In front of this scene shimmered the lake, sheets of cracked
and rippled frosted blue.  Ribboned crystals imprisoned in the ice
glimmered like glowworms.  It was swathe in light pale as an unripe
lemon.  The scene said to me, "Do not be afraid."  It was like the
moment when I pass back the chalice after holy communion.
It had taken five and a quarter hours, though we had stopped regularly
for ice inspections, and by nine-thirty we were picking our way along
the soft mud on the edge of the lake toward the camp, diminutive in the
distance.
When we arrived, a tall figure carrying a case of beer stopped and
leaned against the door frame of the Jamesway.  "Here come the
explorers!  " he shouted, and Ed called back, "I found a writer!
" The man was the project leader at Lake Bonney, and his name was John
Priscu.  I had met him at the conference in Virginia, and he had
immediately invited me up to see his camp.  It was his eleventh season
at Bonney, and he said that when he got out of the helicopter, it was
like coming home.  He had officially named a number of the
topographical features after colleagues who had worked with him on the
ice, "so they're still here."  We all shook hands, and he ushered us
inside.  Four people were sitting around a large table, and the sound
of taped jazz and peals of laughter filled the Jamesway.  If it had
been in an advertisement, a log fire would have been roaring in a grate
and a large sheepdog snoozing on a rug.
John was a veteran Antarctic microbiologist, and he was studying the
plankton in the lakes.
"These lakes are unique all the way from the ice on the top to the
plankton at the bottom, " he said, handing me a beer.  "I can't figure
out what's going on down there.  Some of these lakes are frozen all the
way to the bottom, for God's sake, and we don't know why.  I'm going to
keep coming back until I understand it."  He paused, and slurped at his
own beer.  "We probably never will understand itþ but we're learning."
He was 42, had gone to school at Our Lady of Las Vegas, and played
guitar in a rock band.  I found out later that he also plied a trade as
an Antarctic tattoo artist and ear piercer.  He had tattooed three
people at Bonney using a needle for repairing Scott tents, and pierced
four ears.
"So, what's it like being a Fingee?  " he asked me when I sat down.
"What's a fingee?  " I asked suspiciously.
"Fucking New Guy!  " said John.  "Like Ed here."
"I'm not a guy, to start with, " I said.
"Everyone's a guy here!  " John had chosen the site for the camp
himself, in 1989.  His

Jamesway had been used in the Korean War, and he claimed that the holes
in the canvas at one end had been made by bullets.  A notice over the
door said, "Good morning, scientists!  It's a good day for science!  "
and next to a dartboard beneath it someone had ducttaped the label from
a tin of California Girl peaches.  All over Antarctica people stuck up
images of heat, sunshine and tropical landscapes.  They reminded me of
the call of whales for a lost world.  The debris of human occupation
had spread all over the Jamesway like creepers in a
greenhouseþpostcards
 with curling edges, bits of rope on old hooks, broken mobiles, Gary
Larson cartoons (indigenous to the American academic community),
baseball caps, foot powder containers filled with plastic flowers, an
inflatable sheep called a Lov Ewe and Christmas cards strung along the
arched ceiling their messages long since forgotten.  The gas fridge was
full of water samples, and food was stored on the floor.
Two Kiwi scientists had arrived that day from Lake Vanda in the Wright
Valley, which was next along from the Taylor.  Clive ran a
quasi-governmental environmental hydrology institute in Christchurch.
He was acute and articulate, with very clear eyes, and his colleague
Mark was amiable and quiet.  The pair of them had known John for more
than a decade, and it was a great reunion.
"I wish I still had my old hut, " Clive said, looking around the
Jamesway.  The original LakeVanda hut had been pulled down, and in its
place Clive had been given a freezer-box style modern version from which
any trace of personality was erased like a palimpsest at the beginning
of each new season.
We ate a pot of bean stew, drank a case of beer, and then a bottle of
bourbon appeared.  Two women graduate students were working at Bonney
at that time.  One of them, a tall, feline individual called Cristina,
was the target of a good deal of teasing to which she retaliated in
kind.  John's favorite story was that on her regular trips down to base
Cristina had begun stockpiling free condoms from the McMurdo medical
center.  It wasn't that she needed them in Antarctica, she said, but
that she never knew when they might come in handy at home, and as they
were freeþhey, she was a grad student.
Arriving back at Bonney one day she had stepped out of the helicopter,
dug her hand in her pocket to retrieve a glove, and inadvertently
brought out a handful of condoms, which sprayed all over the helipad,
whipped into the air by the blades and settling gently over her
shoulders like confetti.
Clive had disappeared outside for ten minutes.  "Look, " he said when
he came back in.  "We should drink this whiskey with glacier ice, " and
he deposited an extremely large and alarmingly blue ice cube on the
table.  John took to it with an ice ax.

The Other Side of Silence

"What do you think?  " asked Clive after we had added chunks of glacier
ice to our mugs.
"Delicious, " I said.
"Lake ice is more delicious, " said Ed, who referred to water as
"liquid ice."  With that, lake ice was fetched, and a disquisition on
the relative merits and properties of each type of ice hastened the
disappearance of the whiskey.
The conversation moved on to drilling in the lake.
Penetrating ice, yards thick, to get at the water below it posed
interminable problems in those temperatures, and scientific minds were
much occupied with it.  The stories and their permutations were
endlessþ about copper coils carrying heated glycol, about instruments
freezing about the advantages of hand drills.  The four men shared a
deep sense of the absurdity of their situation, floundering around on
frozen lakes at 72 degrees south.  It was obvious that they could have
gone on yaming forever.
John suddenly turned to me.
"What's your impression, then?  Of Antarctica?  "
"Well, " I said
slowly, "I have a million impressions."
"Don't you have one overwhelming impression?  " I thought about that.
"I feel as if I'm getting to know a person.  It's like having a love
affairþI'm finding out more and more and more, it's all different and
overwhelming and intoxicating, and I don't know where it's going to
end."
"Ha!  " he said.  "I used to feel like that."  I slept in a Scott tent
overlooking the lake and woke to a perfect spring day.  Clive and Mark
were already out on the ice, struggling with their instruments.  We sat
outside drinking coffee, and watched them.
John was stretched out on the rocky shore.
. .
"Did you notice, " he said, "that when I got up to go to bed at five
o'clock this morning Clive said, Oh, can't take the pace, eh?  After
fourteen years, it's still a pissing contest."  He laughed loudly.
I was gratified that anyone could live so patently at ease in an
Antarctic environment.  Up at Lake Bonney it seemed to like people.  It
liked him, anyway.  Even Ed, on his first trip, commented that he
"didn't feel like a foreigner."  Later, when everyone went out to take
samples, I walked up the valley.
The 1, 250, 000 map I carried in my pocket was bisected by a jagged
line marked "Limit of compilation, " and the half to the left of the
Taylor Glacier was blank.  I had reached the end of the map.
I hitched a lift out on a helicopter three days later, at five o'clock
in the afternoon.  I had just taken a bread-and-butter pudding out of
the oven.  The helicopter crew was revving up for Saturday night, and
as I waved to a diminishing Ed and John I heard the pilots discussing a
girl over the headsets.
"Is she pretty?  " one asked.
"I've been here so long I've forgotten what pretty is, " replied the
other.

The Naked Soul of Man

The Naked Soul of Man On passing our winter quarters at Cape Royds we
all turned out to give three cheers, and to take a last look at the
place where, in spite of discomforts and hardships, we had spent so
many happy days.
We watched the little hut, which had been our home for a year that must
always live in our memories, fade away in the distance with feelings
almost of sadness, and there were few men aboard who did not cherish a
hope that some day they might again live strenuous days under the
shadow of mighty Erebus.

ERNEST SH&CKLETON, from The Heart of the Antarctic

At ten o'clock on Easter Monday morning, 1916, a diminutive wooden boat
lurched off a rock shelf on one of the islands to the north of the
Antarctic Peninsula and into the angry Southern Ocean, immediately
tossing two of the men on board into the broth.  Within minutes the
freezing waters of a roller were pouring through the plug hole.
Standing on the sandless and wind whipped beach, a tall Anglo-Irishman
was calmly making final preparations before himself climbing into the
boat.  His name was Ernest Shackleton.
The two sodden men were pushed ashore with an oar, the anchor was
dropped, the hole was plugged with a filthy handkerchief until the real
plug was found, stores and over a ton of ballast were stowed, and at
half-past twelve Shackleton gave the order to set sail.  For 137 days
the 22 men left behind grew blubbery on seal and penguin underneath a
pair of upturned boats, watching themselves grow old as the chance of
rescue, slim at the outset, shrank to an almost imperceptible filament
of hope.
The story of their rescue is the greatest epic in the history of
Antarctica.
The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition had set sail aboard Endurance
from London's East India Docks on August 1, 1914, three days before
Britain declared war on Germany.  The plan was for a party led by
Shackleton to sledge across Antarctica, starting from the Weddell Sea,
while a team on the other side of the continent laid depots for them.
But in January the ship was trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea
"like an almond in a chocolate bar."
"Almost like a living creature, " wrote Shackleton during the painful
weeks of ebbing hope as he watched his ship die, "she resisted the
forces that would crush her."  When she finally went down, Frank
Worsley, her skipper, recorded in his diary, "When one knows every nook
and corner of one's ship as we did, and has helped her time and again
in the fight that she made so well, the actual parting was not without
its pathos, quite apart from one's own desolation, and I doubt if there
was one amongst us who did not feel some personal emotion when Sir
Ernest, standing on top of the look-out [a platform they had rigged up
on the ice], said somewhat sadly and quietly, She's gone, boys."  They
were each allowed to take two pounds of personal possessions off the
ship, and these they buried in snow holes.  Shackleton l himself tossed
a handful of gold sovereigns from his pocket onto the ice and picked up
a slim volume of Browning's poetry.  "I throw away trash, " he said,
"and am rewarded with golden inspirations.
" For five months, then, the 28 drifted on ice floes for 2, 000 miles,
tents and all, and when the chance came they traveled for six days in
the three small lifeboats from the Endurance until they reached
Elephant Island, an outpost of the South Shetlands.  On the last leg of
this brutal journey, Shackleton did not sleep for a hundred hours.
Even then he spoke of the beauties of the sea, and of anxieties
dwindling to nothing amidst those splendors.
When they landed on Elephant Island, Frank Hurley, the expedition
photographer, recorded in his diary that they were more dead than
alive, and that many of them could no longer row.  Later Shackleton,
whom they called The Boss, wrote in his book South, "The smiles and
laughter, which caused cracked lips to bleed afresh, and the gleeful
exclamations at the sight of two live seals on the beach, made me think
for a moment of that glittering hour of childhood when the door is open
at last and the Christmas tree in all its wonder bursts upon the
vision."  The southern winter was already upon them, and Perce
Blackborow, the man who had joined the Endurance as a stowaway, had his
frostbitten toes amputated.  * The stranded men took to referring to
their new prison as "Hell-of-an-Island."  There was no hope of a chance
rescue and so no alternative but to send one of the lifeboats to the
whaling stations on South Georgia 700 miles away.  From there a vessel
could be found to fetch the stranded men.

* Blackborow was a man of few words, but when he finally got home to
Wales he was asked to give a talk at the Y.M.C.A Boys' Club in Newport.
Speaking of the period after the loss of the ship, he said, HI like to
think of our leader as I recall him at this time.  His hopes and
ambitons had all been shattered, yet he was cheerful and went out of
his way to impart some cheerfulness to others.  He had a genius for
keeD T say more, we loved him like a father.  "

L

, !  , .  t t' F F f i t , , ,

5'

T. S. Eliott, .  . , The Naked Soul of Man

'. Before the Endurance sank, Captain Frank Worsley, a New

Zealander and an officer in the merchant navy, had worked out the
courses and distances from the South Orkneys and Elephant Island to

South Georgia, the Falklands and Cape Horn.  Of the three battered

lifeboats, the James Caird offered the least horrifying option.
They caulked the seams with Marston's artist's paint and seal blood and
stripped the two other wretched boats for parts.  New additions
included an extra sail, which brought the total to three.
The James Caird, named after the expedition's main sponsor, was 22 feet
long and her height above the water was two feet two inches, not a
great deal higher than a bath.  She had been built to Worsley's
specifications in Poplar, East London, from Baltic pine, American elm
and English oak.  After the Endurance went down, the shipwright fitted
the little boat with a pump made from the casing of the ship's compass
and two men labored over a blubber stove with canvas and needles to
fashion a cover for the makeshift cabin.
Six of them went, and Worsley was at the helm.  Before they left,
Shackleton issued instructions to Frank Wild, the leader of the
stranded party, to the effect that if relief had not arrived in six
months, when the whaling station opened on Deception Island, Wild was
to assume that the boat had gone down and set out himself.
Worsley recorded in his diary that on the first evening Shackleton sent
the rest in to sleep and the two of them "snuggled close together all
night, " with the Southern Cross overhead, relentlessly inundated by
waves and "holding north by the stars that swept in glittering
procession over the Atlantic towards the Pacific .  . . While I
steered, his arm thrown over my shoulder, we discussed plans and yamed
in low tones.  We smoked all nightþhe rolled cigarettes for us both, a
job at which I was unhandy."  They had one compass, and it was
faulty.
Shackleton confided that if any of the 22 he had left behind perished,
he would feel like a murderer.
Tom Crean, a petty officer in the Navy, was in charge of the
"kitchen.
" He was obligd to light the primus stove while bent double and to jam
it between his and another man's legs to keep it steady.
There was no room for anyone to sit upright and eat his hoosh, the
standard Antarctic meal of dehydrated meat protein dissolved in hot
water.
It was usually followed by a sledging biscuit, some Streimer's Nutfood
and a few sugar lumps.  By the third day everything, with the exception
of matches and sugar in watertight tins, was irredeemably soaked.
The men's feet and legs, immersed almost constantly, were already
frostbitten and swollen.
They had rations, water and oil for 30 days.  Apart from that, they
didn't have much, except methylated spirits for the stove, a tin of
seal oil, six reindeer-hair sleeping bags, a small sack of spare
clothes and one chronometer.
There wasn't enough room for them all to lie down at once, so they took
it in turns to crawl on their chests and stomachs over sharp stone
ballast, Shackleton directing the in-out operation, into a hole seven
feet long and five feet wide.  Then they slid into saturated sleeping
bags, which after a week began to smell of sour bread.  The air was
bad, and stifling, and sometimes they woke suddenly with the feeling
that they had been buried alive.
By the fifth day JohnVincent, able seaman and a bully, was experiencing
severe pain in his legs and feet.  He lost his appetite for the fight
after that.  It was the psychological cramp, not the physical kind,
that did him in.  He had worked on North Sea trawlers, too, so he was
no stranger to hardship.
By the seventh day the men's faces and hands were black with soot and
blubber.  They needed calories, so they drank the seal oil.
Two of the sleeping bags were proclaimed beyond redemption and tossed
overboard, lifted briefly against the blanched sky.
On the eighth day the ice on the boat grew so thick that they were
obliged to take to it with an ax.  It was agonizingly painful L

The Naked Soul of Man

work.  Their thighs were inflamed by the chafing of wet clothes, and
their lower legs turned a spectral white and were numb.  The painter
snapped, the sea anchor was swept away and the white light of fear
flashed through their souls as the biggest wave they had ever
encountered crashed over the little boat.  By the eleventh dayWorsley
calculated that they had crossed the halfway mark.  Two of the men
found tobacco leaves floating in the bilges and laboriously dried them
and rolled them into cigarettes with toilet paper.  By the thirteenth
day frostbite had skinned their hands so frequently that they were
ringed like tree trunks.  Then they discovered that the remaining water
had turned brackish.
As sunlight leaked into the sky on the fifteenth day, someone spotted a
skein of seaweed.  The hours ticked by.  If they had missed South
Georgia, they were lost.  Then, at half-past twelve, as if in a vision,
the turban of clouds unraveled on the pearly horizon and revealed a
shining black crag.  They had found land.  It was in fact Cape Demidov,
the northern headland of King Haakon Sound on South Georgia.  What they
didn't know, as they celebrated, was that the worst was not yet behind
them.
A gale got up.  The wind and current were against them, forcing the
James Caird almost onto the rocks.  It began to snow, and roaring
breakers shattered into the mist.  It looked hopeless.  They steered,
pumped and bailed, deceiving one another with encouraging phrases.
Their mouths and tongues were so swollen from thirst that they could
barely swallow.  At one point they were driven so close to land that
they had to crane their necks to look up at the top of the crag.
Worsley said later that for three hours they looked death square in the
eye.  He felt annoyed that nobody would ever know that they had come so
close.
The ordeal lasted for nine hours before they knew that they were going
to live.  The storm subsided, and on the seventeenth day they sailed on
to the entrance of King Haakon Bay and got in.  It was dark by the time
they spotted a cove.  They carried the boat in and heaved themselves
ashore, eyes fixed on the glint of freshwater pools.
Shackleton wrote later that they flung down the adze, logbook and
cooker, "That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of
the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with
well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes.  That was all of
tangible things, but in memories we were rich.  We had pierced the
veneer of outside things.  We had suffered, starved and triumphed,
grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the
whole.  We had seen God in all his splendours, heard the text that
nature renders.
We had reached the naked soul of man."  Still it wasn't over.
Shackleton and his men had hit South Georgia on the uninhabited south
coast, not the north coast where the whaling stations were located.
They had to penetrate the perilous and unknown interior.
Together with Worsley and Crean, Shackleton trekked for thirty miles
over mountains and glaciers no man had crossed.  It took them 36 hours.
To give the other two a psychological boost at a critical juncture, he
told them they could have half an hour's sleepþthen woke them after
five minutes without revealing how long they had rested.
On May 20, 1916, they arrived at the Stromness whaling station, 800 miles from Elephant Island.  Their first contact with the outside world
for 17 months was the terrified faces of two lads who fled at their
wild appearance.  Captain Sorlle, the manager of the station, had met
Shackleton before, but he didn't recognize him.
"Who are you?  " he asked.
The quiet reply came back, "My name is Shackleton.  When was the war
over?  " No betting man would have put odds on it.  The Norwegian
whalers, hard men even among seafarers, listened to the story of this
journey later, and one of them came forward.  He laid his hand

The Naked Soul of Man

on Shackleton's arm, and in his halting English he said, "These are
men."
"When I look back on those days, " The Boss wrote, "I have no doubt
that Providence guided us .  . . I know that during that long and
racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and
glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not
three."  Worsley and Crean, he said, confessed to the same idea of a
fourth presence.  "One feels, " he wrote, " the dearth of human words,
the roughness of mortal speech' " in trying to describe things
intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a
reference to a subject very near to our hearts."  In his notes to The
Waste Land T. S. Eliot wrote that an experience recounted by Shackleton
had inspired these seven lines, Who is the third who walks always
beside you?  When I count, there are only you and I together But when I
look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside
you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man
or a woman þBut who is that on the other side of you?
What T. S. Eliot did not know was that the whole fourth-presence story
was a later fabrication in order to add a dash of spirituality to the
story before it went to press.
Shackleton eventually rescued his men, after several agonizing
attempts.  Leonard Hussey, the meteorologist and one of the stranded,
recorded in his diary that in the evenings they occupied themselves by
reading recipes from Marston's penny cookbook and suggesting
improvements and alternatives.  They told Blackborow that they would
eat him first if the seals and penguins stopped coming.
Thomas Orde-Lees irritated everyone, they said he was meanspirited and
tetchy.  Even before Elephant Island, Shackleton had privately referred
to him as the Old Lady.  He had been chosen primarily for his
mechanical expertise, and had tested the motor sledges in
Switzerland.
On a muggy Cambridge afternoon, under the beady eye of the archivist at
the Scott Polar Research Institute, I read his unpublished diary,
scrawled in pencil between food lists in a small leather bank
passbook.
I had read so very many diaries by then, but when I held the tattered
originals I saw worlds in the cramped, unpunctuated, spidery
handwriting splashed with blubber and seawater.  Orde-Lees's reputation
as a quartermaster reached beyond the grave when I found a darning
needleþa precious commodity on Elephant Islandþin the creased gutter of
his diary.  He noted, "There is a clique up against me to whom Wild
gives too much head.  I am called a jew."  The diary mostly concerns
skinning penguins, but it leaps to life when the rescue vessel
appears.
He writes that the makeshift flagpole behind camp jammed, with the
result that Shackleton, straining his eyes from the deck of the ship,
thought it was at half mast and that someone had died.
On the long journey home to England, Sir Ernest traveled free.
Kings and presidents entertained him.  He never let the crowds down.
As Roland Huntford said in his biography, he had the instincts of a
showman.  On another Cambridge day, this time assisted by the
beady-eyed archivist, I found a bunch of flimsy green-and-pink fliers
printed in Los Andes, a town on the Chilean and Argentinian border.
The sheets read, in Spanish and English, "Shackleton is the
crystallisation of human endeavour, triumphing over the forces of
nature, Hosanna!  Together [with Wild] they make the symbol of those
lofty sentiments of Love for the Truth, of one's Country, of Science,
and of Humanity, which bears Mankind onwards with ardour towards its
ideal, which places men above suffering above destiny, which makes them
heroes .  . . Hosanna!  "

, , , , '

l Shackleton watched over his subordinates like a brooding hen, quietly
assessing each man's emotional state.  If someone was weakening
physically, he would order extra hot milk all around, without revealing
who needed it, so that the man would not carry the invalid's burden.
When Frank Wild had lost sensation in his hands, Shackleton tried to
force him to take his gloves.  Wild refused.  "If you don't, " said
Shackleton, "I'll throw them into the sea."  He had learned his
leadership skills in the hard school of the merchant navy, not the
rigid and hermetic world of the Royal Navy, and back at home he was
ostracized from polar circles because he wasn't a Navy man.
He flitted from scheme to scheme throughout his life, and even stood at
one time as a Unionist MP for Dundee.  Shackleton wasn't perfect, as a
man or as an expedition leader.  He drank too much, smoked too much and
had affairs with other people's wives.  That's why so many people like
him.  He's like the rest of us.  "Sir Ernest's humour in the morning
before breakfast is very erratic, " Hurley noted in his diary.  During
one of the attempts to get the men off Elephant Island, Worsley
recorded that Shackleton "was human enough .  .
. to become irritable with me, " and he treated the gale that blew up
as if it were Worsley's fault.  The latter responds heroically, "I
didn't mind, I was glad that he should have some little outlet for his
misery."  Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who went south with Scott, made a
comparison that has been hijacked and rearranged by almost every
explorer ever since, "For a joint scientific and geographical piece of
organisation, give me Scott, for a Winter Journey, Wilson, for a dash to
the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen, and if I am in the devil of a hole
and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time."  The finest
decision ever made in the Antarctic belongs to The Boss.
It was when he decided, during the Nimrod expedition, to turn back just
97 miles from the Pole.
Although Shackleton knew that the Southern Ocean was "pitiless almost
to weakness, " he was an indefatigable optimist, and his power to
inspire hope and courage amid seemingly desperate misery has scarcely
been equaled in the rich history of human endeavor.  "It is in these
circumstances, " Hurley wrote, "stripped of the veneers of
civilisation, that one sees the real man .  . . A born poet, through
all his oppressions he could see glory and beauty in the stern forces
which had reduced us to destitution."  On another expedition a
colleague noted in his diary that for Shackleton "Antarctica did not
exist.  It was the inner, not the outer world that engrossed him."  The
continent represented much more to him than a landmass.  "I have
ideals, " he said, "and far away in my own white south I open my arms
to the romance of it all."  Yes, boys, we will be home again, he wrote,
But our hearts will still be faithful to this Southern land of ours,
Though we wander in English meadows mid the scent of English flowers,
When the soft southerly breeze shakes the blossom away from the thorn,
And flings from the wild rose cup, the shining gift of the morn, And
when the scarlet poppies peep through the golden wheat, As the stronger
winds of Autumn march in with heavier feet, And when the fields are
snow clad, trees hard in a frosty rime, Our thoughts still wander
Southward, we shall think of the grey old time,

The Naked Soul of Man

Again in dreams go back to our fight with the icy floe .  .

.

We shall dream of the ever increasing gales, the birds in their
Northward flight, The magic of twilight colours, the gloom of the long,
long night .
. .
And when, in the fading firelight, we.  turn these pages o'er, We shall
think of the times we wrote therein by that far off Southern shore.
With regret we shall close the story, yet ever in thought go back .

.

.
Though the grip of the frost may be cruel, and relentless its icy hold,
Yet * knit our hearts together in that darkness stern and cold.
The war loomed over the Endurance expedition like a thundercloud.
When it was declared, The Boss offered the services of the whole
expedition to the Admiralty.  The telegram came back saying simply

"Proceed."  Over the months and years on the ice, Shackleton wrote,
"The war was a constant subject of discussion .  . . and many campaigns
were fought on the map during the long months of drifting."  When he
finally learned of the horrors, he wrote, "We were like men arisen from
the dead to a world gone mad, " and in Australia, on his way home, he
issued a messianic appeal to Australian men urging them to fight,
drawing the analogy of "the white warfare of the Antarctic and the red
warfare of Europe" from his well-polished arsenal of rhetoric.
Like Scott, he was used as a national icon at home to bolster morale.
One newspaper wrote, after the news of the epic rescue mission had
broken, "As long as Englishmen are prepared to do this kind of thing we
need not lie awake dreading the boys of the dachshund breed."  Conan
Doyle wrote, "We can pass the eight Dreadnoughts, if we are sure of the
eight Shackletons."  Every single one of the men who had sat it out on
Elephant Island went off to fight when he got home, and Shackleton
dedicated South "To my comrades who fell in the white warfare of the
south and on the red fields of France and Flanders."  Even in
peacetime, war has been used as an image for the exploration of the
continent.  Admiral Byrd, one of America's great Antarctic explorers,
wrote, "The Antarctic was like war, " and, after listing names of ice
camps in his book Discovery, published in the

States in 1935, he says, "These names were later to be burned into the
minds of my men, to become as bitterly unforgettable as the localities
of hard-fought engagements to the memories of soldiers."  On Frank
Hurley's first night in London after his return, the city was bombed.
He ends his book, "Emerged from a war with nature, we were destined to
take our places in a war of nations.  Life is one long call to
conflict, anyway."  When I got back to McMurdo from the valley, I set
about making arrangements to travel overland to Cape Royds to see
Shackleton's hut before the sea ice melted out.  Ann, the long-haired
photographer, wanted to shoot the interior of the hut.
"You go and get all the survival gear and some food, " she drawled,
"and I'll score us a vehicle again."  The food stores were run by a
tall, straight-backed woman called Sarah with clear eyes, long hair and
a seraphic countenance.  For five years she had been in charge of what
people took to their camps to eat and drink.  She relied almost
exclusively on dried, canned and frozen food, though some fresh goods
arrived on planes from New Zealand.
"I'm pushing dried figs quite hard right now, " she said, "as I was
sent nine hundred pounds, rather than the ninety pounds I ordered.
"
"Do people eat more down here because it's cold?  " I asked as I
walked up and down the aisles picking up Ziploc bags of trail mix and
cartons of juice.

The Naked Soul of Man

"Sureþthey need to.  And I notice that in a warm season they eat a lot
less than in a cold season, " Sarah said.  "Which makes my job
difficult as I have to place my order eighteen months in advance.
" Food assumes a role of abnormal importance in a place deficient in so
many of life's pleasures.  In his book Life at the Bottom, published in
1977, the American journalist John Langone mentions a submarine
commander who wintered over in Antarctica and reported a group
obsession with food, going on to say the men cared desperately if meals
weren't up to scratch as food served as a substitute for sex.  In the
early days of Antarctic exploration, culinary ingenuity occupied a good
deal of everyone's time.  One man assured himself of lifelong
popularity by producing minty peas, revealing later that he had
squirted toothpaste into the pot.  Christmas and Midwinter Day menus
were elaborately recorded and printed up.  During the hard times out
sledging they played Shut-eye when food was doled out.  Someone named
the recipient of each plate with his eyes closed, so that the cook
couldn't be accused of favoritism when he handed out the portions.
It wasn't a game, really, it was a peacekeeping mechanism.  When
rations dwindled the men began having food dreams, and spoke bitterly
to one another about second helpings they had refused ten years
previously.
Nowadays residents of Antarctic field camps deliberately hide the
chocolate to stop themselves from overindulging.
Packed, fueled and ready to set off for Shackleton's hut, Ann checked
out with the radio people while I tested the level of the transmission
fluid.  On the journey we took it in turns to get out and measure the
thickness of the ice with a drill.  By mid-December the sea ice in
front of base was beginning to melt.
"If it's thinner than thirty inches, " said Ann, "we turn back or find
an alternative route."  After about two and a half hours, beyond the
seals at Big Razorback, beyond Scott's hut at Cape Evans and beyond the
Bame Glacier, striped with its layer of ash, we left the Spryte by a
large berg and walked over the ice to the volcanic hillock of the Cape
itself, following the smell of penguins.  Individual birds out walking
never seemed to smell of anything but in a crowd they stank like an
ammonia factory.  Shackleton's neat, buff-colored hut appeared, nestled
in a dell, as we reached the brow of the hill.  Beyond it thousands of
Adelie penguins gathered in front of a panoramic view of the
Transantarctics.
A pair of penguins had nested on a spoke of the Arrol-Johnston car, the
first motor vehicle in Antarctica, which Shackleton had brought, and
the carcass of a dog well picked by skuas, had frozen to the floor of
the doghouse.  I unlocked the door and walked into the tiny
vestibule.
The hut was smaller than Scott's, about 30 feet by 20, and, as
everything was arranged around a central space, it seemed more open.
Like the other huts, it had been built in London, then taken down and
shipped south in pieces.  The walls were made of smooth wooden planks
and the room was sparsely furnished with packing cases, a low table
and, opposite the entrance," hefty cast-iron stove connected to the
roof by a bulky metal flue.  A set of sledge runners hung from the
rafters, and an assortment of pots, pans and lamps from the rickety
shelves behind the stove.  A door in the corner next to the entrance
led to a small, windowless storeroom.  In 1916 Ernest Joyce spent three
months there studying penguins, and he, or someone, had scrawled in big
letters on the crates at one end of the hut "Joyce's
SkinningAcademy."
"Aren't you going to sing the National Anthem, dear?  " drawled Ann,
nodding in the direction of a framed portrait of the king and queen
hanging in the middle of a side wall.  Without waiting for a reply she
stopped in front of a row of tins on a shelf behind the stove.

The Naked Soul of Man

"What's Irish brawn?  " she asked.
"It's like a loaf of bread, but made from jellied pig's head, " I
said.
"Eat that a lot over there, do you?  "
"Not every day, " I said.
They had pinned postcards around the hutþa painting of an Elizabethan
yeoman, B. D. Sigmund's "The Bells of Ouseley" and others.
I, too, carried a dozen familiar images around with me.  I propped them
up wherever I happened to be sleeping.  They reminded me of who I was,
I suppose, like the creased family photographs businessmen carry in
their wallets.  Mine were not rosy-cheeked children but images that had
moved me over the years, now comforting and familiar landmarks in the
daily blur of visual stimulation.  Most of them depicted some kind of
universal human theme, like Botticelli's Birth of Venus, or Stanley
Spencer's Resumechon, * but one of them was Manet's boring old Pinks
and Clemahis in a Crystal Vase.
"I could live here, " said Ann, setting up her tripod in a corner.
"Especially if he were here, " I said.  "I'd like to have been picked
for his team."
"What, more than Scott's?  " she said, feigning horror.
"Much more."  I was sitting at the head of the low table in the middle
of the room.
"Smile!  " Ann said before letting off a puff of light.
Back in Britain, on a wet afternoon in August, I had met Shackleton's
greatest living apostle.  He had invited me to his home on Blackheath
in southeast London, and I had had to push my way through dripping
branches to find his house.  When I got there, he had forgotten I was
coming.  His name was Harding Dunnett, he was in his eighties and he
described himself as "a bit of an ancient mariner, these days."  Like
Shackleton, he went to Dulwich College, * Spencer alone of the
multitudinous Resurrection artists sends ever, vone to heaven.  His
Christ does not judge.  I love this picture.

' i *, F›, and as a schoolboy he could remember seeing the James Caird
arrive in 1924, by then resembling an old rowing boat.  It had been
donated to the school by one of Shackleton's benefactors, John Quiller
Rowett, another alumnus who used to walk to school with Shackleton.  He
had become fed up with the little boat.  The schoolboys knew nothing of
their famous alumnus.  "Scott was the myth, " Harding told me, "even at
Dulwich."  The boat was loaned to the Maritime Museum, and when they,
too, grew tired of it, they returned it to the school, which had
nowhere to put it and shoved it in an old garage with the lawnmowers.
While researching a book on eminent Dulwich alumni, Dunnett
unexpectedly came across Ernest Shackleton, "He just hit me between the
eyes."  Dunnett committed himself to his hero's rehabilitation and
founded the James Caird Society, which I joined in 1992, immediately
after meeting him, and over the next year spent several happy evenings
dining in the north cloister of Dulwich College in front of the
restored boat itself, paying homage.  I suspected that members were
mumbling "Down with Scott" during the toasts.  In the interests of
objective research I had tried to join the Captain Scott Society, too,
but they wouldn't have meþor any other woman.  It was based in Cardiff,
and Beryl Bainbridge had been invited to one of its dinners as guest
speaker.  She wasn't allowed to go to the lavatory and had her hand
slapped for trying to light a cigarette.  In the morning she left
before anyone else was up (though she had by then been allowed to vis*
the toilet).
Shackleton had become Dunnett's mission.  "To hell with Scott, " he
said as I disappeared into the wet bushes, and, tapping his forehead,
he added, "He lacked it up here."  One day I found a note pinned to my
office door inviting me to a Christmas party at the Movement Control
Center.  Despite the sin 6 .

The Naked Soul of Man

ister name, the M. C. C. fulfilled a benign role as a kind of on-ice
airport terminal.  It was the perfect venue for a bash as it was really
a hangar.  A Christmas tree the size of a Californian redwood had been
set up for the occasion.  It was made out of parachutes.  The party was
crowded, and people were serving beer and pizza from trestle tables.
Trotsky materialized out of the gloom, laughing loudly at another
feeble joke.  He worked on the sea ice, and was therefore packing up to
go home.
"Once it starts melting out, " he said, "I haven't got anything to work
on."  His LC-130 flight to Christchurch had been canceled three days in
a row.
He jumped up and began hurling a woman across the dance floor.
The man selling beer raised his eyebrows.
"Once the beakers have crated up their samples, they don't have any
work to do, " the beer seller shouted, "so they sleep all day and party
all night."
"Beaker" was a character in Sesame Street, but the term had been
appropriated to describe all scientists.  Whether it was derogatory or
not depended on the context and the attitude of the speaker.  I was
becoming more acculturated to Americans, but I still had some
linguistic barriers to cross.  I thought Kool-Aid was an Antarctic
charity until it was offered to me in a raspberry flavor.
I woke up in my room at five in the morning to see my roommate standing
by the window, fully clothe .  Our paths rarely crossed, as we both
spent more time in the field than on station and led generally erratic
lives.
"Are you off?  " I asked.
"No, " she replied.  "I've just come in."  The vertical borders of the
maps I was using were not parallel.
They were heading inexorably for 90 degrees south, and I was becoming
increasingly preoccupied with following them down and reaching the
Pole, where they all converged.  I decided to concentrate on getting
there before dashing off anywhere else, and I got myself on a
Fridge-to-Freezer fuel flight later in the week.
To fill in time I practiced my cross-country skiing.  I wasn't very
good at it, but I got to know the south of Ross Island pretty well.
Fortunately, I had found a very good teacher, a veteran Antarctic
support worker called Felix who for years had been circumventing the
strict McMurdo regulations about what constituted "safe travel."  One
day, we went out to the skiway, a landing strip consisting of
compressed snow over glacial ice (the "ice runway, " another facility
at McMurdo, is sea ice stripped of its snow).  As I puffed along behind
him, Felix told stories of his illegal escapades on the ice.  He called
his exploits "missions."
"I always launch on a Saturday night, " he said, "when no one suspects
anything.  Usually I stow my skis under a rock somewhere near McMurdo
the day before, so I don't arouse suspicion."  Like all serious
outlaws, he had brought his own sleeping bag and bivvy sack to the

Antarctic, plus a pair of minibinoculars to scan the horizon for
potential informers.
"What happens if you do see people?  " I asked.
"I lie low behind a snow hill till they've gone."  Once, Felix had
climbed Erebus alone.
"I took a snowmobile at midnight, and it stopped going up at three in
the morning at what I later reckoned was eight thousand feet.

[At about this elevation snowmobile carburetors must be rejetted for
altitude.  ] I climbed for nine hours.  On the summit, I was
hallucinating.  I walked halfway round the crater, and the terrain got
rough, I was frightened then.  I knew that if I so much as sprained an
ankle I'd be deadþbut it was the best thing I've ever done."  Felix
went back to McMurdo early, and I stayed out on the ice alone.  It was
almost midnight when I skied back, and the temperature was hovering
around zero degrees Celsius.  The sky was bur I i , t The Naked Soul of
Man rushed blue, streaked with a twisted ribbon of altocumulus.
Dazzling honeyed sunlight flashed off the faces of the
Transantarctics.
As I stopped to lift my goggles, I glimpsed something out of the corner
of my eye.
Some time before going south I had done a long line of radio interviews
to talk about my book on Chile.  At the first one, in Manchester, the
interviewer asked me about the nature of fear.
She was interested in how I could trek around alone in the high Andes,
hopping in and out of antediluvian Bolivian trucks freighted with
smuggled drugs.  I was flummoxed by the probing nature of her
inquiIy.
She seemed convinced that I had some secret to impart that would
empower all the women of the world, enabling them to fling down their
aprons and run off to South America.  I muddled through the interview,
and the women of Manchester did not subsequently stampede to the
airport, clogging the concourse in their frenzy to cross the
Atlantic.
Over the next weeks I was repeatedly asked, "Weren't you afraid, alone
over there?  " and I was embarrassed to admit that I had never been
frightened, not even at the worst moments.  As a result, I began to be
perceived as a freakþnot a troublesome freak but a benign, barking-mad
free spirit, like the tweed-skirtedVictorian "lady" travelers who
rampaged across Africa with a fly swatter in hand and three hundred
heavily laden "natives" behind them.
What I could never quite tell anyone was that I was afraid of other
thingsþso afraid that nothing that could happen to me up a Chilean
mountain could possibly worry me.  All my life, or at least since a
long journey returning from a holiday in Cornwall on a green leather
bench seat in the front of my father's first car when I was eight, the
thoughts trailing nomadically around inside my head have intermittently
staged rebellions, coalescing into a mass of far-reaching grief and
paralyzing fear, causing my mouth to go dry, my hands to shake and all
the color to be blanched from the sky.
It would have been hard to explain this on a talk show.  "Um, what are
these thoughts actually rebelling about?  " the interviewers would have
asked, riffling through their papers to find the next item.
The misery of the human condition is popular with the Nomadic
Thoughts.
The catalyst might be an old man replacing a box of teabags on the
supermarket shelf, having held it up to his pebble glasses to peer at
the price, or a young woman with Down's syndrome staring out of the
smeared window of the day center around the corner from my home because
there was nothing else for her to do that day or any other day, or
another visit to another friend in another AIDS ward, watching young
men shrivel up until they were replaced by new ones, and the supply
never ran out.
Like many people, I was depressed and upset by these things.
They made it hard to find the energy to go on.  The setting for my
anguiish was not a long-forgotten byway far from home but the nearby
grubby corner of a London street where someone was eating, or opening a
window, or just walking dully away.  Faced with evidence of the
inescapable misery of most people's lives, and the ultimate tragedy of
all of them, it was hard not to be a pessimist.  Sometimes I saw my own
life stretching ahead of me blighted by depression, the asphyxiating
kind that feels as if a hod of bricks has been deposited on my chest.
I was never going to find peace of mind (I would think at these times),
I was never going to be usefully creative, and, like many people I knew
or heard about, I would probably end up with a nervous breakdown.
I would never be able to escape from my melancholic nature.
This was all frightening enough, but it grew much worse when the
Nomadic Thoughts arrived at their favorite watering hole.
Everything was all right, of course, if God was in his heaven, as the

The Naked Soul of Man

Catholic Church used to preach in the South American slums
beforeVatican II in the sixties, "Life in this world is a piece of
shit, but shut up and put up with it because in the next world
everything will be fine" (or something like that).  I have never had
any trouble with faith.  I have believed in God for many years.
It was a God who constantly redefined himself as I staggered through my
life, and he seemed to live inside me, rather than in heaven or on the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  If any of the radio journalists had
asked me directly, "What are you frightened of?  " I could have told
them immediately, in three words.
"Losing my faith."  I had experienced intimations of it when the teabag
man and the smeared window of the day center and the AIDS ward supply
line led me too far down the long, unwinding road of despair.
All I can tell you is that I felt the white heat of terror then, and
the idea that a gang of Bolivian truck drivers could provoke a similar
response was like suggesting that if I attached wings to my skis I
could take off and fly back to McMurdo.
In Antarctica I experienced a certainty amidst the morass of thoughts
and emotions and preoccupations seething inside my balaclavaed head.
This is what I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye.  It wasn't an
answer, or the kind of respite offered by a bottle of calamine lotion
on a sunburn.  It was something that put everything elseþeverything
that wasn't Antarcticaþin true perspective.  I felt as if I were
realigning my vision of the world through the long lens of a telescope.
 The landscape was intact, complete and larger than my imagination
could grasp.  It was free of the diurnal cycle that locked us earthlings
into the ineluctable routine of home.  It didn't suffer famines or
social unrest.  It was sufficient unto itself, untainted by the
inevitable tragedy of the human condition.
You might ask why I didn't go to the Yorkshire moors or the Nevada
desert if "all" I wanted was pristine nature.  It would have been a lot
easier.  I had been to those places, and many others, but it was the
scale, the unownedness and the overpowering beauty that made Antarctica
different and diverted the Nomadic Thoughts.
It wasn't a permanent diversion.  I knew I would meet my demons again
and again before my life ended.  Still, I had glimpsed a world in which
everything made sense.  God didn't appear to me in any particular shape
or formþif anything he became even more nebulous.  But I heard the
still, small voice.  I had never known certainty like it.
I felt certain that a higher power exists, and that every soul
constitutes part of a harmonious universe, and that the human
imagination can raise itself beyond poverty, social condemnation and
the crushing inevitability of death.  For the first time in my life, I
didn't sense fear prowling around behind a locked door inside my head,
trying to find a way out.  It was as if a light had gone on in that
room, and I had looked the beast in the eye.
It happened in a second.  I've noticed that it is often seconds that
matter most.  Reason is too lumbering a faculty to operate in seconds,
and it leaves the way clear for instinct, or for nothing at all except
a bit of psychic energy flying across a synapse.  The glimpse left me
with a deep and warm sense of calm and mental well-being, like the
cosmic glow after some astronomical phenomenon.

I

X i At the South Pole Great God!  this is an awful place and terrible
enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.

.

. Now for the run home and a desperate struggle.
I wonder if we can do it.

From SCOTUS diary, January 1912

The only other passenger on the fuel flight to the South Pole was a
physicist in his late twenties from Boston.  On the way to the ice
runway he told me that he had been south before and was about to spend
a year at the Pole, a prospect which filled him with great joy.
He reminded me of an overgrown puppy.
The sun was shining, and the ice runway was pitted with water holes.
The following day, December 17, air operations were shifting to the
firmer skiway at Ellly Field.  We picked our way over to a metal hut on
stilts containing a drum of drinking water, padded blue plastic chairs,
the usual bewildering array of rubbish bins and a box of yellow
earplugs.
The walls were bare except for two brightly colored waste management
posters, and the blue lino floor was smudged with dirty snow.  When we
had settled down, the physicist handed me a photograph of his telescope
at the Pole.  He was carrying a stash of them in his pocket.  We could
see our plane squatting on the ice, attached to umbilical fueling tubes
and tended by diminutive khaki figures.
After an hour, the pilot arrived and announced that we were "all set.
" We made our way over to the steps of the Hercules.  On the flight
information board in the hold it said, "Only eight shopping days till
Christmas."  As we belted up in the red webbing seats, the pair of us
alone in the cavernous fuselage, a crewman appeared and said, "As far
as emergency exits go, if you have to, get out any way you can."  I was
ushered up to the flight deck immediately after takeoff, and there I
stayed for the whole journey.  A crewman gave me a Styrofoam cup of
coffee.  On the side he had written "850 miles to go."  We flew toward
the Beardmore Glacier over a window in the clouds.  Up ahead, the tips
of the Transantarctics pierced the stratocumulus.  Scott and his party
walked up the Beardmore to get through to the plateau, and it had
become a part of his legend.  Nancy Mitford called her chilly upstairs
lavatory the Beardmore.  It was hot in the cockpit, and I fell asleep
for a while, images of small bearded figures and cold Edwardian
porcelain flashing through my dreams.
The ten men of the Ross Sea party had manhauled upward of 1,500 miles
over that stretch of the continent from 1914 to 1916, some of them
without washing or changing their clothes for two years.
They had laid depots on that ice for men who never came, depots that
were still there, strung out for 400 miles.  They were members of the
Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and their party, led by one-eyed
Aeneas Mackintosh, was storing supplies from the coast to the base of
the

Beardmore Glacier for six men, led by Shackleton, who were supposed to
be marching across from the other side.  At Cape Evans I had seen a
cross for the three men who never made it back.  At home, no statues of
the Ross Sea party were ever made to adorn public squares, perhaps in
part because the survivors returned in the middle of the Great War.

Like Scott, they didn't feel they had struggled in vain.
Dick Richards, the party's physicist, wrote later, "That the effort was
unnecessary, that the sacrifice was made to no purpose, in the end was
irrelevant.  To me, no undertaking carried through to conclusion is for
nothing.  And so I don't think of our struggle as futile.  It was
something that the human spirit accomplished."  The ship blew away on
May 6, 1915, before they had unloaded all their supplies.  They had to
make trousers out of canvas tents left in the Cape Evans hut by
Scott.
Later, Mackintosh fell sick and another man, Ernest Joyce, took over
the leadership by default.  He was a complicated character whom
Shackleton engaged, according to legend, after seeing him ride past the
expedition office in London on top of a number 37 bus.  (I have often
wondered exactly how this occurred.
I like to think of Shackleton glancing out of the office window and, as
he catches sight of Joyce riding contentedly past on the top deck,
being struck by inspiration.  Recognizing his man, Shackleton sprints
after the bus until he can leap on and collar the hapless Joyce.  )
Mawson almost took Joyce south in 1911, but there was a row about
Joyce's drinking in Tasmania, so he wasn't asked.  On the first page of
his book, The South Polar Trail, Joyce says that the hardships "were
almost beyond human endurance."
"If there is a hell, " he wrote, "this is the place, and the sleeping
bags are worse than hell."  Twenty-five months after they had left the
fleshpots of civilization, Shackleton came to get them, aboard
Aurora.
They never forgot what they had endured.
There was a padre with them, Spencer-Smith, who died of scurvy after
weeks lashed to the sledge, often unconscious.  Then, when they had
laid the depots and returned to Hut Point, Mackintosh, who had
recovered, and V. G. Hayward, who was in charge of the dogs, their
minds fogged by suffering, set out across the fragile ice for the other
hut at Cape Evans.  They were never seen again.
When I woke up, I had spilled the coffee over my wind pants.
The crew was pointing out the window.  I looked out too, but I couldn't
see anything.  Then I spotted a smudge.  It was a small patch of snow
groomed as a skiway, and a cluster of black dots.  I looked at my
watch.  It had taken three hours.
The first thing I saw when we landed was a twelve-foot poster board of
Elvis and a signpost marked GRACELAND.  The geodesic dome in the middle
of the station flashed in the bright sunlight.  It was very noisy when
we climbed down the steps, it was too cold to shut down the engine, and
the snow was knuckle-hard.  A man approached me, bulky as a yeti.
"Welcome to South Pole, " he shouted in my ear, and together we walked
down through a tunnel into the dome beneath a sign announcing that the
United States, too, welcomed me to AmundsenScott Station.  My heart was
beating fast, due either to excitement or lack of oxygen.
Later the yeti directed me to a Jamesway ten minutestwalk from the
dome.  When I got there, I lay down on my bed and tried to think about
where I was.
"The South Pole, " says a character in Saul Bellow's novel More Die of
Heartbreak, "gives a foretaste of eternity, when the soul will have to
leave its warm body."  In Thomas Pynchon's first novel, 14 a man is
ineluctably drawn to the South Pole, "But I had to reach it.  I had
begun to think that there, at one of the only two motionless places on
this gyrating world, I might have peace.  I wanted to stand at the dead
center of the carousel, if only for a moment, try to catch F my
bearings."  P I admired both writers.  If they had been able to see me
at that moment, supine in a tent at 90 degrees south, I imagine they
wouldf, both have said, "God, I didn't mean it literally."  Without
going anywhere near it, Pynchon had so completely transformed the
continent into a symbol that when reduced to a lower-case a in his book
"antarctica" becomes isolation itselfþ"a beach as alien as the i At the
South Pole moon's antarctic."  I had to come, and already I knew that I
would never be quite the same again.  Nonetheless, Pynchon's character
was right when he said, "It is not what I saw or believed I saw that in
the end is important.  It is what I thought.
What truth I came to."  The 12 cots in the Jamesway were curtained off
with sheets of green canvas, so we all had our own few feet of
privacy.
It was hot and dark inside, and when I went out to find the bathroom
the glare made my eyes smart.  I strode into a Jamesway marked WOMEN,
but this turned out to be a joke, and the shift workers asleep inside
turned fitfully on their cots.  The bathroom was called "The Inferno, "
and it was as bright as the inside of an open fridge.  In the toilet
cubicles a sign read, "If it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown,
flush it down."
"Showers, " another sign said, were "limited to two minutes twice a
week."  Out of the window I could see a bulldozer trundling along
carrying a load of snow, and a strange blue building on stilts.
I walked to the dome, and my heartbeat immediately quickened.
My breathing was shallow.  The altitude at the South Pole, 2, 850 meters or 9, 300 feet, meant I was standing on a layer of ice almost
one third the height of Mount Everest.  In addition, the earth's
atmosphere is at its shallowest at the poles.  The combination of
altitude and shallow atmosphere means that at the South Pole the human
body receives about half its normal oxygen supply.
The small thermometer that hung permanently from the zipper of my parka
read minus 29 degrees Celsius.  This was the coldest temperature I had
ever experienced, though I had once been in New York when it was minus
23.  I felt perfectly snug on that first day, bundled up in my special
clothes, but it wasn't windy.  When the wind whipped up, it sliced
through any number of layers like a knife.  The mean annual temperature
at the South Pole is minus 49, and the record high, registered in
December 1978, was a sultry minus 13.  6. The lowest temperature ever
recorded here was minus 82.  8, in June 1982.
The configuration of small buildings that made up the station was
dominated by a sapphire-blue harlequined dome, an aluminum structure
shaped like the lid of a wok.  It was 165 feet in diameter and 55 feet
high, and a Stars and Stripes flag was flapping on top among a small
forest of antennae.  underneath, 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.
For a year I had looked at it every day, in a photograph next to the
toothbrush mug 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 his four companions at the Pole.
Ponting had taught Scott and Bowers to use a remote camera so that they
could shoot photographs of themselves, and after the film 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 30 feet each year to
compensate for ice drift.  The surface ice is moving steadily over the
earth's face far below so that once a year a member of the staff from
the U. S. Geological Survey has to make a trip to the Pole to move the
marker.  * 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.
A few hundred yards away from the perambulating marker, the permanent
Ceremonial Pole consists of an arc of flags facing a * The ice moves 40 degrees west of Greenwich (That's Greenwich, England, I was told by the
U. S. Geological Survey staff member who had landed the Pole-shifting
job).

0 chromium soccer ball on a short barber-striped column.
Someone , had drilled a compass into the snow on a piece of canvas,
with f every direction pointing north.
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 imMmortal 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 basic words conceal a
welter of cultural baggage.
Two nations could hardly have been further apart when Amundsen and
Scott raced each other to the Pole.  Norway didn't exist when Amundsen
was born, the Norwegians separated from the Swedes on June 7, 1905, and
when Amundsen planted the flag at 90 south 2 Norway was taking its
first tentative steps on the fragile slope of 0 nationhood.
The citizens of Britain, on the other hand, had learned that it was
their right to rule.  It was inconceivable to them that Britain could
be , wrong, or lose.  "I don't hold that anyone but an Englishman
should , get to the Pole first, " Scott wrote, and on the subject of
Norwegian 0 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
i going south, The Times said in an editorial that "he may not have
played the game, " a notion that has been handed down through ,
generations like a mildewed heirloom, resurfacing (for example) in 1995 in a biography of Scott's widow written by her granddaughter, 0

"At best, Amundsen's secrecy was underhand."  In his excellent book The
Retunt 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 lateVictorian and Edwardian England.
In Westward Hol, as the protagonist, Tom, swims to the North Pole
Charles Kingsley conjures up the frozen specters of dead explorers.
"They were all true English hearts, and they came to their end like
good knightserrant in searching for the great white gate that never was
opened yet."  The chivalric code created ideals of behavior.  The
concept of playing the game, which loomed so large in British
perceptions of Antarctic exploration and in the code of conduct of the
English gentleman at that time, ultimately derived from the world of
medieval knights.  Oates appears in Baden-Powell's best-selling
Scoutingfor

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 theater, it was repeated, in
fact, every Christmas till the 1950s.  In this piece of deathless
drama, Saint George appears in shining armor, 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 of this
chivalric code, Girouard concludes that Scott's last message suggests
an attitude in which heroism becomes more important than the
intelligent forethought that would make heroism unnecessary.
By and large, the war put an end to all that.
Amundsen didn't labor under such a burden.  He wasn't motivated by
science or empire, 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 demons, however.  For reasons of
his own, perhaps jealousy, he humiliated Hjalmar Johansen, a polar
explorer whose feats in the north with Nansen had turned him into a
national hero.
Johansen was a member of Amundsen's team, but he was excluded from the
polar party, probably because he criticized Amundsen's judgment.
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 skisHlaf Bjaaland, one of
the five who reached the Pole, was a former national skiing
championþand luck, as far as they were concerned, had very little to do
with success.
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
conversation in their journals.  Xlctory 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
timeþthis 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.  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 polar 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 admiration and humility,
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 the Pole he said that he felt as he had 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 food,
Amundsen records that he turned the primus stove up full blast so he
couldn't hear the shots.  And oh, those innocent, ingenuous times!
A photograph, taken by a member of the crew and depicting a man
dancingwith 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.
"

At the South Pole

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-shaped
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
bear-pawed 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 multicolored hats, and beyond it a group of women unpacked boxes of
Christmas decorations in a brightly lit and wellheated 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 a 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.  Desp*e the webs of antennae and the clumsy cargo
lines, and the fact that the buildings constituted an unsightly jumble
of shapes and colors, 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 that 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 shimmered 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 around 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 egoþI 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 rear-ended in Arkansas.

(I had heard about this harrowing episode in some detail on the
plane.

)

At the South Pole

"It detects short wavelengths known as submillimeter 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 submillimeter-wave radiation.  Talk of minus 273 degrees made me feel less cold.
When I asked how it was going, he ran a finger over his icy beard and
said, "Astronomy in Antarctica is full of disappointments."  * "You
must have great faith, " I said, "to keep you going through these long
and grueling 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 resentmentþespecially in Antarctica.
Let's go in.
I'm cold."  Tucked away in a small room under the dome I found a
contraption that looked as if it might have been installed by Scott.
It was called a gravimeter, and it 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 *
The ASTRO project went on to achieve notable success, including the
first detection of atomic carbon in the Magellamc Couds.

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 telephone kiosk that 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
labeled doors that 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 earthe ' as you
British say.  Every instrument works when you pack it into the box at
home, but it stops 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 graffitied
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.
It hadn't taken me long to find it.

l

_

At the South Pole A construction worker with hair the color of custard
was sitting on a stool at the bar.  She had grown up on the coast, but
she said she only realized how much she missed the ocean when she saw
it again.
People at the Pole often talked about sensory deprivation.  One of
their favorite topics was the rush of arriving in New Zealand after
leaving the ice, and they always mentioned specifically darkness,
trees, colors and smells.  (I had noticed how much the absence of smell
affected people at Fryxell, when one day I put on a dab of perfume from
a sample bottle I found in the bottom of a bag.  When I went into the
Jamesway everyone 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 90 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, n 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 toward me.
"I bet you he comes back next season.  Everyone leaves saying they're
never coming back.  But they do.  They get home and realize they
haven't got a life anyway, so they might as well come back here.
We have a saying at the 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 placeþthe South
Poleþwas 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 learned 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 Bjomson, 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 romanticþeven 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, became
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 afterward he said that
when he saw Amundsen sailing away it was the bitterest moment of his
life.
One story about Nansen illustrates the importance of choosing
companions carefully.  He decided he could have only one man with him
on his longest and most arduous journey in the north, and he selected
Hjalmar Johansen.  Long afterward Nansen confessed that at the very
first camp after leaving the ship he realized that he had chosen a man
without any intellectual interests whatever.  It must have been a bleak
moment.

At the South Pole

I signed up to help in the kitchen before Sunday brunch.  The galley
was the heart of the community, and the six Galley Oueens 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 midwinter drop, when a C-141 plane flew over from
Christchurch and dropped cargo onto 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 (Cosmic Background Radiation
Anisotrophy) project looked for minute deviations in the smoothness of
cosmic background radiation, itself the aftereffect of the earlyyears
of the expandinguniverse.  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."  l , ,
"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 meþlike a toaster."  In the evenings
people sprawled on the sofas in the library under the dome, swathe in
candlewick bedspreads.  It was like a nest.
Once a week, 15 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 that was pulled out.  All the words were white, like marshmallow,
or cloud, or chalk.
The poolroom 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 October 31,
1956, when Admiral George Dufek stepped out of an R-4D plane called Queer
sera' sera.  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 22 years after Scott, was the most
spectacular.  Discovery, the book he wrote about it, 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 the four and a half
months he spent 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.
Above me the day was dying, the night was rising in *s place.
Ever since late in February, when the sun had rolled down from its
lofty twenty-four-hour circuit around the sky, it had been setting a
little earlier at night, rising a little later in the morning.
Now it was just a monstrous ball which could barely hoist itself free
from the horizon.
It would wheel along for a few hours, obscured by mist, then sink out
of sight in the north not long after noon.  I found myself watching it
as one might watch a departing lover.
. . . Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos,
harmonious and soundless.  Harmony, that was it!  That was what came
out of the silenceþa gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the
music of the spheres.  . . This is the way the world will look to the
last man when he aes.
The decision to inaugurate an International GeophysicalYear in 1957-58 encouraged the Americans to build up their Antarctic program.
In addition, the Soviets were known to be nurturing a desire to build a
station at the Pole.  When the U. S. government learned of this, the
project was quickly hustled down the corridors of bureaucracy and out
onto 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 windchill 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 fuTy on the subject of
the recklessness of young people.  No alcohol was permitted on his
expeditions, and on one occasion, when chief scientist and second in
command Tom Poulter discovered 30 cases of liquor smuggled in by the
doctor he poured it all onto 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 longnosed pliers.
Smoking is a leitmotif of polar expeditions.  Shackleton understood the
hardship of tobacco famine, and when he arrived at Elephant Island to
rescue his men he threw bags of tobacco ashore before he landed.  The
stranded men had been smoking penguin feathers, and one of them, the
proud possessor of two pipes, had tried to smoke the wood of one in the
bowl of another.  Viktor Ignatov, the geophysicist in command of Vostok
from 1959 to 1960, recorded that at the beginning of the year four
smokers signed the

At the South Pole

pledge and gave up.  Not only did these men soon crumble under
pressureþthe nonsmokers took up the habit as well.  During the bitter
periods between resupplies they smoked tea.
In modern times the shortage of tobacco is rarely an issue.
It is the restrictions that annoy the nicotine addicts.  All around the
continent men and women huddle outside huts and tents inhaling
furiously like office workers on the streets of Manhattan.  When
finished, they can't throw their butts on the ice.  They have to put
them in their pockets, if there isn't a receptacle at hand.  We were
always finding butts in our pockets, and once, in the field, I saw a
scientist's parka catch fire.
Dave Grisez kicked six barrels of fuel out of a C-124 fifty feet over
the Pole in 1956.  He was a construction worker in the Navy, and he
spent 14 months on the ice putting up what was to become McMurdo.
If the public has only a vague awareness of Antarctica now, in the
fifties the continent existed only in the realm of fantasy.
Before leaving his small town in Indiana, Dave wrote in his black vinyl
diary, "Auntie Doris thinks it's hot at the South Pole."  On October
26, 1956, his twenty-first birthday, Dave wrote in the same diary in a
cold tent on Ross Island, "A C-124 took off to fly over the Pole this
afternoon.
They are afraid that Russia is at or near the Pole."  He had been
working all winter flattening ice for a runway.  On September 4 he
recorded, "Sky was pink, blue, green, turquoise, gold, yellow and
lime.
Would trade it all for a moonlit night with a farm girl in Indiana.  "
One day, 40 years after this was written, I walked into the Heavy Shop
at McMurdo to get a liter of transmission fluid.  Dave Grisez was
standing in the corridor wiping oil from his hands.  He had just taken
a job as a machinist in the Heavy Shop.  He had got the girl in
Indiana, but he had come back.  "Call of the quiet land, " he said.
I met a man who had been assessing the long-term buildup of global
pollutants in the atmosphere.  He was trying to get home for Christmas,
but the incoming plane from McMurdo had been delayed, one painful hour
at a time, for the past two days, and all he could do was hover close
to his suitcases like a wasp around a jam jar.  He had been traveling
for 30 years.
"I want to sit at home and think about it now, n he said.  "I want to
ask myself why I went to all those places."  I, too, often ask myself
why.  A small, white worm of doubt wriggled away in the dungeons of
consciousness, fidgeting over the unanswerable question about escape or
pursuit.  Travel represents either a journey of discovery to push
forward all kinds of boundaries, or an easy-access escape.  It was a
treacherously familiar stretch of the psychic landscape.
I had never understood the appeal of remaining within earshot of the
tinkling bells of the parish churchHampanilismo, they call it in
Italy.
Traveling gave me and all the other compulsive travelers a new identity
away from that place called home, at least, ostensibly it did.
As everyone who has done it has discovered, and as many writers have
written since Horace (though no one has ever done it better than he),
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare curruntþ You can run away as
far as you like but you'll never get away from yourself.  This was no
reason to stop, even if it could be disappointing to find oneself
lurking in the depths of the Taklimakan Desert after all the effort it
took to get there.  For me, it meant I was still trying.  That was how
I saw it.
Somehow, somewhere in a dark, voiceless place in my heart, I sensed
that one day I would find something more important than myself lying in
wait, something that would put all those other places I had tramped
through in perspective.  It was not that the other places had
disappointed meþI had fallen passionately in love with many
landscapes.
If you don't know what you're looking for, it's difficult to be
disappointed.
I began traveling at the age of 16 when I took a train to Paris with a
friend.  I had just sat for my O-level exams, and had been working in a
clothes shop to raise the cash for the trip.  My friend had been an
usherette in a cinema.  We camped for a week at a site in the Bois de
Boulogne, strolled aimlessly along Hausmann's wide boulevards,
discovered Impressionism, Livre de Poche existential novels and pains
all chocolate, met some Finns and drank a lot of vodka.
Before that, holidays had been taken in Cornwall, Devon or south Wales
with my brother, mother, father and sometimes a pair of grandparents
bringing up the rear.  Two features of these holidays have taken up
residence in my memory.  First of all, the sun was always shining, a
phenomenon I can only explain as a trick played by my retrospective
imagination.
Second, I clearly recall that our daily collective aim was always to
get awayfrom everyone else.
We were, at that stage, a reasonably happy family, or so I remember
it.
My brother, 18 months younger than I am and similar in temperament and
looks (though thinner, damn him), has been brain-damaged since before
his first birthday, probably as the result of a vaccinffion against
whooping cough.  We spent most of the time steering him away from other
children's elaborate sand castles, upon which he enjoyed descending in
an impressive flying leap, or from the pointed mountains of buns on
cafe counters that tended to come crashing to the floor when he
appeared in front of them.
So I had no role modelsþI didn't know any travelers.  I followed my
instinct.  On the last day of the camping holiday in Paris, I woke up
in our small tent, in which we had inexplicably been joined by a pair
of stertorous Finns, and I didn't feel sorry that it was over.  I felt
as if it had only just begun.
Seventeen years on, when I reached the South Pole, I had got as far,
geographically, as anyone can go on this earth.  In retrospect, it
seems like a natural conclusion to all the places that preceded it.
It was as if one great long journey was coming to an end, and I looked
over my shoulder at the miles that had unraveled since the tent in
Paris.
There were none I wished I hadn't covered.  Yet there was a payback,
the attrition of which climbers are so aware.  I wanted freedom more
than I wanted a partner or children, and on the road I was free.  Back
at home, increasingly, it seemed a tough choice to have to make.
In Antarctica I met many people who were struggling with this
dilemma.
The pressures of separation had always been present on the ice.
During the first Operation Deep Freeze in the fifties, the enlisted men
used to hold Dear John parties when the mail arrived.  At the Pole now,
letters were strange and obsolete artifacts of the past, replaced by
electronic mail.  E-mail was as much a part of life there as food and
drink.  The problem of long-distance relationships, however, could not
be solved by technology.  One man told me his girlfriend had just
dumped him by E-mail.  On station anxiety was concealed behind a mask
of humorous resignation and encapsulated in the apocryphal E-mail
message they had pinned on the wall of the computer room, "Yours is
bigger, but his is here."  I was thinking about this as I stepped out
of the science building and was accosted by my new friend Nann.  She
was a large woman from Chicago who looked as though her hair had been
arranged with a blowtorch, and she had her own reason for making the
journey.
She had come to the Pole to get away from her husband.  Her
responsibilities as general factotum on station included cleaning the
toilets, and she called herself a porcelain engineer.
"I'm going to see a balloon go up, " she said.  "Come along, why don't
you?  " With that, she took my arm and pulled me along.
The balloons released each day by a meteorologist called Kathy captured
atmospheric data that could then be used to compile weather records.
It happened to be the summer solstice, but it was hard to celebrate the
longest day at a place where day never ended.

At the South Pole

In the inflation room at the top of the balloon tower, Kathy spread the
translucent fabric over a large table and began pumping it with
helium.
"What happens to them when they're up there?  " I asked.
"Sooner or laterþdepending on the type of balloonþthey expand so they
can't hold the pressure within them anymore, then they burst and come
tumbling back to earth."
"Which is your favorite type of balloon?  " I asked, shouting over the
loud hiss of helium.
"Well, size matters, " she said.
"As in all things, " interrupted Nann.
"The bigger balloons take more preparation, go up more slowly and
gracefully, and you feel you've accomplished something.  Could you give
me a hand getting this out?  " The balloon was now ten feet in
diameter, and as I held the small Styrofoam box attached to the bottom,
Kathy opened a pair of metal doors and stepped onto a platform.
"I give you life!  " she shouted as she flung her balloon away, and we
watched it float peacefully off into the blue, like an Ascension.
"It looks like a condom, " said Nann.
At that moment, a voice crackled over the loudspeaker.
"We have seen black dots on the horizon, assumed to be the Japanese, "
it seemed to be saying.
"God!  " I said, imagining that the Second World War was about to be
reenacted on the ice sheet.  "What the hell's that about?  "
"It's an
expedition coming in!  " said Nann gleefully, pulling on her parka.
"Let's get out there, to see em come in."  On the way she told me that
a Japanese called Susumu Nakamura had skied from Hercules Inlet on the
Ronne Ice Shelf.  He had covered 775 miles, and it had taken him 39 days, four of which were rest days.  He was accompanied by a navigator
and three television crewmen on snowmobiles.
Japan first involved itself with Antarctica in 1910, when Nobu Shirase
set out from Tokyo in the Kaman-Maru (Southern Pioneer).
He reached the Ross Ice Shelf, which he thought looked like "a series
of pure white folding screens, " and marched 160 miles inland before
sailing over to the Bay of Whales.  There his team stumbled upon the
Fram, which they thought was a pirate ship.  The Norwegians, in turn,
were horrified by the wanton slaughter of seals perpetrated by the
Japanese, and when they were invited aboard the Kaman-Maru to drink
tea and eat slices of cake they said in hushed tones that they wouldn't
have got halfway to Antarctica in such a crummy ship.  While in the Bay
of Whales, Shirase and his men unloaded their stores from ship to shore
wearing traditional Japanese straw boots.  "We wound our way upwards, "
said the expedition report, "like a string of pilgrims ascending Mount
Fuji.  It was without doubt the worst of all our trials and
tribulations since the moment when we had left our mothers'wombs.
" It was difficult, as a Japanese in those days, to venture onto the
world stage.  When the Kaman-Maru stopped in Wellington, the New
Zealand Times referred to the men as "a crew of gorillas."  Japan
nonetheless went on to launch scientific expeditions to Antarctica and
was an original signatory of the Antarctic Treaty, the international
agreement protecting Antarctica from exploitation.  The second Asian
country to sign it was India, which in 1983 became the first developing
nation in Asia to become a full treaty member.  India's involvement in
Antarctica emerged largely as a result of prime minister Jawaharlal

Nehru's vision of his country's global position several decades
earlier.
Susumu skied up to the Ceremonial Pole, his cheeks "burnt as black as
lacquer, " as the Kaman-Maru expedition reported theirs had been.  A
single tear froze as it emerged from a corner of his eye.  After
handshakes all around (enough to make one think they were

At the South Pole

English), the party began unfurling corporate flags for the inevitable
sponsorship photographs, and later we saw all their small yellow tents
pitched in the distance.
The frost-nipped faces and frozen beards reminded me of other images of
exhausted men at the end of punishing journeys across Antarctica.  The
point of these treks appeared to be to see how dead you can get.  Well,
chacun a son gout, I could understand the appeal of answering the
question "Can it be done?  " If you do it, no one can ever ask the
question again.  It is yours.  All the journeys made by the
almost-deads are treks through monomania, ambitious battles of the
mind.  Yet writing a book is like that, so perhaps we were doing the
same thing, only in different ways.
The Race Around the World was the most enduring Christmas tradition at
the South Pole, and it began at four o'clock in the afternoon on
Christmas Eve.  The two-mile course involved three circuits around the
Pole.  The residents of the station had rigged up a starting line and
engaged a couple of timekeepers, and participants could complete the
course however they liked.  One skied, one sat on a sledge towed by a
snowmobile, someone else rode a hobbyhorse and a bunch of committed
drinkers were driven around on the back of a bulldozer.
The most imaginative competitor had taken the rowing machine from the
weight room, loaded it onto a sledge, and was towed around the course,
rowing all the way.
I jogged around and developed a violent headache, which, aggravated by
the altitude, slid seamlessly into migraine.  I was obliged to sneak
off to the medical facility under the dome and lie down.  The doctor
was a descendant of Otto Sverdrup, the distinguished Arctic explorer
and the captain of Nansen's Fram on the Farthest North journey.  Her
name was Eileen, and she put me on oxygen for two hours 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 during school holidays.  The smell of the chemicals, the
labels (STOP BATH), and the wire racks on the walls for hanging the X
rays up to dryþwell, they took me back.  It seemed odd that my
childhood should catch up with me here.
In 1961 a Soviet doctor at an Antarctic station 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
anesthetic so I could talk them through it."  She had also taken a short
dentistry course before coming out.
"The low temperatures make people's fillings and crowns fall out, " she
said.  "The glue dries out, you see.  "You had to use 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.

At the South Pole

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 around the world, it looked as if it had
been towed from Hercules Inlet on Susumu's sledge.  Nann got itþshe
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 applique
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 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 dreamed 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.
"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 Amesen.
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 retorted.  "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 we always get a flurry of Beard stories in the press at
Christmas, " I said.  * 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.  Her radio had
failed.
"God, " said Tony.  "That must have been a disaster."
"Actually, it wasn't, " she said guiltily.  "I was happy not being able
to communicate!  " Liv was 41 years old.  She spoke excellent English,
with the quiet, vibrant confidence of someone who has attained her goal
and thereby dislodged all their anxieties in a stroke.  Unlike Susumu,
who had spent 39 days arguing with the television crew, she had found
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 realized the wind had dropped.  I had been in this wind for six
weeks, and you know, it had been a companion."
"What was your first impression when you got here?  "

* David Hempleman-Adams, a Briton, arrived at the Pole in a similar
flurry the following year.  When he flew out of Antarctica, to Punta
Arenas in Chile, he telephoned home at once, eager to share his
triumph.
At his home in Swindon he heard his own voice on the answering machine,
so he tried his grandmother.  She refused to accept the call.

At the South Pole

"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 shockþhow 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 around
one dayþand 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 plateauþhow 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
cajoled into playing Amundsen.  Ironman Tony did Scott with gusto,
though it was difficult to imagine anyone less suited to an American
accent.
During the march to the Pole, Bowers was cooking on their last
Christmas Day.  He scraped together two spoons of raisins for each
man's tea, five sticks of chocolate, and "a good fat hoosh,
two-nd-half inches of plum duff, four caramels each and four squares
of crystallized 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 from
feeling sad that we weren't at home.
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 Seismic 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 "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 Andres Segovia
tape was unearthed , they admitted he was Spanish, but Antarctica taught
you to improvise.  Afterward we took the flexikites out behind the
pressure ridges, an area out of bounds to McMurdo residents.
As a red parka betrayed an American trespasser, I had borrowed yellow
and blue Kiwi gear.
"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.
I wanted more than anything to get out to Seismic Man's camp for
New Year's Eve.  He was working at a remote deep-field site called
Central WestAntarctica, a place so notoriously difficult to access that
its acronym had been elongated into Continually Waiting for
Airplanes.
Either the weather closed in at C.W.A, or a weather front descended on
Ross Island, or the planes were broken.  The camp was regularly
resuppliedþat 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 padded blue plastic chairs before being sent back to camp.
I even took off once, but the Hercules, which was older than I, had
problems with its landing gear and boomeranged after five minutes in
the air.  On base I had said good-bye so many times that people began
to laugh when I reappeared.  I developed an intimate relffionship with
the two other prospective passengers, both support staff assigned to
relief work at C.W.A.  Evelyn was a woman in her forties with
biscuit-colored hair and Jose, 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 C.W.A,
but after the long morning drained away it was postponed again, this
time for at least a week, as the one Hercules on station had developed
a serious ailment.
Feasting in the Tropics I felt interminably depressed, as I didn't want
to spend New Year's on base.  I retrieved my bags and decided on
impulse to call on Helicopter Operations to see Robin, helicopter queen
and the personification of American can-do culture.
I had been meaning to visit a group of geologists at Lake Mackay and
decided to try to see them while waiting for the next plane to C.W.A.
Ross, the project leader, had invited me, and as it was only an hour
away by helicopter, I knew I could catch a lift fairly easily.
Robin studied her schedule for a few moments, then grabbed 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 farther
inland.  "They can drop you off, " she said cheerily.  "Happy
New Year.
" An hour later I was in the back of a helicopter following McMurdo
Sound in the direction of Terra Nova Bay, listening to the pilots
arguing over 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, and before I took off my
headset the pilot asked doubtfully, "Will you be okay?  , " shouting
out 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 yielded hesitantly under my step.  I took off my parka, hat and
gloves and contemplated the scene.
The camp had been pitched 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 brown, cast squat
shadows over the streaked cliffs of the glaciers and the frozen folds
of sea.  In the middle, five small tents were spread into a crescent.
An arc of lenticular clouds floated above against a Wedgwood sky.
I cannot say it was beautiful, it was beyond all that.
Like all the best camps, there was no generator there.
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, and
introduced himself as John, the camp manager.
The other four were working out at their dive hole, so we unloaded the
sledge and drove across.  We found them near the walls of the glacier,
crowded around a bright yellow machine that looked not unlike a large
lawnmower.  I soon learned that this contraption ruled the camp with an
iron rod.  It was the only thing that ever got a wash.
Operated by remote control, it went down onto the seabed and took
pictures that Ross's group depended on for all their research.
They were studying the release of debris from the glacier and its
dispersal into the marine environment.
Everyone had sunburned faces and white eyelids.  One of the three
graduate students 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
hometown.  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 had asked me to guess where he came
from by his accent and then told me that if I had saidMorkshire he
would have given me smaller portions on his cookdays, clearly a dire
threat.
Besides Rossþthe project leaderþand the three students, the fifth
member of the team was the camp manager, John, who was soft-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 anymoreþ quite the
reverse, as I relished the thought that these unknown people were about
to define themselves to me, as I to them.
Feasting in the Tropics Every day the yellow vehicle was lowered
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, microscopic unicellular algae, skittering by as the
cameras moved along the seabed 450 feet below us, radiated 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.  When Ross tipped the vehicle, the cameras peeked inside the
sponge.  It was hollow and dimpled and, when pushed gently, folded
smoothly and swiftly 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 tent.
We had dinner in another small canvas hut underneath a sign that
stated, FLOGGINGS WILL CONTSUE UNLESS MO RALE IMPROVES.  The graduate
students were engaged in eating contests.  Mike had recently won a
night off cooking duty by swallowing a bowl of cold potatoes and three
cans of Coke after 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 made 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 in on a crate in the dark hut.
When the machine was traveling down, the screen looked like a bank of
rain on a gray day.  "Like Wigan in November, " Mike said.
I volunteered to cook a New Year's Eve banquet.  They were all 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 home more refreshing on New Year's Eve than at
any other time.  I was spared the sickening realization 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 labeled 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.  I made flowers for the table out of a cardboard
box and napkin rings out of the egg bag.
The food was enthusiastically dispatched.  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

H.

if' X,!
Feasting in the Tropics 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 tormented by the others
for having the shortest beard.  The sun was immediately behind the peak
of Mount England, and we stood apart from one another, lost in our own
private worlds.
I woke late on New Year's Day, sweating in my sleeping bag the tropical
weather had returned.  I lay there for a while 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 finally got up to get my coffee I found a fried breakfast left for me
in the pan.  When no one was looking I crept over to our waste hole and
watched the food and its puddle of grease slide silently into the
depths.  I took my coffee back to the 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 illage offering ear piercing "With or Without Pain."  Mike
was sitting at an open-air desk made of crates, labeling data.  The
others were packingup.  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 garrulousþMike's antithesisþand 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 yellow submarine.
Alistair F. Mackay, Shackleton's doctor on the Nitrod, had one of the
best glaciers named after him.  He would die in the Arctic, but in 1908 he 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's habits drove him almost mad.
It was Edgeworth David's approach to the mundane detail of daily life
that gratedþif they had been at home, they would have quarreled over
who left the cap off the toothpaste.  Mawson was a fine geologist, all
the scientists I met revered him.  It is this that sets him apart
from

Shackleton, from Scott, from Amundsen and even from Nansen.  He is the
scientist's explorer.  Steve and I 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.  His
was the most legendary solo trek on the continent, 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 enormous man
staggered back to Commonwealth Bay at almost half his normal weight.
The first person to see 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 with Ninnis into the crevasse that killed
him, so he was forced to eat his dogs, eyes and all.  Later, he
witnessed the agonized ravings of Mertz, watched him bite off his own
fingr and cleaned up his acute dysentery.  He noted on January 11 that
his own body was beginning to rot from lack of nourishment.
Australians tend to speak in awed tones about meeting members of
Mawson's family, and a Mawson research industry has fueled the
legend.
To do so, it has also kept some secrets.  While I was researching his
expedition, I received a letter from a distinguished Australian that
included this, "Mawson, on one of his outback Feastinz in the Tropics
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 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 disappeared down
the crevasse did Mawson refer to Mertz by his Christian name in his
diary.  Frank Hurley, who went south withboth Mawson and Shackleton,
summed up the difference between the two men like this, "Shackleton
grafted science on to explorationþMawson added exploring to science.  "
The sea ice was flat and free of sastrugi.  * Beyond the seals, 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 emperor penguins were standing in a row on the
ice, looking expectantly into the middle distance as if for a scheduled
bus.
They saw us and approached immediately.  One of them was taller than
the other two, though they were all over three feet.
Their feet looked as if they didn't belong to them, they were gray,
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.

* Wend-calved ridges of ice.
"The edge of the sea ice is over twenty miles away, " said steve.
"I wonder why these guys came all that way?  " The emperor penguin is
the world's largest extant diving bird.  The adult weighs 70 pounds
(fossils reveal that prehistoric penguins were as tall as six feet).
On land 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 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 MotherTime 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.
Over the last two days a battalion of jobs presented themselves for
attention.  John dispensed tasks from long lists inscribed in a red
spiral-bound notebook.
Feasting in the Tropics "When I get on the last helicopter, " he told
me, "I like to look back and see it looking just as it did the day we
landed."  I packed up the food boxes and took the others mugs of
Lipton's Hot Spiced Cider, of which all camps had a suspicious
proliferation.
The packet proclaimed CONTAINS NO APPLE JUICE, as if this were a
selling point.  As I carried a mug across the ice, a tall figure dived
in front of me with his pants around his ankles.  It was Mike, and he
slid to a stop at my feet, arms flailing.
"Shit!  " he said.
The latrine at Camp Mackay was a hole in the sea ice protected by a
small windbreaker and with a glorious panoramic view.  I l, quickly
learned that on this occasion a seal had emerged through the hole and
exhaled in his usual manner while Mike was engaged in the task at
hand.

f Lavatory stories were part of the fabric of camp life in the south, S
as they are in all camps.  Fortunately, a particularly notorious
variety of Antarctic outhouse had recently been abandoned.
Like many of 0 its kind, it accepted only solids, but unlike others it
was powered by electricity, with the painful result that if liquid was
deposited F in error the donor received an electric shock and the
outhouse .  shorted.

, We made such good progress with the cleaning up that Ross declared a
half day and we took off on an excursion to Botany Bay and Granite
Harbour.  John didn't come, he took his work very seriously.

l, f I think he was glad to have us out of the way.

f I traveled lying in a trailer behind a snowmobile.  It wasn't very
comfortable, but I preferred it to the back of the snowmobile as it 0 was easier to lose yourself when you didn't have to concentrate on
hanging on.  We trawled around the sea ice and stopped beneath the
cliffs at Granite Harbour, climbing over pressure ridges to , Si',
zigzag up a hiX coated with spongy black lichen and lash out at
swooping skuas.  Glacier ice cascaded down the granite cliffs like S
ice cream down a cone, and the boys paused to argue the toss between
the conflicting theories of glacial stability and glacial dynamism.
Granite Harbour, discovered in January 1902 when the Discovery steamed
in, was an embayment about 11 miles wide that marked the seaward end of
a deep valley between Cape Archer and Cape Roberts, and it was backed
by high mountains.  Frank Debenham, T. Griffith Taylor, Tryggve Gran
and P. O. Robert Forde, the Second Western Party, set out from Cape
Evans on December 14, 1911, to geologize in the area of

Granite Harbour, and they built a rock shelter that they called Granite
House, a name they took from a Jules Verne story.  They used it as a
field kitchen, because the blubber stove exuded too many fumes to be
kept in a tent.  They even sprouted sea kale in a kitchen garden
outside.  In 1959 an American party discovered two books in perfect
condition in the shelter.  One was by Poe and the other byMerne, and
when they were opened the party saw from the flyleaves that
GriffithTaylor had owned one and Debenham the other.  As both men were
still alive, the Americans sent the books back.
Everyone gathered in the canvas hut at seven the next morning the day
of our pullout, lured out of sleeping bags by John's tactical promise
of maple-syrup pancakes.  As the stove had been purged it was very
cold, and the hut had been stripped, so it was like sitting down at
home for the final cup of tea on the day you move house.  The
discussion revolved around the weather and potential competition for
helicopter time, and our spirits rose during our radio schedule with
McMurdo as we heard that a number of other camps were weathered in.
I was sent back on the first trip, wedged between Ross and three
plastic trash bags.

The Response of the Spirit.

Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the
Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying
far beyond the seas which encircled man's habitation, and nothing is
more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than
its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were
navigating the ice-fields of the North, yet when Wellington fought the
battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the
south.

APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD, from The Worst journey in the World

In 1911, in the heart of the polar winter, the saintly Bill Wilson,
Scott's right-hand man, pulled a sledge from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier
with Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard in order to collect
emperor penguin eggs.  No human being had yet seen such eggs.
The temperature dropped to minus 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the tent blew
away, and when they finally got back to the hut after five weeks the
others had to use can openers to get their clothes off.  "I for one had
come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only
I could die without much pain, " wrote CherryGarrard.
When three eggs reached England, the men in starched collars laboring
in its Gothic scientific institutions sniffed and said that the Crozier
trip "had not added greatly to our knowledge of penguin embryology.  "
In The Worst Journey in the World, a book that deals with the whole
expedition though the title refers to the march to Gorier,
Cherry-Garrard artlessly turns the journey into the quest for truth and
the penguin eggs into a symbol of its spiritual goal.  It is the
archetypal transmogrification of failure on a human plane into success
on a higher one.  He said this, Superficially they failed.  I have
heard discussions of their failure.
The same men would have discussed the failure of Christ hanging upon
the cross, or Joan of Arc burning at the stake .  . . To me, and
perhaps to you, the interest of this story is the men, and it is the
spirit of the men, "the response of the spirit, " which is interesting,
rather than what they did or failed to do, except in a superficial
sense they never failed.  That is how I see it, and I knew them pretty
well.  It is a story about human minds with all kinds of ideas and
questions involved, which stretch beyond the furthest horizons.
Cherry wrote his book after he had been invalided home from the Western
Front, and by then the war had shattered illusions like so many
eggshells.  "Never such innocence, never before or since, " Philip
Larkin wrote of 1914.  For Cherry, the trek to Crozier became a one-way
journey out of innocence.  Nobody needed to believe in its mythical
elevation more than he did.  His two companions, Wilson and Bowers, had
gone on to die with Scott, and he tortured himself with the thought
that he might have saved them had he taken the dogs farther before the
next winter closed in.

The Response of the Spirit

For Cherry, as for the dying Scott, the whole business became an
apotheosis.  He ends his book like this, And I tell you, if you have
the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression,
go out and explore.  If you are a brave man you will do nothing, if you
are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove
their bravery.  Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all
will say, "What is the use?  " For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and
no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a
financial return within a year.  And so you will sledge nearly alone,
but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers, that is worth a
good deal.  If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your
reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.
His prose is divine, its mournful echoing cadences reminiscent of a
great, badly lit railway station where people are saying good-bye.
Among the youngest of Scott's men, Cherry was a typical Edwardian
landed gentleman, a classicist and a rower, and he was very popular in
the south.  Despite shockingly bad eyesight, he was one of the best
sledgers, the editor of the South Polar Times and Wilson's
indefatigable zoological assistant.  The transmogrification he effected
did not keep his demons at bay, and he spent a large part of his later
years suffering from depression.
Shortly after I had returned from Chile, I found a battered copy of The
Worst Journey in a secondhand bookshop.  Knowing almost nothing about
Antarctica, I lay in the hammock on my roof for an hour's respite after
a murderously frustrating morning in front of the word processor.
With a duvet over me, I grasped the book in one hand so that it hovered
in midair above my face.  I had been invited to a birthday party that
night, and in a burst of organizational zeal I had already ironed my
dress, which was hanging, ready for duty, from the picture rail in my
bedroom.  But I never went to the party.  I closed the book at four in
the morningþby then inside on the sofa, though still under the duvet.
"This journey had beggared our language, " Cherry wrote, but he had
searched within himself and produced a masterpiece.
The Worst journey has slipped the shackles of its period and entered the
immortal zone.  It has influenced countless people and pops up
unexpectedly in volumes of memoirs and essays from Nancy Mitford to
Paul Theroux.  George Bernard Shaw, a friend of Cherry's, had cast his
eye over an early draft, and in his biography of Shaw, Michael Holroyd
wrote, "In Shaw's imagination the appalling conditions of the Antarctic
became a metaphor for the moral climate of Britain between the wars,
and Cherry-Garrard's survival a triumph of human will over social
adversity."  Cherry, Wilson and Bowers built a rock shelter they called
an igloo near the Cape Crozier emperor penguin colony where their tent
had blown away.
I had an overpowering desire to lie in what was left of their
shelter.
There, I thought, I could pay homage.
I heard that a pair of scientists was to be picked up from a camp down
the coast of Ross Island and ferried to and from the Adelie colony at
Crozier.  By this time I had honed the skill of appearing at judicious
moments in the Helicopter Operations room.  Soon I had successfully
insinuated myself onto the flight manifest.
The day before I left on my pilgrimage to Crozier, I attended the
weekly science lecture.  It was about evolutionary biology, and the
Catholic priest, a full-time McMurdo employee and on this occasion
apparently appearing for the opposition, sat in the front row.
"This is what Antarctica looked like for much of its geological
history, a intoned the lecturer.  By the time he got down to the
paleontological nitty-gritty the priest had nodded off, effectively
registering his protest.
We set off in a helicopter early in the morning and proceeded up the
coast to Cape Bird, where two Kiwi biologists were waiting next to
their small hut.  From there it took us half an hour to reach
Crozier.
I saw from the map that we were in James Clark Ross's territory, he had
sprayed names everywhere.  Cape Crozier was named after his best
friend, Francis Crozier, who captained the Terror, one of the two ships
Ross took south.  Its first lieutenant was Archibald McMurdo.
The pilot pointed across the sound.  In the distance a red dot was
stationary in the heavy pack ice.  It was an American icebreaker,
trying to cut a channel for a tanker to refuel McMurdo.  Crevasse
fields streaked the snow beneath us like cellulite.
"See those?  " said the pilot over the headset.  "You could drive a
double-decker bus in there.
Fragments of black metal then began to appear on the snow fields.
On November 28, 1979, a 200-ton DC-10 on a sightseeing flight crashed
into the lower slopes of Erebus, killing all 257 aboard.  The
passengers on Air New Zealand Flight 901 were tourists.  Every Kiwi can
tell you what he or she was doing when they heard the news.  They could
all remember, too, seeing the familiar Maori koru, the airline's logo,
protruding from the snow on the DC-10's tail engine pod.  The effect of
the disaster on the national psyche was incalculable.  "The fact that
it was in the Antarctic made it particularly obscene, a someone said.
Sixteen years later I happened to mention to a table of New Zealanders
in Wellington that someone had attended a McMurdo Halloween party in an
impressive Mount Erebus costume.  Silence descended like a fog.
It was like telling a British gathering that someone had dressed up as
Lockerbie.
We dropped the biologists off and arranged to pick them up two hours
later.  Having inflamed the crew with stories of epic heroism, I had no
difficulty in persuading them that we should try to find Cherry's rock
shelter.  They threw themselves into the search enthusiastically.
"You mean to say that they dragged their sledges over that?  " asked
the pilot, looking at the gnarled pressure ridges.
"Yes, " I said, keen to maintain his interest.  "They said their necks
were frozen into the same position for hours."  It took three aborted
landings and several radio conversations to establish the exact
location of the rock shelter.  I had read in The Worst Journey that it
was two miles from the emperor colony.  As we knew exactly where the
emperor colony was, I had assumed that a swift aerial sweep within a
two-mile radius would reveal the shelter.  I didn't know that the
colony had shifted four miles since then.
We got out and looked over the pressure ridges from the top of a
hill.
"Look at that, a said the crewman.  "Forty miles of crevasse fields and
cracked, craggy iceþwe could never land on most of that, and they
pulled their sledges all this goddam way.  Damn sure I wouldn't do
it.
" When I spotted the remains of the shelter, my heart contracted.  I
felt as if they were going to appear from behind a rock, their necks
frozen, smiling through cracked lips.  As the ground came up to meet
us, my eyes filled with tears.  I pulled down my goggles.  I hadn't
realized how close we had become, these dead explorers and I.

can you believe those suckers built a shelter in such an exposed
saddle?  " the crewman shouted over the headset as the blades whirred
to a stop and the wind buffeted the helicopter like a rocking chair.
"They chose the site in complete darkness," I said, instinctively
springing to their defense.
They had built a kind of igloo out of stones, about seven feet in
diameter.  Most of it had been carried off by the wind, but a ring of
stones about ten inches high had survived.  "This is the House that
Cherry Built, a an anonymous contributor had written in the South Polar
Times, their expedition newspaper.  It went on,

The Response of the Spirit

This is the Ridge that topped the Moraine That supported the House that
Cherry Built.
These are the Rocks and Boulders "Erratic, " Composing the Wallsþwith
lavas "Basic"þ That stood on the Ridge that topped the Moraine .  . . *
The interior of the shelter was covered with snow through which poked a
small wooden crate and a pair of frozen socks.  I had been told that
these *ems had belonged to Cherry, Bowers and Wilson, but it seemed
highly unlikely.  It was blowing so hard that in order to walk forward
we had to lean into the wind.  I found the small entrance in the
crumbling wall of the shelter, lay down and closed my eyes.
Cherry had prepared to die as he lay there.  He did not rue the past,
he said only that he wanted those years over again.  The comradeship
among the three men never faltered, even at the worst moments.  Cherry
exults in the dignity with which they emerged from their ordeal.  awe
did not forget the please and the thank you, " he wrote.  "I'll swear
there was still a grace about us when we staggered in.  And we kept our
tempers, even with God."  People have said that this is an easy thing
to write, after the event, especially when no one is alive to gainsay
it.  This may be so, but Cherry's prose sings with conviction.
Lying in the remains of his shelter, I felt something approaching awe,
as he had taught me so much.  From him I had learned that it was
possible to do anything two ways, whether a five-week dance with death
or an hour-long business meeting.  You could do it with dignity and
loving kindness, keeping your temper with God, or with ambition,
self-interest and greed.  It was a simple choice.  As he said, there
were no promises attachedþthe effort brought its own rewards.  I had
made myself believe I could get to Cape Crozier, as * The same issue of
the paper insluded a reworking of Henry V in which Lieutenant Evans
strides in declaring, gOnce more unto the beach, dear friends, once
more.  V he had done, but what mattered was the response of the
spirit."  It is surely the same whatever your personal
Crozierþsummiting without oxygen, building a garden shed, telling
someone you love them.
The crewman and pilot leaped over the low wall and landed on top of
me.
"Bit cramped in here, with three, a the crewman shouted over the
wind.
Indeed.  Cherry's party had had bulky reindeer sleeping bags to contend
with too, and the stove.  One night a glob of boiling blubber had
sizzled from the stove and landed in Wilson's eye.  He was temporarily
blinded and in excruciating pain.  Needless to say, they were
dangerously underfed.  "Night after night, a Cherry wrote, "I bought
big buns and chocolate at a stall on the island platform at Haffield
station."
"Let's gO, a said the pilot, jumping up.  "We've got a sustained
twenty-five knots here, and it's slicing through this gear like a
knife."  The manhauling winter journey to Crozier has been repeated
once, though only one way.  What Mike Stroud, Roger Mear and Gareth
Wood accomplished when they pulled sledges to Crozier during the
private

Footsteps of Scott expedition in 1985 was a remarkable achievement.
Mear, however, who went on to make an aborted attempt at a solo
crossing of the continent a decade later, acknowledged in his book that
the trip had been dominated by tensions and hostility.  "We came out of
it anxious and hurt," he wrote.  So Cherry had been right.  For him,
what counted was the response of the spirit, a but we are living in an
age that doesn't give a fig about the spirit, an age fatally
compromised by ambition and worldly success.  Cherry knew, somehow,
that the men who walked in his footsteps wouldn't be interested in
gold, pure, shining, unalloyeda companionship.  It seemed unbearably
sad.

The Response of the Spirit

When Mear and his companions returned to their Cape Evans hut, a
12-pound tin of strawberries exploded and could easily have killed
them.
Imagine doing all that and being killed by a strawberry.
Bill Wilson, who went south with Scott on both the Discovery and the
Terra Nova expeditions, was the leader of the Crozier trek.
He was a deeply religious man, even a mystic.  That he was called by
God, he had no doubt.  This is transparent in his poems, And this was
the thought that the silence wrought, As it scorched and froze us
through, That we were the men God meant should know The heart of the
Barrier snow.
Wilson was a doctor, a naturalist and an accomplished artist.
He admired Ruskin, and had a volume of Tennyson's poems in his pocket
on his last sledging journey.  He had Scott's ear, so he was a natural
confidant for the men.  As the great southern journey grew nearer, an
increasing number of them came to him with their grievances, whether
against Scott, other colleagues or the world in general.  "My
goodness!
" he wrote.  "I had hours of it yesterday, as though I was a bucket and
it was poured into me."  Yet back at home he found normal social
intercourse so difficult that he confided to his diary that he took
sedatives before going to parties, and one of his biographers wrote
that it required far more courage for him to face an audience than to
cross a crevasse.
Everything served a grand purpose for Wilson and was a component of an
embracing and harmonious philosophy.  Art functioned to help science,
which in turn enhanced faith.  He was an ascetic.
Between expeditions he wrote to his wife from somewhere in England that
he had begun to enjoy hotel dinners and to prefer hot water to cold,
and that this was a bad sign.
Wilson did not always inspire admiration.  After their first meeting
Mawson noted in his diary, "I did not like Dr. Wilson."  While I was
having lunch with Roland Huntford in Cambridge, he put down his knife
and fork on the long dining hall table and said, "I can't stand
WllSorl."  Mike Stroud, one of the three who repeated the Winter
Journey in 1985, once told me, "Wilson's books are so strange.
He was a very odd bloke.  I don't know what to make of him a Robert
Graves had wanted to put Wilson into his autobiography, Goodbye to All
That, but couldn't find space.  The two met in 1909, and Graves was
much tickled by the story of a penguin who tried to mate with Wilson,
though in fact all the bird did was drop a stone at his feet, which is
quite a long way from mating though perhaps not to a penguin.
In the south Wilson experienced the peace that passes all
understanding.
He spent the happiest times in the crow's nest, communing with his God
together (as he felt) with his beloved wife, Ory.  Toward the end he
appears already to have worked himself beyond the earthly plane.
"This is the most fascinating ideal I think I ever imagined," he wrote
on the plateau, to become entirely careless of your own soul or body
in looking after the welfare of others."  Bowers, the third member of
the team, was called Birdie because he had a beak nose.  He was a
peerless worker, indomitably cheerful, never felt the cold and shared,
though to a lesser degree, Wilson's spirituality.
That he bought the fatal British prejudice concerning the moral virtues
of dogless travel is revealed in a letter he wrote to Kathleen Scott,
"After all, it will be a fine thing to do that plateau with man-haulage
in these days of the supposed decadence of the British race."  He gave
his horse, Victor, a last biscuit from his own ration before shooting
him.  Bowers was devoted to his mother and wrote this in a letter to
her from the south.

The Response of the Spirit

Have been reading a lot and thinking a lot about things.
This life at sea, so dependent upon nature, and so lonely, makes one
think.
I seem to get into a quagmire of doubts and disbeliefs.  Why should we
have so many disappointments, when life was hard enough without them?
Everything seems a hopeless problem.  I felt I should never get out,
there was no purpose of it.
One night on deck when things were at their blackest, it seemed to me
that Christ came to me and showed me why we are here, and what the
purpose of life really is.  It is to make a great decisionþto choose
between the material and the spiritual, and if we choose the spiritual
we must work out our choice, and then it will run like a silver thread
through the material.  It is very difficult to express in words what I
suddenly saw so plainly, and it was sometimes difficult to recapture it
myself.  I know, too, that my powerful ambitions to get on in this
world will conflict with the pure light that I saw for a moment, but I
can never forget that I did realise, in a flash, that nothing that
happens to our bodies really matters.
Back at Cape Crozier, we arrived early to pick up the biologists and
sat down to eat our sandwiches.  The skuas complained bitterly about
this flagrant trespass.  The sandwiches were peanut butter and jelly, a
particularly American combination and very nasty indeed.
The whole of the Cape Crozier area resounded with the dull background
roar of the Adelie colonyþsome 170, 000 breeding pairs.  The chicks
were 16 days old, about ten inches tall and very lively.  From a
distance they looked like gray puffballs.
The Kiwi beakers, who were monitoring the Adelie diet, came trudging up
the hill carrying their buckets like children coming home from the
beach.
"Know what's in those buckets?  " asked the crewman.
"No," I said.
"Penguin vomit!  " he announced triumphantly.
"KrillX dip, anyone?  " shouted Bruce, the younger Kiwi.
The pair of them had begun chatting in the helicopter when we first
picked them up as if they had known us all their lives.  In fact, none
of us had ever seen them before.  They had a straightforward, pragmatic
approach to whatever the day threw at them, and viewed the world with a
healthy exuberance I had observed in many New Zealanders.
"What exactly do you do to the penguins?  " I asked dubiously over the
headset after we had taken off.
"Put cathe ers down their throats, introduce a little salt water and
apply pressure to their abdomens, a said Jack cheerfilly.  He was the
project leader.  "They throw up pretty quickly."  Hardly surprising I
thought.  The crew made gagging noises.
"What do you do with the vomit?  " I continued in spite of myself.
"Bottle its said Jack.  "And take it back to New Zealand to have a
closer look.  Or sell it as chutney."  When we landed at Cape Bird,
everyone agreed that we should shut down and climb out for a turn on
the cape.
The wind had carved the band of twisted ice fastened to the shore into
a series of apocalyptic shapes, and the Adelies waddled among them like
spectators at an art exhibition.
"There's between thirty and forty thousand breeding pairs here, a said
Bruce, and see how well they blend in with the environment.
" It was trueþthey melted into the snow-streaked black volcanic rock.
Penguins were everywhere.  Antarctica was the antithesis of the jungle
or the rain forest, where everything burgeoned and mutated and
thousands of species and tens of thousands of * A krill is a small,
shrimplike marine crustacean and a vital constituent of the Antarctic
food chain.  The word comes from the Norwegian noun for a young fish.

The Response of the Spirit

subspecies coexisted.  (I remembered fungus forming on my rucksack in
the Amazon Basin as quickly as ice did in the south.  ) As the
biologist David Campbell wrote in The Gystal Desert, "A paucity of
species but an abundance of individuals is a recurring evolutionary
motif in polar areas."  Everything was so simple in Antarctica.  Even
the food chain was simple.
Phytoplankton, the primary producers, take light and make matter.
Phytoplankton is eaten by krill, and krill is eaten by everything
else.
Bruce, a man of Pickwickian geniality and an alarming orange beard, was
showing off his new electronic weighbridge over which a subcolony of
Adelies had to strut on their way to the sea.  The parents took it in
turns to swim out, swallow a meal and return to regurgitate it to their
offspring.  There was a good deal of argument over it all.
When a leopard seal began his late-afternoon patrol hundreds of
penguins porpoising through the water shot out vertically as if
propelled by a tightly coiled spring.  After landing, they shook
themselves off as if they hadn't expected to land quite so soon.
The water, reflecting the pearly silver blues of the sky, was thick
with drifting pack ice, and suddenly the dark, arched backs of a large
pod of killer whales appeared, proceeding with rhythmic perfection in
front of the cape.  It was an identical scene to that of Herbert
Ponting's finest hour, when, not far from this spot, he was apprehended
on a floe by eight killer whales.  He makes much of this episode in his
book.
Ponting was the official photographer on the Terra Nova expedition,
though he pressured Scott into letting him be called Camera Artist.
Besides the famous stills of Scott writing purposefully at his desk in
the Cape Evans hut and the ship perfectly framed by an ice cave, images
now engraved on the British national consciousness, Ponting shot a
akinematograph, a or moving picture, and 20 years later reissued it
with a commentary and sound track, calling it Ninety Degrees South.
Teddy Evans appears at the beginning in front of a creased black
curtain in full evening dress and, hands in pockets, plays with his
balls for some minutes while introducing "Ponto, " who slides into view
resembling a large stuffed animal.
What follows is a brilliant piece of film.
Ponting was a cold fish.  He abandoned his wife, daughter and son to
become a photographer and never saw any of them again.  Scott deplored
his commercialism, and Ponting was always moaning that Scott had got
the publicity wrong.  In the south he irritated the others by asking
them to pose all the time, like many photographers after him, and in
later years never attended reunions.  His prose is stiff and pompous,
yet often revealing.  "We felt like boys again," he wrote, and acted,
too, like boys."  Frank Hurley, the other great photographer of the
Heroic Age, went south with Shackleton and took the famous picture of
the crippled Endurance balancing on the ice like a ballerina.  As a
record of the death of a ship it will never be surpassed.  Hurley, an
Australian with none of Ponting's pomposity, ran away from home and
didn't see the sea until he was 15.  He met a French opera singer in
Cairo and married her ten days later.  Besides hundreds of images of
Australian troops, Hurley took pictures of monolithic columns in the
Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem with beams of light falling in
pools on the flagstones (he called one "Am the Light of the
World").
He has left fewer remarkable Antarctic landscapes than Ponting, but his
Antarctica is less frigid and more human.  The pack ice in his best
picture is like a field of white carnations.  In life Shackleton and
Scott had found the appropriate photographers, just as in death they
got the

Societies they deserved.
By the time the helicopter landed at McMurdo, it was already eight
o'clock.  I was supposed to be moving over to Scott Base.  Many months
before I had engaged in a long correspondence with the people who ran
the New Zealand Antarctic Programme, and they had invited me to spend a
few days at their base while I was on Ross Island.  I had met Malcolm
Macfarlane, the senior representative of the NZ program, shortly after
arriving at McMurdo.  We had almost collided before, we discovered,
three years earlier when Malcolm had been working on a cruise liner in
the Southern Ocean.  A passenger died while the ship was off Cape
Horn.
I was hanging around in Tierra del Fuego at that time, and to get a
glimpse of the Horn I hitched a lift on a supply boat delivering an
empty coffin to a cruise ship.  The coffin had been covered with a
candlewick bedspread, and the sailors played poker on it for most of
the trip.  When we got to the Horn, where a gale was raging I had
helped lower the coffin into a zodiac and must have seen Malcolm
hanging over the rail in the stern of the ship, assisting the
embarkation of the coffin.
I arrived at Scott Base later that evening and repaired to the bar with
Malcolm.  A sign on the door said, REMOVE BOOTS, JACKET AND HAT O R BUY
THE WHOLE BAR A DRINK.  The sign was in Japanese, a cunning Kiwi ploy
to force passing strangers into buying a round.
There were only 30 or so people on base, so I had a room to myself,
small and windowless with a set of bunk beds, but very comfortable.
There was a mug on the bedside table bearing the slogan PARTYTILLYOU
PUKE, a caption that went some way toward summing up the off-duty
philosophy of the base.  The Kiwis on the ice had a culture all their
own.  They held three-legged ski races and painted their toenails
blue.
It snowed for two days, and scientists paced the corridors.
A trio of microbiologists was trying to get to the crater of Erebus to
collect high-temperature bacteria.  One of them, a tall man with wild
eyes who peered over his glasses and down his nose, had hair shooting
from his head like the flame of the Olympic torch.  He flung his arms
around when he spoke.
"I work," he told me one day, jiggling his left hand and slicing the
air with his right forefinger, on bacteria for which the tropics are
too cold.  They like it best at 105 degrees Celsius.  This is a theory
of evolutionþthat life began with these creatures.  They form the very
roots of the tree of life!  That is my belief.  A theory of evolution
must be like a belief."  On my third day, conversation turned to the
Husky Hugging Club, initiation into which had involved stripping naked
in front of the base, walking a hundred yards and hugging a husky.  The
last huskies left Antarctica in 1994 as a result of Antarctic Treaty
regulations banning all alien species, although they hadn't been used
as working dogs for some years before that.  I wondered why humans had
not qualified for the same exclusion.
Much of the human culture of Antarctica was caught up in the mystique
of the old days a for every nationality.  I wondered how many stories
I had heard Americans telling about the Biolab that preceded the Crary
and its crappy lounge with the beaten-up sofas and benches where
everyone worked next to one another, and about walking past Art
DeVries's bench and being offered a bowl of fish soup.  It was like
some Homeric age in which men larger than ourselves bestrode the
continent, replaced now by the etiolated figures of bureaucracy.
The legends were even more vividly drawn in the collective memory of
Kiwi veterans.  They reached their acme in the exploits of the Asgard
Rangers and their bitter enemies the Vandals.  The former were nomadic
hydrologists who had been roaming the Asgard Mountains in the
DryValleys since the late sixties, and the latter were the sedentary
scientists of the LakeVanda camp on the valley floor.  One of the
Asgaards had just arrived at Scott Base, and he was extremely keen to
extol Asgard virtues andVandal frailties.  Pete was a rogue with a
gleam in his eye and an infectiously enthusiastic manner, once he
spotted a joke he pursued it like a hound after a hare.
"Tell me about your work," I said.

The Response of the Spirit

awe measure water flows, " he replied quickly, and compare the rate of
glacial advance and retreat here with glacier movement in New
Zealand.
They move much more slowly here."  He didn't seem very interested in
talking about this.
"What you have to understand," he said, clearing his throat and
leaning over the dining table toward me, is thatVandals are inferior
to Asgaards in every way."  The passage of almost 30 years had not
diminished their rivalry.
Mock battles continued to be staged, and if the andals raised their
flag from the bamboo pole at their camp, an Asgard Ranger would be
sure to ski down from the top of the valley and slice it off.
"Asgaarcls pride themselves on the theft of as much issue clothing as
possible, a said Pete, adding quickly, though of course we Rangers
don't actually need to wear many clothes, as we barely feel the cold.
"
"What else rates highly then?  " I asked.  "I mean, in the Asgard
versusMandal rivaky?  "
"Stealing food from Americans, but ratting
onVandals who do the same is highly regarded," he said, warming now to
the theme.  "I remember hijacking a leg of ham from a helicopter
once.
We were only talking about that at a reunion last month."
"Where do you hold the reunions?  " I asked.

strip clubs, usually."  I could imagine how much the bureaucracy and
safety regulations of the contemporary Antarctic program must have
crucified him.  The affection with which he recounted his stories made
me realize what an important part of his life Antarctica had been.
When I commented on that, he paused reflectively.
"Well, relationships here are especially close," he said eventually.
"It's obvious, isn't itþyou can't share it with anyone else.
I hardly ever talk about Antarctica at home.  No one would
understand.
There's no place like this, and because of that it becomes emotional.
" On the fourth day the Kiwis went into a huddle, and when they came
out of it, a camping trip had been arranged.  When they asked me along,
I sent a message to McMurdo to say I wasn't coming home.
The team consisted of four men and five women.  "Here, a said Jaqui
before we left.  She was the base cleaner.  "Take this."  With that,
she bundled a yellow parka into my arms.  sO you won't feel the odd
one out, a she said.  The Kiwi women had raised their collective wing
and taken me under it.  It was like coming home.
We set off in high spirits in a Hagglunds tracked vehicle, bound for an
old hut on the ice shelf.  The Kiwis had been maintaining the hut for
yearsþit was only a few miles away, but it was off-station, and that
was what mattered.  We stopped enroute at the skiway on the southern
side of Hut Point peninsula for a couple of hours of downhill skiing.
They had fixed a towrope to the back of an old truck, and imported
juggernaut tires for downhill tubing.
After exhausting ourselves on the slopes, we drove on to the hut.
Lighting the Preway was always something of a drama in Antarctic huts,
but once it was done there was nothing further to do but snuggle around
it and sip mulled wine.  The hut, in full view of Erebus, was hard by
the snow field used by the New Zealanders for survival training.
Besides building igloos, snow holes and snow walls, they had carved a
life-size bar, complete with barstools, draft pumps and glasses.
"It makes us feel at home, a someone commented.
On the spur of the moment I decided that night to sleep in an igloo, as
the ambient temperature was above zero and the wind had fallen to a
whisper.  When I woke up the next morning, skyblue sunlight was
trickling through the bricks and splashing onto the blue-and-yellow
sleeping bag.
I crawled out the tunnel and watched the plumes of Erebus dissolve into
the limpid sky.  The sun had warmed the motionless air, the clouds had
fled and nobody else was awake.

The Response of the Spirit

I lay down on my parka.  Sometimes I lost myself so thoroughly in
Antarctica that I felt as if I had slipped off the planet and forgotten
who I was.  It was as if all my points of reference had dissolved like
the Erebus plumes, or I had wandered off into some country of the mind
to which I alone had a passport.  When I felt it most acutely, I had to
close my eyes and think about something that was still going on in the
inhabited world.  It was a device to ensure I didn't lose my grip on
reality, like looking up through a periscope on a submarine for
reassurance that the world is still there.  The image that leaped most
readily into my empty mind was that of a beak-nosed nun crouching on a
checkered floor in a tiny Byzantine chapel.  A single oil lamp in a
niche cast flickering light around the entire biblical cosmogony, and
on the chipped fresco at the back a mass of faces was permanently
twisted into the tormented screams of the damned.
The nunnery was high on a mountain in the middle of the Greek island of
Evia.  I had spent several weeks there five years previously, staying
in a bare room above a courtyard filled with geraniums bursting from
terra-cotta flowerpots.  The rims of these flowerpots were regularly
whitewashed by the beak-nosed nun.  As soon as she finished, she
started at the beginning again.  The sisters spent at least half their
waking hours in the chapel, and services were punctuated by brief
hiatuses during which an argument stormed to and fro over which psalm
was to be sung.
In the years since I had walked back down the mountain, I often found
myself thinking of the nuns.  They represented something solid and
permanent when everything else seemed to be sliding away like loose
scree.
Unlike the United States, New Zealand claims sovereignty over a slice
of Antarctica.  The Antarctic Treaty neither endorses nor refutes this
claim, or indeed the claims of six other nations (Chile, Argentina,
Australia, Britain, Norway and France).  The treaty evolved to preserve
the fragile balance of ownership and nonownership and to protectTerra
Incognita from the depredations of exploitation and warfare.  It states
that "Antarctica shall be used for peaceful measures only.  . . in the
interests of all humanity, " and gives all parties free access to the
whole of the continent, fostering science as the legitimate expression
of national interest.  Initiated during the International Geophysical
Year and applicable to all territory south of 60 degrees south, the
treaty was signed by 12 nations in 1959 and came into force in 1961.
Since then the number of signatories has more than tripled.  The
accession of India and Brazil in 1983, and China two years later, meant
that the treaty was no longer the exclusive territory of rich,
developed nations.  The document subsequently expanded.  The Protocol
on Environmental Protection, signed in Madrid in 1991, imposed a
50-year moratorium on extracting oil and mining minerals.  It has been
called Par Antarctica.
In the early days, everyone wanted some of this unknown landþor at
least they didn't want to be left out.  Doris Lessing wrote that to
non-Europeans thinking about the Antarctic in the decades before the
First World War, "there was little Europe, strutting and bossing up
there in its little corner, like a pack of schoolboys fighting over a
cake."  Just before the Second World War, Hitler decided that
Antarctica, too, was to be part of the great Nazi empire.  He ordered
several thousand steel-barbed swastikas, loaded them onto planes, put
the planes on a ship and sent the whole lot south, telling the pilots
to drop their cargo over a vast tract of the ice fields.  After the
war, people were still optimistic that the continent could be made to
earn its keep.  In 1949 a journalist called Douglas Liversidge went
south to visit British bases and witness the relief of Fuchs and his
expedition from Stonington Island.  In his book The Last Continent,
published in 1958, Liversidge suggests that Antarctica might provide
"cheap, large-scale refrigeration of grain, meat The Response of the
Spirit and other supplies"þthat it might function as a global freezer,
in other words.  By the late eighties, a coalition of Third World
nations led by Malaysia accused treaty members of "modern-day
colonialism."  The political situation often belied reality.  I
observed on my first visit south that the Antarctic can erase national
boundaries.
An Argentinian arrived for a minor operation at a Chilean base that
included a relatively sophisticated medical facility.  The man was
greeted with slaps on the back and urgent petitions about a forthcoming
radio chess tournament.  I had never heard that kind of talk in Chile,
only spiteful jokes about loud-mouthed neighbors who rolled their r's.
The geopolitics of Antarcticaþcomplex, potentially explosive, deadly
serious and ice-coldþwere played out not on the snow fields but in the
ring of the international circus of conferences they engendered and the
carpeted corridors of capital cities.
Igloos and Nitroglycerine N N E Igloos and Nitroglycerine I don't
really mind scienceþI just seem to feel better when it's not around.
Observed on latrine wall, Central West Antarctica deep-field camp
Resuming the quest for Seismic Man and his group, I wheedled my way
onto a fuel flight to Central West Antarctica, and after a series of
false starts I was transported to the skiway with four members of a
science project staging at C.W.A enroute to Ice Stream B. The West
Antarctic ice streamsþfast-flowing currents of ice up to 50 miles wide
and 310 miles longþare cited as evidence of possible glacial retreat
and the much-touted imminent rise in global sea levels.
On the flight the project leader pulled out the Road to Oriana, the
greatest travel book ever written and one that lies so close to my
heart that it gave me a shock to see it there.  He was a beatific man
in his mid-fifties with a round, mottled face like the moon, and his
name was Hermann.  Ten years previously, he had climbed out of a
crashed plane in Antarctica.
The previous evening, in the galley at McMurdo, I had run into a
mountaineer from a science group that had recently pulled out of C.W.A.
"Hey!  " he had said when I told him I was on my way there.
"You can sublease the igloo I built just outside camp.  It's the
coolest igloo on the West Antarctic ice sheet."  When we landed at 82 degrees south, the back flap lifted and light flooded into the plane.
Tornadoes of powder snow were careering over the blanched wasteland.
There were no topographical features, just a boundless and burnished ice
sheet.  Lesser (ETest) Antarctica is thought to be a rift systemþa
jumble of unstable platesþseparated from the stable shield of Greater
(East) Antarctica by the Transantarctic Mountains.  Most of Lesser
Antarctica's surface consists of the world's only marine-based ice
sheet.  This means that the bottom of the ice is far below sea level,
and if it all melted, the western half of Antarctica would be a group
of islands.  The assemblage of plates that make up LesserAntarctica
have been moving both relative to one another and to the east for
something like 230 million years, whereas Greater Antarctica has
existed relatively intact for many hundreds of millions of years.  In
Gondwanaland, the prehistoric supercontinent, what we now know as South
America and the Antipodes were glued to Antarctica.
Gondwanaland started to break up early in the Jurassic periodþsome 175 million years agoþand geologists like to speculate on the relationship
of Antarctica to still earlier supercontinents.  Most exciting of all,
Antarctica once had its own dinosaurs.
The crewmen began to roll pallets off the back of the plane.
We walked down after them, the wind stinging our faces.  The engines
roared behind us as we struggled to pull our balaclavas down around our
goggles.
In the sepulchral light ahead I could see a scattering of Jamesways, a
row of sledges, half a dozen tents and Lars, the shaggy-haired
Norwegian-American from Survival School.  He was looking even shaggier
and was brandishing a mug of cocoa.  We hugged each other.  Lars led
the way into the first Jamesway, where half a dozen weatherbeaten
individuals were slumped around folding Formica tables.
"Welcome, Woo!  " somebody shouted.  I had brought cookies and a stack
of magazines from McMurdo, and as I handed them out we all talked at
once, a lot seemed to have happened in two months.

Guess what?  " said Lars.  "We saw a bird."  The C.W.A field camp was
probably the largest on the continent.
Fifty people were based here for most of the summer season, working on
four separate geological projects.  Small groups often left camp
temporarily, traveled over the ice sheet on snowmobiles or tracked
vehicles, pitched their tents for a few days and tried to find out what
the earth looked like under that particular bit of ice.  They were
creating a relief map of Antarctica without its white blanket.
Seeing Seismic Man's lightweight parka hanging on a hook in the
Jamesway, I suspected he was away working at one of these small
satellite camps.  I was thinking about this, as Lars produced another
round of cocoa, when a familiar figure flew through the door of the
Jamesway and clattered to a standstill beside me.  It was Jose, the
diminutive Mexican-American biker with whom I had failed to reach C.W.A
on earlier attempts.  He had made it here a week before me.  In one
long exhalation of breath, he said that he had heard I'd come, that he
and two others were about to set off to strike a satellite camp 30 miles away, that it would take about 24 hours and they wouldn't be
sleeping that I could go too, if I wanted .  . .
Having flown halfway across the continent to find Seismic Man, I left
immediately without seeing him at all.  Vaguely irritated about this,
as if the whole expedition had been someone else's idea, I climbed into
the back of a tracked vehicle with a tall, loose-limbed Alaskan in the
driver's seat.
"They call me Too-Tall Dave, " he said as he pumped my hand, crushing a
few unimportant bones.  Pleased to meet you."  The man next to himþa
medical corpsman on loan from the Navyþlooked as if he had just got
up.
His name was Chuck.  He had apparently forgotten the American
president's name one day and asked Too-Tall Dave to remind him.  Jose
and I spread out over the two bench seats in the back of the vehicle.
It was a temperamental Tucker that only liked traveling between eight
and ten miles an hour.  We were towing a flat, open trailer and a
sledge loaded with survival gear.  As we were following a flagged route
to the small camp, you couldn't really call what Too-Tall was doing
driving, it was more a question of stabilizing the steering wheel with
his elbow and glancing at the dashboard every so often to make sure he
maintained the correct rpm to keep the water and oil at a stable
temperature.  It was very warm in the Tucker.  The ice was dappled with
watery sunlight and the sky pale, streaky blue.
After five hours, we reached a weatherhaven and a Scott tent.
"Is this it?  " I asked.

Yep, n said Too-Tall, swinging nimbly out of the Tucker.
When I saw the tent, its flap still open, sunlit against the white
landscape, an image flashed across my mind, J. C. Dollman's painting of
Titus Oates staggering off to die, arms outstretched and wearing a blue
bobble hat.  The lone tent in the background of the picture was
identical to the one I was looking at, except that Dollman had painted
something like a Land Rover parked outside.  The painting was called A
Very Gallant Gentleman, and the previous summer I had gone to see it at
the Cavalry Club in London's Piccadilly.  The Patron of my expedition,
Jeremy Lewis, came along in an attempt to expiate his guilt at
fulfilling none of the duties performed by more experienced patrons
such as the Duke of Edinburgh or the manufacturers of Kendal's Mint

Cake.  Jeremy said he thought Oates was probably wearing a tweed jacket
under his parka with a copy of the Symposium in the pocket.
In its clumsy way the picture captures the most luminous moment in
Antarctic historyþwhen a desperately weak Oates announced that he might
be some time and, without putting on his boots, crawled out of the
tent, never to return.  The episode has inculcated itself so
effectively into the British national psyche that the phrase "the
Captain Oates Defense" is now bandied around the financial press when a
senior figure leaves a troubled company to save his colleagues.
At the time Oates's deed unleashed a good deal of excruciating
sentiment disguised as art.  I was especially taken by two stanzas of
"Omen Pugnae, " a poem by Hugh Mcnaghten, vice provost of Eton
College, Oates's school, published in 1924.
So, on the day he died, His birthday, one last gift was his to give For
him to perish that his friends might live Was "just to go outside.  "
Just two and thirty years But O!  thy last farewell, a household word
And all that we have seen and we have heard, There is no room for
tears.
In the Daily Telegraph, on April 8, 1995, Beryl Bainbridge took a more
robust approach, suggesting that Andrew Lloyd Webber might like to
stage a musical of Scott's expedition including a number sung by Oates,
"I'm Just Stepping Outside and May Be Some Time."  Oates was in charge
of the ponies on the Terra Nova expedition.
They were a bunch of old nags from Siberia and a disaster from the
start.  He had not selected them himself and described his charges and
the dogs on board the ship as "the most unsuitable scrap-heap crowd of
unfit animals."  Nicknamed Titus after a seventeenthcentury intriguer,
Lawrence Oates was the only expedition member from the Army and was
consequently also known as The Soldier.  He had moneyþhis father had
written "gentleman" in the PATERNAL OCCUPATION box on his birth
certificateþand as a young man Igloos and Nitroglycerine Titus was
lord of the manor at Gestingthorpe in Essex.  The whole village
celebrated feudal-style when he returned from the Boer War a wounded
hero.  He was reserved, measured and a cheerful pessimist whose only
pinup above his bunk was a portrait of Napoleon.  In many ways he was
the polar opposite of Scott.  He received a toy gun for Christmas in
the south and went around shooting people with it for the rest of the
evening, asking them to fall down when hit.  His creed was "Down with
Science, Sentiment and the Fair Sex, " and he once confided to Wilson
that his mother was the only woman he had ever loved.
Oates was a popular officer.  I read a pile of letters sent to his
mother after the news of his death had broken.  One said, "Dear old
Titus took my brother's place when he died in the Transvaal and I loved
Titus as a brother and now he is gone.  What it must mean to you God
alone knows."  Indeed.  She burned his diaries, though his sister,
alerted to the imminent conflagration, stayed up all night copying out
as many of the handwritten pages as she could.
He was a stereotypical upper-class twit, in many ways, and twits were
no different then than they are now.  Despite that, I liked him.
His no-nonsense approach appealed to me, and so did his fierce
opposition to cant.
I packed up the contents of the weather haven while Jose and TooTall
set about dismantling it from the outside.  Fortunately, the wind had
dropped, but * was bitterly cold.
"Why didn't the beakers do this themselves?  " asked Too-Tall
irritably.
"Next time they'll be asking us to wipe their butts."  By the time we
had finished loading the gear onto the trailer, it was six o'clock in
the morning.  We squatted in a banana sledge we had forgotten to pack
and opened three cartons of orange juice and a large bag of trail
mix.
As we rearranged our gear in the back of the Tucker afterward, I
noticed that fuel had leaked all over my sleeping bag, not for the
first time or the last.  I wasn't the only one in Antarctica who
smelled like an oil rig.
I drove for the first three hours on the way back to camp.
It was a mesmerizing occupation, and as I stared blankly out at the ice
sheet, the rpm needle slowly crept up the dial.
"Less gas!  " Too-Tall would then say, delivering a karate chop on my
shoulder from the bench in the back.  The monotony was broken by the
appearance of a bottle of bourbon.  Jose set up a Walkman with a pair
of speakers.
"We need tortured blues, " said Too-Tall.  He was right.  It was the
perfect accompaniment to the inescapable monotony of the landscape and
the hypnotic rhythm of the Tucker.
I was accused of picking all the cashews out of the trail mix, a crime
of which I was indeed guilty.  Everyone started talking.
"Are you married?  " Jose asked me.
"No, " I said.  "Are you?  "
"No."  There was a pause, which something
was waiting to fill.
"Go on, Jose, tell her!  " said Chuck.
Jose cleared his throat.
"Actually, I married my Harley-Davidson, " he said.
I choked on the last cashew.
"Oh, really?  " I said, in an English kind of way.  "Who performed the,
erþceremony?  "
"Owner of my local bike shop.  He does it a lot.  "
This information was almost more than the human spirit could bear.
Fortunately, an empty fuel drum chose that moment to fall off our
trailer and roll over the ice sheet, and after we had dealt with that,
the topic was forgotten.
A fresh one, however, was looming.
"You know that Captain Scott, " Too-Tall said in my direction as the
bourbon went around again.  "Was he a bit of a dude or what?
" I had just begun to grapple with a reply to this weighty question
when Chuck, his face puckered in concentration, chipped in with "Hey,
is that the guy they named Scott's hut after?  "
"No, " I said, quickly
grasping the opportunity to divert the conversation away from the dude
issue.  "That was Mr. Hut."  It took us eight hours to get back, and
then I had to put up my tent.
It was snowing lightly, and I was too tired to dig out the igloo.
I chose a place at the back of camp, facing the horizon.  My metal tent
pegs weren't deep enough, so I hijacked a bunch of bamboo flagpoles,
and as soon as my tent was up I collapsed into a deep sleep.
When I woke up, a face was hovering a foot above mine.
"Hi Woo, " it growled.  "Didn't want to wake you."
"This is a funny way to go about not waking me, " I said as the face
drew closer.
The science team at C.W.A was using explosives to find out what the
ground was like under 6, 000 feet of ice.  "We're not particularly
interested in ice, " one of them commented breezily.  Because of the
inconvenient ice cover, most Antarctic geology can be studied only by
remote-sensing methods such as seismology, which involves setting off
explosions, bouncing the soundwaves down through the ice to the earth's
crust and recording them on their way back up.
Before the explosives could be detonated, they had to be buried, and 12 itinerant drillers had spent the season traveling around the ice sheet
within a 200-mile radius of C.W.A boring a series of 90foot holes.
They began each hole with a self-contained unit that heated water and
sprinkled it on the ice like a shower head.  This unit fulfilled a
vital secondary function as a hot tub.  We got in four at a time,
draping our clothes carefully over the pipes to prevent them from deep
freezing.
This was a task requiring consummate skill.  A square inch of fabric
inadvertently exposed to the air could have excruciating
consequences.
Five members of the drill team were women, and in the hot tub one day I
found myself next to Diane, a lead driller.  She was tall and willowy
with long hair the color of cornflakes.  I asked her how long she had
been away.
"Thirty-five days, " she said.  "And my feet haven't been dry since we
left McMurdo."
"What did you do out there?  " I asked.  "I mean, when you weren't
drilling?  "
"Well, just living took all our time.  We worked
twelve-hour shifts on the drill, and then we'd have to set up the cook
tent and all that.  We had to plan what we were going to eat carefully,
even if it was going to be a can of peaches it had to be hung up in the
sleep tent overnight to thaw."
"Was it your, er, ambition to do this kind of work?  " I asked,
struggling to grasp the concept that a woman could enjoy spending weeks
in subzero conditions manipulating a drill for 12 hours a day.
"I do love it, " she said.  "I think this is the most magical place in
the world.  People say, But all you can see is white!  That's true, but
I could never, ever get bored on the drill when I can watch the dancing
ice crystals and the halos twinkling around the sun.  It's another
world."  The evening before they flew back to McMurdo, the drillers
brought in ice from a deep core and hacked it up on the chopping board
in the galley.  It was over 300 years old and packed with oxygen
bubbles.
It fizzed like Alka-Seltzer in our drinks.  Diane was baking cinnamon
rolls.
When she opened the oven door a rich, spicy aroma filled the
Jamesway.
It was like a souk.
Diane inhaled deeply.  "Heaven!  " she said.
The next day I moved into the igloo.  It was at the back of what they
called Tent City, and it took me two hours to dig out the trench
leading down to the entrance.  Like all good igloos, the sleeping area
was higher than the entrance, thereby creating a cold sink.
Inside, there was a carpet of rubber mats, and a ledge ran all the way
around about six inches off the floor.  I spent a further two hours
clearing away the pyramids of snow that had accumulated through the
cracks.
When my new home was ready, I spread out my sleep gear and sat on it.
The bricks spiraled to a tapering cork, filtering a blue fluorescent
light that threw everything inside into muted focus.  I was filled with
the same sense of peace that I felt in church.  Yes, that was itþit was
as if I had entered a temple.
The previous inhabitant had suspended a string across the ceiling like
a washing line, so after hanging up my goggles, glacier glasses, damp
socks and thermometer, I fished out the beaten-up postcards that I
always carry around and propped them on the ledge.  The blue light
falling on the "Birth of Venus" gave her kneelength auburn hair an
emerald sheen, and the flying angels had never looked more at home.
Botticelli would surely have approved.
In the mornings I sat underneath rows of cup hooks at one of the
Formica tables in the galley Jamesway, watching the beakers make
sandwiches and fill water bottles before setting out to explode their
bombs.  The cooks, Bob and Matys were the fixed point of camp and a
great team.
Every morning they dragged banana sledges over to what they called
their shop, a storage chamber 17 feet under the ice from which they
winched up filmy cardboard boxes on a kind of Antarctic dumbwaiter.
Mary was relentlessly cheerful, and she loped rather than walked.  Bob
had an Assyrian beard, a penguin tattoo on his thigh and a reputation
as the best cook on the ice.  He was hyperenergetic, very popular, and
seven seasons in Antarctica, including two winters, had left him with a
healthy disrespect for beakerdom.
"What's going on out there?  " someone asked one day after a deafening
explosion.
"They're just trying to melt the West Antarctic ice sheet, " Bob said,
scrubbing a frozen leg of lamb.  He could seem abrasive, but really he
was as soft as a marshmallow.
Seismic Man had spent so long in the field over the past six weeks that
he said "Over" as he reached the end of whatever he was saying.
When he was called to set off an explosion, we rode far out from camp
on the back of Trigger, his snowmobile.  The ice was mottled and ridged
like a relief map, and a hint of wind blew a fine layer of white powder
over the surface.  You could almost absorb the psychic energy out
there.
"You know what?  " I said to him one day as I unpacked orange sausages
of nitroglycerine.  "People call this a sterile landscape because
nothing grows or lives.  But I think it's pulsahngwith energyþ as if
it's about to explode, like one of these bombs."
"Hell, yes, " he drawled.  "I've often felt as if it's alive out
here.
Hey, look at that, " he said, pointing to where the china blue sky grew
pale.
"It looks like a bunch of fuel drums, " I said.
"Ha!  " he replied.  "It's the distorted image of camp, thrown up by
refraction of the light.  It's caused by temperature inversion in the
atmosphere."  Every few minutes a sharp tirade would issue forth
alarmingly from somewhere within the folds of his parka.  The beakers
were forever gabbling to one another over the radio.  They had
developed their own language.  Entire conversations took place between
Lars and Seismic Man consisting of acronyms, nicknames and impenetrable
jokes.
I had never met anyone who found life so effortless.  He approached
everything with a positive attitude and saw something to laugh about in
every situation.  As a result, everyone loved him.
He was also disarmingly perceptive.  He seemed to have got me down,
Igloos and Nitroglycerine anyway.  He exemplified the easygoing languor
I associate with Texas, without any of the cowboy-hat brashness.
"Can you bind the explosives into bundles of three?  " he said, handing
me a roll of tape.  "I have to set up the shot box."  The drillers had
already made a hole, and after attaching the first two orange bundles
to an electric line, we lowered them into it.
Then we tossed down the other 400 pounds of explosives.  When the time
came to initiate the detonator, I pressed the button on the shot box
and a black plume shot up like a geyser.  A sound that could have come
from Cape Canaveral followed in a second.
"Wow, " I said.
"That's it, Woo!  " said Seismic Man, throwing an empty tube of
explosive into the air and heading it like a soccer ball.

nHow are we going to measure the soundwaves?  " I asked.
"When they bounce back up from the earth's crust?  "
"Well, " he said,
packing up the shot box, "what we're trying to do here is image the
geology under six thousand feet of ice.
Seismology is the tool we use, and it operates either by refraction or
reflection.
The difference between the two is largely a function of scale, in that
reflection facilitates the imaging of a smaller area in greater
detail.
With me so far?  " I nodded.
"What you've just been doing is refracting.  The soundwaves we send
down are refracted back to the surface and recorded by a line of Ref
Teks, the soundwave equivalent of the tape recorder.  The Ref Teks
contain computers hooked up to geophones.  We have ninety of them two
hundred yards apart right now, recording away.  So all you and I have
left to do is pack up!  " On the way back we stopped about ten miles
from camp to eat our sandwiches (tinned ham and mustard).  A narrow
strip of incandescent purple-blue light lay on the horizon between ice
and sky, looking for all the world like the sea.  It seemed to me then
that it would be almost impossible, in this landscape, not to reflect
on forces beyond the human plane.  Here, palpably, was something better
than the realm of abandoned dreams and narrowing choices that loomed
outside the rain-splattered windows of home.
"You're right, " said Seismic Man when I mentioned this.
"Wasn't it Barry Loper who wrote that Antarctica reflects the mystery
that we call God'?  " I called what I sensed there God too, but you
could give it many names.
I brought faith with me to Antarctica.  I can't say where my faith came
from because I don't know, it certainly wasn't from my upbringing since
neither of my parents have ever had it.  I remember first being aware
of it when I was about 14, when a lot of other things were happening to
me.
At first it embarrassed me, like a virulent pimple on the end of my
nose.  I have no problems of that kind with it now, though I have
persistently abused the giver by following the siren voices of the
opposition, also dwelling in the rocky terrain of my interior life and
determined to fight to the death.
Despite a good deal of high-mindedness and a sprightly ongoing dialogue
with God, in the day-to-day hustle I constantly failed to do what I
knew to be the right thing.  A sense of spirituality all too often
stopped short of influencing action.  I was a hopeless case.
But I believed that what mattered to God was the direction I was facing
not how far away I was.  Sin, it seemed to me, was the refusal to let
God be God.  I admit that it was a handy credo to espouseþ but I did it
from the heart.  The inner journey, like my route on the ice, was not a
linear one.  It was an uncharted meandering descent through layers and
layers of consciousness, and I was intermittently tossed backward or
sideways like a diver in a current.
On Friday, January 13, a Hercules appeared in the sky.  It was going to
take the drill team and a few others back to McMurdo.
When it landed, incoming mail was borne inside ceremoniously in a metal
turquoise-and-red-striped crate.  Everyone leaped up, plunging their
arms into the crate and calling out names as packages were passed
eagerly from hand to hand.
My own mail would be waiting back at base.  It could have been worse,
Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance missed their mail by two hours
when the ship sailed out of South Georgia, and got it only 18 months
later.  Then I heard my name being called.  Someone in the mailroom
must have known where I was and slung my bundle into the metal crate.
It was like a minor Old Testament miracle.  The bundle included eight
Christmas cards, three of them featuring polar bears, two pairs of
knickers from my friend Alison and a bill from the tax man, the
bastard.  I took the cards to the igloo later and put them up to block
the cracks between the ice bricks.  Blue light shone through the polar
bears.
We went out to wave good-bye to the drillers.  The plane attempted to
take off four times.  It was too light at the back so the drillers, we
heard over the radio, had to stand in the tail.
That night I found a hillock of snow on my sleeping bag and was obliged
to reseal the igloo bricks from the outside.  It was perishing cold in
there all the time, and getting to sleep was an unmeetable challenge.
I tried to listen to my Walkman to take my mind off the pain, but the
earphones got twisted under my balaclava and the batteries died in
minutes.  All my clothes froze in the night.
Besides the water bottle, I was obliged to stow myVHF radio and various
spare batteries in between the bag liner and the sleeping bag to
prevent them from freezing.

"It's like sleeping in a cutlery drawer, " said Seismic Man, who had
made valiant efforts to stay in the igloo.  "Why are you putting
yourself through this when there are warm Jamesways a few hundred yards
away?  " It was the romance of it, if I was honest.  I liked the idea
of living in my own igloo, slightly apart from camp, on the West
Antarctic ice sheet.  Besides, during the periods when I didn't have to
devote every ounce of energy to maintaining my core temperature, I did
love its blue haze very much.  I had noticed that when the sun was in a
certain position it was faintly tinted with a deep, translucent
claret.
The surface of the bricks gleamed like white silver all around me.
When I crawled out in the mornings (this had to be accomplished
backward) and twisted around on my sunken front path, I looked up and
blinked at a pair of pale sundogs, bright spots near the sun formed by
the diffraction of light by ice crystals in the atmosphere and joined
by a circular rainbow.
Each night produced a new torment.  That evening my knees got wet (this
was caused by a rogue patch of ice on the bag liner), so I moved the
wind pants doing service as a pillow down under them.  This meant that
the mummy-style hood of the bag flopped down over my head, raising the
problem (they were lining up for recognition now) of imminent
suffocation.  The digital display on my watch faded.  Out of the corner
of my eye I spied a fresh cone of snow on the floor near the
entrance.
Forced out of the bag to plug the hole with a sock, I brushed my head
against the ceiling and precipitated a rush of ice crystals down the
back of my neck.  I began nurturing uncharitable thoughts about
Eskimos.
The morning after the departure of the drillers, I went straight to the
galley to thaw out, noting that I had forgotten to stand my shovel
upright with the result that it was now lost in accumulated snow.  Camp
had shrunk from 45 to 22 overnight.  Patsy Cline was blaring out of the
speakers, and Bob and Mary were playing Frisbee with a piece of French
toast.
In the end the igloo defeated me.  As I walked back to it the next
night, I eyed the drums nestling in cradles outside the Jamesways,
pumping diesel into the Preways.  Sneaking guiltily into one of the two
berthing Jamesways, I lay on the floor behind a curtain.  It was so
easy.
Ice streams A, B, C, D and E are located on the West Antarctic ice
sheet.  There is also a little F, but no one ever talks about it.
Hermann, the moon-faced Road to Oriana scientist, was investigating Ice
Stream B. He wanted me to go out there with him and his teamþthey were
staying for a weekþbut I knew I wouldn't be able to get back easily,
and I couldn't risk being stranded anywhere that late in the season.  I
was sad.
"Just come for the put-in, " he said.  I looked at him.  It was an
extraordinarily kind gesture, the put-in involved two Otter flights,
and taking me along would seriously complicate logistics.  "You must
see it, " he said.  7 must support you as a writer."  Hermann was
buzzing around his pallets like a wasp as the Otter arrived.  When we
took off, I sat in the back of the hold with him.
The Whitmore Mountains appeared in the distance.  Hermann's eyes lit
up.
"Look!  " he said, pointing to a hollow above a deeply crevassed
area.
"The beginning of Ice Stream B!  " The ice there looked like a holey
old sheet.  Hermann pressed a hand-held Global Positioning System unit
against the window and said solemnly, "We are entering the chromosome
zone."  It sounded like the opening sequence of a science-fiction
movie.
"The crevasses change direction as the glacier moves, " he said, "and
turn into thousands of Y chromosomes."  After that we entered the
Dragon, the transition zone between the moving ice and the stable ice,
a highly deformed, heavily crevassed area streaked with slots.  Hermann
tapped his pencil against the thick glass of the porthole and held
forth.  "The ice streams are not well understood.  The boreholes we
have drilled to the bottom of this stream reveal that the base of the
stream is at melting point.  So they move"þtap, tap, tapþ"these motions
provide a process for rapid dispersal and disintegration of this vast
quantity of ice.  Most of the drainage of this unstable western ice
sheet occurs through the ice streams.  The mechanics"þtap, tap, tapþ"of
ice streaming play a role in the response of the ice sheet to climatic
change.  In other words, the ice streams are telling us about the
interactive role of the ice sheet in global change."  So it seemed that
if the ice melts, resulting in the fabled Great Flood of the popular
press, water will pour out of the continent, via the ice streams, onto
the Siple Coast, virtually the only part of

Antarctica not bounded by mountains.
Hermann settled back in his seat.  "The aim of investigating icestream
dynamics, " he concluded, "is to establish whether the ice sheet is
stable."
"Geology, " Lars had told me, "is an art as well as a science."
Hermann stowed the pencil in his top pocket, my ears popped, and we
landed by a few dozen ragged flags on a relatively stable tear-shaped
island in the middle of Ice Stream B called the Unicorn.
Hermann's eye, glittering like the mariner's, gazed at three or four
flags flapping on bamboo poles in the distance.  "The flags mark our
boreholes, " he said.
"We left equipment down in these holes, gathering data.
Those two boreholes"þhe pointed to a pair of ragged red flagsþ"are
called Lost Love and Mount Chaos."  It was like entering a private
kingdom.
The Dragon, which had resembled a slender windblown channel of ice from
the air, was really a twomile-wide band of chaotic crevassing running
for 40 miles down one side of the island.  It was a dramatic landscape,
its appeal sharpened by the fact that fewer than 20 people had ever
seen it.
Hermann's long-standing field assistant, who had traveled with us, was
a gazelle-like woman called Keri.  When the plane took off and the
sound of the engines faded, she began spooling out the antenna.
"You be my deputy field assistant, " Hermann said to me.  We crunched
off to a flag where he dug around until he found a plywood board
encrusted with crystals.  Fishing out a skein of wires from underneath
it, and attaching them to a small measuring device, he began sucking up
data.
After a few minutes he beamed, an expression he retained until I left
the camp, and possibly much longer.
He started inscribing a neat column of figures in pencil in a yellow
waterproof notebook.
"These bits of data, " he said, "are all little clues to the big
puzzle."  Back at C.W.A they were detonating the last blasts of the
season.
Everyone went outside one morning to watch 750 pounds of explosives go
up half a mile away.  The blaster was close to the site.  A
black-and-gray mushroom cloud surged 500 feet into the air, followed,
seconds later, by a prolonged, muffled boom.
"One less for lunch, Bob, " said Jose.
I skied out to see the crater.  It was 45 feet in diameter with a
conical mound in the middle.  A delicate film of black soot had settled
over the ice.  The blaster was admiring his work.  "My hundredth of the
season, " he said proudly.
He was taciturn, as cold as the ice in which he buried his explosives,
but once I showed an interest in his bombs he began opening boxes to
show me different kinds of powder, expounding upon the apparently
limitless virtues of nitroglycerine.
"Largest charge I've used this season, " he intoned with the treacly
vowels of Mississippi "was nine thousand pounds."  I tut-tutted
admiringly as he ran his fingers through baby-pink balls of explosive
which looked like candy and smelled of diesel.
It was here, above all other places, that Antarctica most resembled the
grainy images of the moon's surface.  After man had reached both Poles
(or it was believed he had), Everest was called the Third Pole, and
when it, too, was conquered in 1953, interest shifted to the moon.
Space became an arena for the international race, just as Antarctica
had been before it, whenYuri Gagarin went up in 1961, three weeks
before a U. S.

manned rocket, the Americans attempted to turn their failure into
success by claiming that their astronauts actually "drove" the
spaceships whereas Gagarin just sat there.  Dogs, oxygen, actual
control of the craft .  . . plus Sa change.
But NASA failed to provide the world with heroes who could keep hold of
the public imagination, and only two years after the hysteria attendant
upon the first moon walk, the U. S. public displayed such overwhelming
lack of interest in Apollo 13 that the networks dropped the
live-from-space broadcast filmed by Jim Lovell and his two
colleagues.
Houston got prime time only when the mission was aborted and the
astronauts were in danger of dying in outer space.
As the days were slipping away, I decided to catch a lift back to
McMurdo in the Otter.  I whipped up a bread-and-butter pudding as a
farewell gift.  While they were silently eating it, Jen, a feisty
individual working her second season as a field assistant, filled a tin
bowl with hot water, rolled up her long johns and perched on a chair in
the galley shaving her legs.
"But who's gonna see those legs, Jen?  " someone yelled.
This was followed by a ripple of laughter.
"Get outta here, " she called.  "I wanna be a girlie for once."  I went
over to the igloo and lay down one last time.
Everyone came over to the Otter to say good-bye.  "See you in

Mactown, " said Seismic Man, squinting into the sunlight.
The pilot wanted to play cards with the air mechanic, so I moved into
the cockpit.  A stack of cassettes was jammed between the front
seatsþmost of it was 1970s stuff I hadn't heard since school, and it
was perfect cruising music.  Cnme of the Century, The Best of the

Eagles, early Bowie, that Fleetwood Mac album we all had.  A good deal
of joking took place over the headsets, as the crew and I were about to
set off for Rothera, the British station on the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Otter's route, straight across the continent, was about 2, 000 miles, whereas mine would be ten times that as I had Igloos and
Nitroglycerine to go by way of a military airstrip in the south of
England before starting all over again.  I had to take this absurd
course as there is simply no way of traveling from one side of the
Antarctic continent to anotherþshort of manhauling that is.  I couldn't
hitch a lift on the Otter, as it didn't have an inch of space
available.  Furthermore, it was too expensive, time-consuming and
complicated to attempt to fly from Christchurch to the Falklands on
commercial airlines.  In the end I had no choice but to buy the
cheapest return ticket between Heathrow and Christchurch and rely on
the Royal Air Force to get me down to the Falklands in time to meet a
Dash-7 plane from the British Antarctic Survey.
Looking down at the earth from 12, 000 feet, I felt then that my life
was in perfect perspective.  I had a sense of oneness with the
universeþI belonged to it, just like the crystals forming on the
wingtip.  At that moment all my anxieties and failures and pain seemed
to me but shadows on the wasteland.  Admiral Byrd, an unbeliever, had
experienced something similar in Antarctica, in his own way.  He
described it as "a feeling that transcended reason, that went to the
heart of man's despair and found it groundless."  It seemed to
represent the ultimate destination of all our journeys.
I c e b r e a k e r T E N Icebreaker Men are not old here Only the
rocks are old, and the sheathing ice, Only the restless sea, chafing
the frozen land, Ever moving, matched by the ceaselessly-circling sun
.
. .
Lighten our darkness, oh Lord, And lettest thou thy servants depart in
peace, For peace is here, here in the quiet land.
FRANK DEBENHAM, geologist on Scott's last expedition An Alaskan
mountaineer returned to McMurdo from the field with scabbed cheeks and
duct tape stuck around the metal frame of his glasses.  He was very
gloomy, for he had lost his snowmobile.  I said I thought this was
quite a feat.
"Well, " he said glumly, you have to tie the throttle down, otherwise
over long distances your hands freeze.  So if you hit a sastrugi and
fall off without your safety cord connected to kill the motor, the
thing just keeps going until it runs out of fuelþcould be a hundred
miles."  I wondered what the occupants of another remote field camp
would make of an unaccompanied snowmobile careering across the ice
sheet.
My office at McMurdo was permanently adrift with heaps of polypropylene
underwear, a tangle of crampons, rolls of film, Ziplocs of trail mix,
tents, tent pegs, insulated mugs, water bottles, pee bottles and
neoprene bottles of Jack Daniels.  One day, I was kneeling on the floor
repacking my survival bag when the gray silence of the lab was
shattered by an explosion of voices next door.  Imre Friedmann and his
team had arrived.  Hungarian by birth, Imre was a distinguished
microbiologist and, at 73, an old Antarctic warrior.  A valley had been
named after him.
Shortly before coming south he had performed 500 squats in the office
of some senior bureaucrat to prove that he was fit enough to join an
expedition heading for the Siberian permafrost later in the year.
Besides studying the cryptoendolithic microbial communities of the
DryValleys, he was a fertile source of Biolab lore.
"It was very cramped, " he said one day, "but we all had space.  It was
before the days of the Walkman, and my graduate students used to listen
to loud rock music.  I retaliated on the other side of the partition by
playing classical music, and the volume wars would break out.  When I
was really desperate I turned to Schoenberg."  Friedmann 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.
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
colorful, chain-smoking character with wild eyes and ink-black hair
that hung over his eyes like a sheepdog's.  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 A1, who wore a thin braid down his
back.
Imre invited me for a day's geologizing at Battleship Promontory in the
Convoy Range, where he was collecting rocks colonized by microbes.  We
arranged to meet for breakfast at seven the next day and climbed into a
helicopter shortly afterward.  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 visible only 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 centimeter 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 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, A1 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."  Later I
labeled specimen boxes while Imre and A1 shuffled around wielding a
geology hammer.
"In this quarter inch of rock, " said Imre, holding aloft a red
splinter, "we have a compressed version of a whole rain forest
canopy.
The microorganisms slice rock off layer by layer, like salami.
One slice of salami takes ten thousand years to cut.  So you see here
biological and geological time scales overlap."  The microorganisms
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 microorganisms can live through the hostility of the Antarctic
winter, there might be some that 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 lay at the heart of the most fundamental questions of
biology.
"Will we find life on Mars in our lifetime?  " I asked.
"Maybe in yoursþnot mine.  The limitations are not technological now.
They are financial."
"What do you think about life on Mars?  " I asked A1, 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 the past five years, " he said, you'd 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 (not a success), religion (Imre, "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 cider
bags "Containing No Apple Juice" and ate fig rolls containing figs
like shrapnel.
There was talk of putting up the tents.  Imre nodded off.

A1

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 burned faces and duct-taped
parkas.  Tribes of the dispossessed were a feature of the Cr"Ty.  Boots
formed queues outside offices, thermal jackets draped themselves over
chairs in the lounge and picked-over Ziplocs of trail mix littered the
kitchen.  Over at Scott Base the mad microbiologist, his hair still
shooting upward like the flame of an 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 sad task of returning
my kit to the Berg Field Center.
Afterward, I sat glumly in the office.  The icebreaker had finally
struggled into McMurdo and was squatting on the sound opposite the
station, cracked ice trailing 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, but
concrete reminders of life on the other side of the looking glass, that
was something else.  In the old days the arrival of the ship was the
major event of the season.  The Australian Charles Laseron, Mawson's
assistant biologist on the 1911-14 expedition, recorded in his
rumbustious account of the experience, South with Mawson, 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 sent a helicopter over to fetch me.  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 Coast
Guard 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 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 was
unenthusiastic about the south.  It had been a long trip, the ship was
dIy, 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-gray
undersides.  Skuas landed on the floes, their spindly legs
slithering.
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 breathe 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 upward 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.  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.  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.  Petty Officer Edgar "Tall" 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 unsavory notion that he had lacked the moral
fiber of the superior classes was whispered in gilded corridors back
home.  In the making of the myth, Tall has been conveniently maneuvered
into a corner, and he is barely remembered outside his native
Rhossily.
He was not represented on a set of 25 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 Tall'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, Tall
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 techrlical authenticity.  It served to distinguish
the working-class Evans from the four toffsþand 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 demoralized, and I had a week's hard traveling off the
ice before I reached the British base on the 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 C.W.A 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 ax and the taped label
from the goggles, ripped the elcroed name off the parka, unstuck the
colored tape from the neoprene water bottle and pulled the badge off
the cap.
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's response when Auden asked him
why he played patience so much.  He reflected for a moment, then 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 good-bye.  At midnight Art DeVries, 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 traveling on a
C-141 Starlifter.  At four o'clock in the morning, after being handed
our bagged meals, we boarded the matte-gray, windowless plane.

PART TWO

When you look upon such things there comes surging through
the confusion of the mind an awareness of the dignity of the earth, of
the unaccountable importance of being alive, and the thought comes out
of nowhere that unhappiness rises not so much from lacking as from
having too much .  . . And you guess the end of the world will probably
look like that, and the last men retreating from the cliffs will look
out upon some such horizon, with all things at last in equilibrium, the
winds quiet, the sea frozen, the sky composed, and the earth in glacial
quietude.
Or so you fancy.  Then along comes a walloping Antarctic blizzard and
knocks such night dreaming into a cocked hat.
RICHARD E. BYRD, from Discorery T H E A N T A R C T C P E N N S UA
LESSER /WEST) ANTARCTICA O MO kilometers O riM miles n SOUTH <, POLE
From New Zealand to the Falklands It's just that there are some things
women don't do.  They don't become Pope or President or go down to the
Antarctic.

HARRY DARLINGTON, chief pilot on Finn Ronne's 194S48

Antarctic Research Expedition We landed at Christchurch at half-past
eleven in the morning on January 25.  When the aircraft door opened,
the smell of trees and green things filled the plane.  To us, it was as
if we had come to the middle of a jungle.  A 747 had just arrived from
Singapore, and we all cleared customs together.  The Singaporeans
looked clean, elegant and ironed, as well as very little.  They eyed
us, a shaggy tribe of overdressed primates with matted hair and worn
faces.
The traffic even within the airport compound was overwhelming.  I
ordered a cappuccino at a cafe with the Swedish scientist who had read
the part of Amundsen at the Pole on Christmas Day, and we both drooled
over the frothy cups.
"It's really too good to drink, " he said.  "We should just look at
*.
" Later, Roger took me to turn on the streetlights of Christchurch at
SouthPower, where he worked.  It was still possible to do it manually,
and I flicked a switch and watched the city fizz to life.  On the first
night, savoring the darkness, I slept in the garden.
"It's so warm, " I said to Roger the next morning when he returned from
his daily run up the nearest hill.
"What d'you expect?  " he said.  "It's the end of Januaryþmidsummer,
practically."  When I went into town, I wanted to buy something in
every shop.  I ran into people I knew from the ice, and we quickly
parked ourselves in coffee shops.  It was as if we were looking for one
another.
I wore a skirt, walked in the checkered shadows of trees, had my hair
cut and opened my bag without being bitten by a crampon.  I caught a
bus to Lyttelton Museum, an overstuffed old building smelling of
linoleum.
The small Antarctic gallery displayed a vermilion parka identical to
the one I had taken off the previous day and curled photographs of the
Terra Nova black cat, called Nigger, in the hammock specially made for
him on the long voyage from Britain to New Zealand.
On my last night in Christchurch I was invited to a soiree in the Polar
Room, the repository of an impressive collection of recent Antarctic
memorabilia.  It was presided over by the most assiduous keeper of the
flame, an author, historian, eccentric and bon viveur called David
Harrowfield.  The Polar Room was tucked away at the back of his neat
suburban house and clipped garden, and its trophies included the escape
hatch from the first Scott Base bar and a bicycle modified with skis.
Peter, the Asgard Ranger I had met at Scott Base, arrived to model his
original and much-abused Ranger parka, which he had donated to the
Polar Room, and large quantities of wine and sausage rolls were
disgorged from the fridge.  It was the centenary of the landing of the
Southern Cross on the Antarctic continent, so David put on a special
cape (I can't remember why it was special, or even if I ever knew) and
declaimed from Borchgrevink's diary until we had drunk the wine and
eaten the sausage rolls.  Then we went home.
Roger made me tomato on toast for breakfast as his last gesture of "NZ
Operational Support, " as he referred to himself.  On my way out to the
airport, I found a sausage roll in my pocket.  I stopped off at
Canterbury Museum to meet the Antarctic curator and historian Baden

Norris.  Theywere cutting the grass in Hagley Park, and the air smelled
sweet.  Baden was waiting in the foyer for me when I arrived.  He was a
short, middle-aged man with a diffident manner and an encyclopedic
knowledge of Antarctica.  I took to him straightaway.  He had spent six
weeks alone at Shackleton's hut in 1963, making sure American
helicopters didn't land too close to the Adelie colony, which had
halved since the first landing.
"I felt I was never alone, " he explained.  As we walked around his
gallery, he told me that he had grown up in Lyttelton.
"Antarctica was always part of my life, " he said, running his fingers
through his gray hair.  "My next-door neighbors were children of people
who'd been on the early expeditions."  He pointed out Spencer-Smith's
ecclesiastical stoles, neatly folded in a glass cabinet.
"Extraordinary man, " he commented, more to himself than to me.
Spencer-Smith was a member of the Ross Sea party of Shackleton's
Endurance expedition, and in his unpublished sledging journal, which
came to light in 1981, a neat pencil hand records the laborious work of
depot-laying and the powerful influence of the continent upon the human
spirit.  "All the old questionings seem to come up for answer in this
quiet place, " he wrote, "but one is able to think more quietly than in
civilisation."  He was a priest and a polymath (he had "a long
argument" with Stevens about the essential nature of a preposition),
and his spirit was relentlessly cheerful until he died from scurvy and
exhaustion lashed onto the back of a sledge.  When he was left alone
and sick in his tent for days, he delivered a sermon in French to
occupy himself, and on All Souls' Day he recorded, "More trips around
London this evening."  I flew to Auckland on a Hawker Siddeley, and the
man sitting next to me asked where I'd been.  When I told him, he said,
"Oh, my cousin went there."  Everybody in New Zealand knew someone who
had been south, even if it was the milkman's brother.  It brought the
continent into their sphere of consciousness and made it less remote.
In Britain and America what I had done was akin to going to the moon.
"Antarctica does sit in your imagination more if you live in the south
of New Zealand, " someone said.  "Also, on a global scale, New Zealand
is involved, for once."  A friend of Roger's once told me that he
needed "to go for an Oatie, " meaning to visit the lavatory.  The
phrase had evolved from Oates's famous departure, with which everyone
in New Zealand was familiar.  Most revealing of all, a Maori waitress
who sat down at a truckstop to join me for a mug of tea said, "You
know, when we feel a cold wind on our faces, we know where it's coming
from.
" Perception of place is bound to be conditioned by nationality.
The race to the North Pole was an American race, whereas there were no
Americans in the south when Shackleton and Scott were manhauling across
the ice.
This partially explains why Antarctica's role in the American national
psyche is less significant than it is in Britain.  The media in America
has tended to orientate public interest toward the Arctic, whereas the
British press, generally, has done the opposite.  An

American scientist I met stooped over a seal hole on the Ross Sea
remarked, "Antarctica seems to have been like the Wild West for Brits,
" and after a pause he added, "Maybe it still is."  Nonetheless, to
many English people the Arctic and the Antarctic are
indistinguishable.
I had observed it when people issued warnings to me about polar bears
and asked, as they frequently did, From New Zealand to the Falklands
"When are you going back up there?  " In reality, the two could hardly
be more different.  First, the Arctic is not a landmass, and the North
Pole is on floating ice.  Second, the Arctic Circle has an indigenous
population.  People can live within it unassisted.  Musk oxen wander
within 800 miles of the North Pole.
Things grow.
Despite the fact that the outer edges of the Arctic Circle can sustain
life, all the Frozen Beards agree that trekking to the North Pole is a
much harsher business than its southern equivalent.
Everyone who had been on northern expeditions remembered immediately
how bad it had been, whereasþlike an irresistible loverþAntarctica had
seduced them into forgetting the pain.  Mike Stroud, who made three
attempts with Sir Ranulph Fiennes to walk unaided across the sea ice to
the North Pole and manhauled across the southern continent via the
South Pole, was in no doubt about which he preferred.  "The Arctic is
an evil place.  It's infinitely more threatening.  You have to trek in
winter, for a startþthat's the only time it's frozen overþand getting
to the North Pole doesn't have the same appeal as getting to the South
Pole.
Why is that?  Is it a British thing?  It occurs to me that it might be
a remnant of Scott's influence.  Antarctica is still very special in
the British consciousness.  It was a mystery for much longer than the
Arctic."  Robert Swan, who has walked to both Poles, was
characteristically exuberant on the subject, "The Arctic is dour and
badtempered.
It's a bastard kind of place.  It drip feeds you arsenic in your tea.
The Antarctic is far more beguilingþthough it's more of a bastard in
a way, as it lulls you into a false sense of security and then bangs
you from behind with a sledgehammer.  It all looks much softer, but
crevasses lurkþit's more psychopathic."  He anthropomorphized both
places relentlessly, "Antarctica is like meeting a mass murderer who
looks nice.  At least in the Arctic you know you're meeting a mass
murderer."  Before I left his huge Chelsea office he tipped his chair
back, paused for a moment and, neatly reversing the biological
distinction that separates the two places, said quietlyþas quietly as
he could say anything, that isþ"The Arctic is a bit dead.  The
Antarctic is definitely much more alive.  In the Arctic, it's as if
someone has said, Freeze!, whereas when we went up the Beardmore it was
as if the landscape were saying, Hi how's it going?  " Even in
Auckland, I found Antarctica.  It was one half of the city's largest
tourist attraction, called "Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World and
Antarctic Encounter.
" I rode a Sno-Cat through a penguin colony, though the birds were
still in transit from San Diego Zoo.  Workmen crouched on the
fiberglass bergs, eating sandwiches, their thermos flasks balancing on
the smiling heads of plastic seals.  People were videoing the videos.
They had even erected a replica of Scott's hut in which a piano
occasionally broke spontaneously into the National Anthem.  The whole
place endorsed the old imperial notion that this was part of Kiwi
culture too, a particularly strange idea in the muggy, subtropical
north island.  Edmund Hillary, though, had made a nice introductory
film about Antarctica, which played on a continuous loop.  He ended by
saying, "It belongs to you."  I liked that.
I flew to L. A. and from there to London.  A sales rep from a computer
company attached himself to me for the whole journey.  He was wearing
an Armani suit, and his face possessed none of those small wrinkles
produced by thought.  I last saw him next to the luggage carousel at
Heathrow, the Armani looking as though he'd had a fight in it.
"Nice to be back on terra-cotta, " he said.
I spent two days in London, feeling like a visitor in my own life.

When I turned up for mass at Saint Mark's on Regent's Park Canal,

always one of my first ports of call, I was shocked to find a cardboard
arrow pinned to the locked doors.  It was pointing to the stone steps
that led to the crypt.  When I got down there, a dozen people From New
Zealand to the Falklands squeezed into Sunday School chairs were
gathered around a trestle table, bare save for a plain wooden cross.
Mass had not yet begun.
I stood in the narrow doorway, baffled.
"My dear, " said Father Tom as he strode toward me, arms
outstretched.
"You won't have heard."  A gang had broken into our church the night
before Remembrance

Sunday and piled everything they could find into three enormous
bonfires, which they lit, presumably warming their hands as they stood
around enjoying the conflagration.  The building had been virtually
gutted, although the stained-glass window of Saint Mark in dashing
purple slippers had not been fatally damaged.  This was next to the
Lady Chapel, and in it Saint Mark was writing in a large book, though
he had been distracted (presumably by Saint Peter in the adjacent
window) and had twisted away from his work as if eager to see what was
going on.  He was also wearing a sumptuous emerald robe.  I had grown
very fond of the image.
"How was the South Pole?  " asked Father Tom brightly.
It seemed very far away.
The next day my father drove me to the Royal Air Force base at

Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

"Where's the entrance?  " he asked as we crawled along outside.
UHow should I know?  " I snapped.  This brief reentry into the real
world had made me disoriented and irritable.  Since leaving McMurdo I
had felt as if I existed only in suspended animation.
"Sorry, Dad, " I said weakly.
After a good deal of hanging around, I flew to Ascension Island on a
Tristar, the cover of the in-flight magazine in front of me depicting a
customer descending by parachute.  By mistake the pilot referred to
"the camera crew" rather than "the cabin crew" over the loudspeaker,
you couldn't help wondering what was on his mind.  The air force
refuels its Tristars at Ascension enroute to the Falkland Islands, and
from there a British Antarctic Survey Dash-7 was to convey me back to
Antarctica.
I discovered that two other people on the plane were heading for
Rothera, the main British station on the Antarctic Peninsula.
They were both employees of Tilbury Douglas, the construction company
contracted to carry out rebuilding works for the British Antarctic
Survey as part of its Way Forward Programme.  John was a plumber who
had never traveled beyond Boumemouth, and George was a 68-year-old
manager who had been brought out of retirement to oversee the job.
George had already been south once and was keen to impart his knowledge
on this and any other matter.  He emitted noise nonstop, in fact, like
the continuous-loop sound track at the Antarctic Encounter.
The crinkly coastline of Ascension, laced with white surf, was ringed
rvith a band of streaky green that faded into the china blue

Atlantic.

The island was goose-bumped with small peaks.  When we landed the
braying and overfed senior officers in the front row got off first,
met by a minisquadron of clean-shaven Air Force personnel marching
along the tarmac in a uniform of pale khaki shorts with long socks and
Hush Puppies.  They looked like extras in a war film set in the Western
Desert.
A team of firefighters stood to attention in silver-foil outfits as the
VIPs sped past, provoking the squaddies bound for the Falklands into a
burst of Gary Glitter choruses.  The rest of us were herded into a
compound and locked up.  It was very hot and sticky despite the soft
tropical breeze, and everyone bought cold cans of Beck's beer.
"I've never drunk beer in the morning before, " said John.
George and I exchanged guilty glances.  The squaddies were dispensing
beer as if they might never see liquid again.  Most of them were from
RAF 20

Squadron, responsible for the ground-to-air missile system in the
Falklands.  An announcement over the loudspeaker informed us that
anyone drunk would be off-loaded, at which a great cheer went up,
Ascension Island (beyond the compound at least) being rather more
agreeable than the Falklands.
From New Zealand to the Falklands The compound consisted of a flagged
concrete yard containing wooden tables with integrated chairs and
parasols and a pockmarked 1883 cannon.
It was surrounded by a wire fence and lined on one side with palm
trees.
The small hills around the airstrip were littered with military
hardware.  One of them, higher than the others, stood out because it
was green, not brown, and in a startling fit of imagination it had been
named Green Mountain.
Not much had happened to Ascension Island or its famous green turtles
since it was garrisoned by the Royal Marines in 1815, initially to
prevent the French from rescuing Napoleon from Saint Helena.
Certainly nothing happened while we were there.  The flight was
delayed.  The sun bleached the sky, and the squaddies began revealing
an extensive range of tattoos.  Hour after hour trickled by as further
delays were announced over the rasping loudspeaker.  George talked
about his "laddies, " by which he meant the builders, as if they were
at nursery school.  The Beck's ran out.  An announcement that we were
being diverted to Rio provoked another cheer.  The squaddies were
envisaging sultry nights in the bars of Copacabana, but it was more
likely to mean a long, stuffy evening on a bucket seat in another
faceless airport.
As we flew over wide green spaces and the thin ribbons of dusty,
untraveled Brazilian roads, I suddenly longed for the freedom of
anonymous travel.  Brazil seemed a long way from the constraints of the
ice.  At that moment I felt as if I were locked into a claustrophobic
love affair, and although I was being pulled back to the south, a voice
inside whispered urgently, "Escape while you can!  " At Rio airport
George led an assault on the duty-free shops.
We bought a bottle of red wine, a slab of goats' cheese and a box of
crackers and had a picnic by the top of the escalators.  When we
reboarded, a flight attendant marched down the aisles spraying us with
disinfectant from an aerosol can held aloft like a flaming torch in
Viking raiding party.
We landed at Mount Pleasant airport on East Fall<land, the sky a low
miasma of blues and pinks.  A line of people on the end of the strip
were holding up placards inscribed with numbers.  They were grading the
pilot on a score out of ten for his landing.  In the terminal a pair of
soldiers stood on the carousel and displayed an array of missiles we
might like to avoid stepping on, there were, they said, over a hundred
minefields lurking in the tussock.
A bus conveyed us across the island to Port Stanley, and I asked the
driver about the runway placards.  "That's what we're reduced to down
here, " he said, "to pass the time."  George was depressed by the news
that we were staying at FIPASS, a government-owned pontoon dock, rather
than the fabled Upland Goose on Stanley's main street.  I asked the
driver how long it would take to get there.  "It depends on the
traffic, " he said, although we had not yet encountered a single
vehicle.  It was very dark.  When we reached civilization two pairs of
whale jawbones were illuminated in front of the cathedral like
wishbones.  We went on, until we passed again into the gloom.  "Welcome
to Alcatraz!  " the driver said as he deposited us in driving rain at
the bottom of a flight of metal stairs.

The Falklands Intermediate Port and Storage System, FIPASS,

consists of a series of oil-rig barges built in Middlesborough and
shipped in by the Ministry of Defence after the conflict.  The Falkland
Islands government purchased it from the Ministry of Defence in 1988.
It was a perfectly acceptable place in which to stay, although there
was a turd in the toilet bowl and a sex novel under my bunk.  When I
asked for a lightbulb, the night watchman handed it over with a
sinister grin and said how nice it was to look after a lady for a
change.
From New Zealand to the Falklands With George around I could abnegate
all responsibility for my life, as he planned it out for me in minute
detail.  It was very agreeable.  In the morning we located my kit bag,
which had been languishing all season in the bowels of FIPASS.  It
contained all my British-issue cold-weather gear, which I had tried on
months before on a sweltering day in Cambridge, and which had been sent
down by ship at the beginning of the season.  Myriam picked us up in
the British Antarctic Survey Land Rover (every other vehicle was a Land
Rover in the Falklands).  She was the BAS representative, a saintly
figure who deciphered scrawled faxes from the ice requesting goods for
which she was obliged to scour the streets of Stanley.  She showed me
some of these request sheets.  For some reason, there was a run on
olives.  I wondered what this could mean.
We strolled around Stanley for an hour, George in the lead, past the
corrugated iron roofs and exuberant flowerbeds of JubileeVillas and a
vast new school.  The roof of a small house in the trellis of quiet
streets on the hill was painted with a Union Jack.

Look at that!  " said George triumphantly, pointing to a sign
indicatingThatcher Street.  "That's the spirit."  The landscape beyond
the town was reminiscent of Tierra del Fuego.
It was obvious, geographically, though I hadn't made the connection
before, as inside my head the two belonged to different worlds.
But there they were, the same purple mists, saffron steppes and cadmium
yellow slopes, the trail of lumpy steamer ducks breaking the surface of
the water and the striped underwings of upland geese flapping against a
bruised southern sky.
Being set on the idea Of getting to Atlantis You have discovered of
course Only the Ship of Fools is Making the voyage this year, As gales
of abnormal force Are predicted, and that you Must therefore be ready
to Behave absurdly enough To pass for one of The Boys, At least
appearing to love Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.
W. H. AUDEN, from Atlantis Deposited by the peerless Myriam at a
diminutive airstrip outside Port Stanley, George, John and I presented
our passports to a saturnine individual in a small, bare room while
another man flossed his teeth.
Nobody was interested in our luggageþthey didn't even look at it, let
alone set a sniffer dog loose among us.  Can we get on?  " George
asked the tooth flosser.  "If you like, " said the man.
The four-engine Dash-7 plane was luxurious after the Hercules that had
conveyed me to McMurdo.  It was carrying very little cargo, and there
were only eight seats, so I was able to walk freely around the cabin
rather than remaining wedged into a red-webbing seat.  We could have
played a game of football, and there was even a toilet.
The pilot waved me up to the jump seat for takeoff.  As he revved the
engines at the end of the runway, all the long, tired hours in sweaty
planes, all the delays and frustrations and wasted days melted into the
long strip of wobbling tarmac.  I was going back.
Stanley looked like Toytown from the air, neat and circumscribed and
little, with primary-color roofs, small animals in green fields and a
harborful of bright sails.  The pilots chatted as we cleared the
isolated farms on outlying islands, and it was odd to hear English
accents over the headset.  The pair of them cracked jokes about
farting, a clue to what was in store.
The British Antarctic Survey originated in a secret wartime naval
operation code-named Tabarin and launched in 1943 to ward off German
cruisers in the South Atlantic.  I watched an old film of Tabarin
once.
The doctor of the all-male team was a gynecologist.  The operation was
transferred to the Colonial Office in 1945 under the name Falkland
Islands Dependency Survey, and in 1967 it became a research institute
within the Natural Environment Research Council.  Before it was
permanently headquartered in Cambridge, the British Antarctic Survey
(BAS, as it became known) was hived out all over the country,
administration and logistics dwelling under the auspices of the
Overseas Development Agency in London.  Mike Richardson, a BAS base
commander long before his days overseeing the South Atlantic at the

Foreign Office, was put through his medical examinations during this
period by a handlebar-mustached retired army colonel.
"Have you got syphilis?  " barked the man, pen poised above the
voluminous forms.
"No, " stammered Mike.
"Why not?  " snapped the colonel.
The peninsula, the finger sticking out of the top left-hand corner of
the continent, has always been the most contentious part of
Antarctica.
In 1948 Argentina, Chile and Britain sent warships south, and in the
fifties an American Antarctican wrote that the territorial squabbling
among the three nations on the peninsula "was so amusing to an onlooker
it rivaled the machinations of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.  "
During this period the explorer Wally Herbert said "protest notes were
exchanged like cards in a game of snap."  When the Chileans announced
in 1983 that at the bottom of an inlet off the northern tip of the
peninsula they had discovered two projectile heads like those used by
indigenous peoples of Chile in the sixteenth century, the British and
Argentinians voiced suspicions that the objects had been planted there
to reinforce Chilean territorial claims.
Britain had been making sporadic claims in the region for many years.

# In 1820 Edward Bransfield claimed portions of the continent for
Britain, and in 1908 and 1917 Letters Patent were issued to the same
end.  In 1920, when British Antarctic policy had begun to assume a
coherent shape, the under-secretary of state at the British Colonial
Office formally proposed that Britain should take over the whole
continent for the Empire.  Neither he nor anyone else knew what they
would be acquiring, even to the nearest million square miles, but they
knew they wanted it.
During the FalSdands War in 1982 members of the House of Lords voiced a
concern that the conflict might spread to British Antarctic

Territory.

As a result, and after years of resource paring BAS funding rose in
1983 by more than 60 percent.  The relationship between science
*British
people often wonder why the U. K. didn't claim any territory explored
by Scott, notably around Ross Island.  The answer is almost certainly
that it was too far away for any British mission to have any hope of
establishing a presence.  The peninsula is far more accessible.

 and politics in Antarctica has always been ambiguous.
Scientists might well dislike political intervention, but the Falklands
experience shows that they have had reason to be thankful for it.
It took four and a half hours to reach the peninsula.  The crew had
purchased our lunch from the Stanley bakery, and we tucked into apple
turnovers and slabs of malt loaf.  Before long icebergs appeared in the
Southern Ocean, rimmed at the waterline with lurid lime green.  I was
feeling vaguely apprehensive, as I didn't really have a clue what was
in store.  I had been invited to spend two months with the small
British team at Rothera and to travel with some of them on the
peninsula.  They were reputed to be a tightly knit community, and I
wondered how they would take to an outsider.  At the end of January,
the season was already beginning to wind downþ science parties would be
coming in from the field while support staff on base prepared for
winter.  An ice-strengthened ship was due to arrive at Rothera at the
end of March to resupply the station and take the summer
stragglersþincluding meþback up to the Falklands.  By then the polar
night would have set in.
When the peninsula appeared it was fenced with high mountains and the
ocean lapped on a narrow strip of rocky shore beneath them.
I had never seen Antarctica so thawed.  Rothera Station was ten degrees
farther north than Ross Island.  On my inflatable globe the peninsula
almost seemed to touch South America, whereas Ross Island was
perilously close to the air valve, inches from anywhere to the north.
At McMurdo the mean temperature in January is minus three degrees
Celsius, whereas at Rothera it is a sweaty two degrees above zero.
At the Pole, the January mean is minus 28.  It can reach minus 50 at

McMurdo in the winter, but the lowest temperature ever recorded at
Rothera is minus 39.
The sun, shining weakly through the clouds, was hovering some way above
the western horizon.  The nights were already dark here, the sun
setting before ten o'clock and rising at six, much as it does in a
northern summer.
Nobody showed any sign of putting on their cold-weather clothes, and
when we landed George was still wearing his tie.  After we got off the
aircraft, he gripped me by the shoulder.
"The laddies and I have separate quarters from the BAS men, n he
said.
"But don't worry.  I'll come over to see you soon."  With that, he
vanished.
I loitered on the apron, waiting once again for whatever was going to
happen next.  I had not expected banners welcoming me to Rothera, but I
had assumed that the base commander would send someone out to meet me,
if only to avoid having to deal with the removal of my frozen corpse
from the airstrip.  Eventually, I spotted a Sno-Cat trundling around
the edge of the apron.  I flagged it down and smiled weakly at the
Beard at the wheel.
"Any chance of a lift to the main building?  " I asked.
He nodded, and I climbed up, slinging my bag into the space behind the
seats.  The Beard was silent.  I wondered if he often passed
hitchhikers.
We lurched to a standstill in front of a long, pale green two-story
building, separated from the runway by an expanse of gravel and ice.
Open water was visible a few hundred yards from each end of the
building and behind the base a ridge of gentle hills, only partially
ice-clad, afforded some protection against the wind.  The Beard looked
at me expectantly.  "Thanks, " I said, dragging my bag down after me.
There was only one entrance to the building so I went through it.
Finding myself in a cramped lobby, I engaged in more loitering and took
off my parka.  Men were coming and going along the corridors, engaged
in a variety of activities but united by the fact that they all ignored
me.
Short of erecting a sign outside the base saying GO AWAY, they couldn't
have made me feel less welcome.  Eventually, a balding but youngish
radio operator called Stu took me upstairs for a cup of tea.
Everyone was crowding around a table of new mail in a canteen-style
dining room.  Stu consulted a wall chart One of the Boys and found the
number of my pit room.  I was relieved to see my name written up
there.
At least they knew I was coming.
The pit room was like my room at Scott Baseþsmall, windowless and
comfortableþexcept that there were two sets of bunks rather than one,
and it was painted in repulsive shades of brown and orange.  Each bunk
had curtains around it, which meant that you could create a separate
little box for yourself to hide in.  My morale faltered when I realized
from the absence of belongings that I was to be alone in this room.
This meant I was the only woman on base.  This late in the season there
was no hope of new ones arriving.  Outside the door, someone belched
like the volcanic lake in Cameroon which emitted gases so poisonous
that hundreds died.  I sat on my bunk and burst into tears.
Later, Stu reappeared.  "Do you need anything?  " he asked.
"No, I'm fine, " I lied.  "But thanksþthanks for asking."
"On Saturday nights we have a bit of a special dinnerþtablecloths and
lots of courses, that sort of thing.  We get kind of dressed up."  He
thought for a moment.  "Why not come and meet everyone at the bar at
seven-thirty?  "
"Great, " I said, the tone of my voice indicating that
I did not believe it to be great at all.  "Thanks."
"No worries, a said Stu cheerily.  "See you later."  Getting "kind of
dressed up" was a challenging concept.  At halfpast seven I made the
best of a clean shirt and a half-clean pair of jeans and sallied
forth.
There were about 35 people in the bar when I got there, and they were
all talking loudly or guffawing with laughter.
About eight of them were wearing ties.  I introduced myself to a man in
a sports jacket that was too small for him, but he immediately turned
his back on me.  Through careful observation I gathered that purchasing
a drink involved entering a tick in a column next to one's name on a
special chart that was being tossed around chummily from hand to
hand.
I looked over a shoulder at this chart.
"I don't expect your name will be there, " said the Beard who had given
me a lift.  But it was.
The meal was delicious.  I sat next to a field assistant.
"What exactly does a field assistant do?  " I asked him.
"Baby-sit the scientists, " he said.
It was difficult to make yourself heard over the permanent dull roar of
badinage that characterized social events at Rothera.
They practiced a kind of chain-joking.  A brief food fight broke out
during the cheese course.  Here were British men doing what they did
bestþreverting to childhood and behaving like gits.  I had become an
expert on this type of behavior at university, having been sheltered
from it at my old-fashioned girls' school.  (Growing up in an ordinary
working-class environment, I had also been sheltered from the horrors
of the class jungle.  I didn't realize people came off separate shelves
until I went to Oxford.  ) At the end of my second week as a student, a
formal dinner was held for freshmen in my college.  When the first
bread roll whizzed through the air, I thought it was a ball that had
escaped from the cricket pitch next door.  I was just wondering how
they could be playing cricket in the dark when a wrapped pat of butter
glanced off my tutor's shoulder and plopped into my brown Windsor
soup.
The next morning before anyone else got up, I had a look around the
base.
Labs, the radio room, the doctor's surgery, the boot room .  . .
Antarctic bases were starting to look awfully familiar.
Rothera was about the same size as Scott Base and Terra Nova Bay and
about one twentieth the size of McMurdo.  The building was still, and
silent, like a museum after closing time.  I ran the palm of my hand
over a smooth white wall.  Then I heard a woman laughing faintly.  I
stood very still, trying to detect where this promising sound came
from.
Slowly, I padded along a narrow corridor until I was standing outside
an unmarked door.  Inside, a woman was talking very softly.  I held an
ear to the door.  There was something .  . . familiar about the
voice.
Several minutes passed.  Suddenly, an orchestra struck up.  I pushed
the door open quietly.  There was the night watchman, slumbering
peacefully in an armchair, and on the video screen in front of him

Julie Andrews was leaping down an Austrian mountainside followed by a
row of rosy-cheeked von Trapp children.  He had fallen asleep watching
lke Sound of Music.
Later, I sat in the sunshine on the steps of the main building drinking
tea with Ben, a tall, lean marathon runner from Sheffield who was
working at Rothera as a general base assistant.  I had met him at the
conference in Cambridge, and as soon as he spotted me stalking the
Rothera corridors, he had welcomed me enthusiastically.  I was pathe
ically grateful.  Ben was pushing 60 and had first come to the ice as a
dog handler in 1961.  He was a vegetarian, drove a Citroen 2 c. v.

without a seat belt, and got up at five-thirty to meditate.
He was revered by the others, who were all a good deal younger than he,
as he had worked many seasons in the south during the golden age.  I
got the impression that he had come back to say good-bye.
Others were racing snowmobiles up an icy hill opposite the base.
This hill was the gateway to the rest of the island.  A route was
flagged to the top, where it turned right along a tortuous traverse
below Reptile Ridge, a 250-meter serrated edge extending northwest from
Rothera.
"It's their base now, " Ben said suddenly.
"You're not gone yet, old boy, " said a small man who had thrown a
portion of apple tart across the room at dinner the previous night.
"And talking of going, we're supposed to be taking the boats out.
" Ben jumped up.
"Come on, Sara, " he said.  "I'm sure there's room for you.
" We took the tea things upstairs, struggled into red immersion suits
in the boot room, and walked down to the wharf.  The small man was
busily winching two 15-foot, 25-horsepower Humber inflatables into the
water.
We climbed down a metal ladder attached to the wall of the jetty.
It was a cloudless day, and the mountainsides around one end of the bay
were gilded with sunlight.  The apple-tart thrower smiled at me.
The bergs were spotted with seals and penguins, and Wilson's petrels
skimmed the wake behind the other Humber, the white bar on their tails
twirling gracefully over the ruffled water as if they were dancing on
the hem of a slip.  After a three-month ornithological diet of skuas,
they looked miraculously tiny.  A man in the bows was making notes on a
small green pad.  He was a biologist working in the Life Sciences
division of BAS.
"Death Sciences, more like, " said the apple-tart thrower as this was
explained to me.  "They bloody kill everything!  " The note taker had
spent the summer poking around under rocks in the ice-free areas around
Rothera.  He was looking for insects.
"I haven't noticed any insects, " I said.
"You need a microscope, " he replied apologetically.
"They're mainly mites and springtails."
"What happens to them in the winter?  " I asked.  "Presumably they
freeze."
"No, they don't.  They accumulate antifreeze.  It's a substance close
to glycerol, very similar to the stuff you put in your car.
It means that the water in their cells doesn't freeze."  Life Sciences,
as well as a number of other scientific divisions within BAS, is highly
regarded in the international Antarctic community for the quality and
value of its research.  Besides investigating terrestrial, freshwater
and marine ecosystems in and around Antarctica, BAS also funds
groundbreaking geophysical work and a range of upper atmospheric
sciences.  BAS people beat NASA, the One of the Boys American Antarctic
program and everyone else in the field when they announced that there
was a hole in the ozone layer.
We stopped at a blue-eyed shag colony and scrambled up a rock to see
the dark-eyed chicks, almost as tall as their parents but cocoa-brown
and fluffy.  The adults were white and black with long, smooth necks
and eyes like blue marbles.  Antarctica was throbbing with life here on
the banana belt.  It seemed a long way from the biological haiku of the
plateau.
Having crossed the Antarctic equivalent of the Atlantic, I had to make
certain linguistic adjustments.  I knew already about flashlights
becoming torches and sleds mysteriously metamorphosing into sledges.
In addition, in the "British sector, " Scott tents were pyramid tents,
Coleman lanterns were tilley lamps, Tuckers were Sno-Cats, thermarests
were karrimats, bunny boots were RBLTs (this stood for rubber-bottom
leather-top), dorms were pit rooms and the galley was both the kitchen
and the dining room.  Weather was defined by two words, manky, which
meant bad, and dingle, which was good.  In-between weather apparently
never occurred.  * Thinking nostalgically of my office at McMurdo, I
parked my laptop and notebooks in a corner of the sledge store.
Soon I discovered that someone slept on the floor of this room,
presumably in order to escape the pit rooms, which were known as
deprivation chambers.  In the mornings I had to skulk outside to
establish whether this individual had risen.
I learned how to drive Hondas, the four-wheel-drive minitractors, and
John Deeres, little green pickups that were a permanent feature of the
landscape around Rothera, beetling across the gravel.  I had a
snowmobile refresher course and went to Radio School to learn how to
set up a high-frequency antenna and * Antarctica might be the last
frontier, but it has been occupied by man long enough to begin
developing its own language.  A sparky Australian researcher is
currently compiling the world's first dictionary of Antarctic
English.
The book is listed as an official project by the Australian Antarctic
Division.

squelch "VHF.  I went to Meteorological School, where the weatherman,
Steve, taught me how to tell the difference between cirrus and
stratocumulus, to Shutdown School to learn how to turn the engines off
if a pilot should ever keel over in his plane, and to Medical

School, where I discovered the beneficial effects of athlete's foot
powder on crotch rot and was taught how to perform a tracheotomy with a
Swiss Army knife.
Twice a week everyone gathered in the dining room for a "Situation
Report" at which the base commander announced news and impending
events.
This was followed by the communal viewing of a video.  The video was
chosen on a rotation system.  Most people had seen all the videos on
station several times.  Their favorite trick was to pick a really bad
film when it was their turn and then walk out after five minutes.
One day, after one of these videos, I tried to socialize in the bar, a
large room with a low ceiling, an institutional brown carpet and walls
lined with the obligatory team photos of hairy winterers clutching
dogs.
The drinking area was festooned with postcards of women's bottoms.
There was a music system, a collection of vinyl records, a pool table
and a dartboard.  In the winter they held radio darts contests with
other bases.  After a couple of years of competition, someone went to
Bird Island and discovered that the small scientific station there, its
occupants always keen participants, had never had a dartboard on the
premises.
A man approaching the end of a two-and-a-half-year tour of duty as a
member of base support staff announced that he had remembered a good
joke.
"Why do women have periods?  " it went.
Nobody knew the answer.
"Because they deserve it!  " the man burst out, no longer able to keep
this side-splitting information to himself.  Everyone laughed.
It was as if I had entered a time capsule and been hurtled back to an
age in which Neanderthal man was prowling around on the lookout for
mammoths.  Later that evening, safely removed from the bar, which I had
come to think of as occupied territory, a Byronic youth apprehended me
next to the tea urn.
"I hope you weren't too offended by that joke, " he said.
I couldn't think of anything to say.
"It does seem to mean a lot to themþI mean, keeping it male, " the man
went on.  "I came down here from Grimsby on the BAS ship.
Three women got on at Signy base, and it electrified the atmosphere on
board.
It sparked a major debateþeven some of the young guys were arguing
passionately against women down here.  By the way, I'm Lucas."  We
shook hands, took our tea and sat down at a Formica table.  Lucas was
working for BAS as a summer-only field assistant and felt "at one
remove" from the community at Rothera.
"Why on earth do they feel so strongly about it?  " I asked.
He hesitated.  "They don't want the complication of women in such a
pristine place, " he said eventually.  "It's visceral."  I didn't need
to be told that.  I felt it every day.
"Were the Americans like it too?  " he asked.
"Er, no."
"I suppose you have to remember that the majority of support staff here
sign on for a two-and-a-half-year tour of duty.
It's a long time to live on an Antarctic base.  Attitudes get
entrenched."
"The support staff seem young here, " I said.  "Much younger than in
other programs."
"They are.  Twenty isn't an uncommon age.  You can't get a man to leave
a wife and kids for two and a half years."
"They seem to find it hard to cope with outsiders .  . . "
"There
aren't any outsiders except you!  They've never had a writer here
before."  It was as if I had moved into a family home and tried to
pretend I was a relative.  It wasn't fair to blame them for it.
There was a highly developed sense of ownership among the British.  The
incumbents owned the base, figuratively, just as in their heads they
owned "theirn bit of the continent.  Besides the fact that most support
staff were deployed for such a long period, the scientists were all
employed by BAS.  They worked in the same building in Cambridge, saw
one another on the ice year after year, and were imbued with the same
culture.
Other Antarctic programs worked with scientists from a wide variety of
universities and external institutions, but BAS people were all members
of the same club.  There was an exclusivity about Rothera.  It was in
part a function of size, at least when compared with its larger
American counterpart, which had gone as far as institutionalizing
writers and artists.  To a greater extent, however, it was a function
of historical continuity.  BAS had been in the Antarctic longer than
any other program.
The cultural differences between Britain and America in Antarctica had
revealed themselves to me before I got farther south than Cambridge
orVirginia.  At the orientation conferences the gloom of Girton College
and cozy nights in the cellar bar were centuries away from the
antiseptic vastness of the Xerox Document University in which the
American program held its conference.  While BAS tried hard to
introduce modern methodology into the training program, with the result
that at Girton we dutifully sat in small groups in front of flip charts
in sessions called Lifestyle, this was little more than a nod in the
direction of progress, and when we had to use the flip chart to write a
list of potential sources of conflict on base, Sexual Harassment was
followed by Not Enough Sexual Harassment, and Farting was noted.
To me, the notion of shutting people out betrayed everything Antarctica
represented.  The women who had breached the BAS defenses had fought
hard, and minor battles had been won.  The institutional subscription
to Playboy magazine was no longer provided by the benign employer and
left on Rothera's coffee tables.  There were many wars still to be
fought, however.  Men had always wanted to keep Antarctica for
themselves, and since the Norwe One of the Boys gin Caroline Mikkelsen
became the first woman to set foot on the continent on February 20,
1935, the cause had advanced with the speed of a vegetable garden.
Only the American program has taken the matter seriously, and yet, in
1995, only 61 of the 244 winterers at McMurdo were women.
SirVivien Fuchs wrote in his book Of Ice and Men, published in 1982,
"Problems will arise should it ever happen that women are admitted to
base complement, " and when I sat drinking tea with him at his house in
Cambridge before I left England he suggested helpfully that the answer
was to put women in all-female camps.  In September 1966 an article in
the American Antarctic magazine ran the headline

WOMEN = WORRIES, and Admiral Reedy said breezily to a reporter from
the same journal two years later that Antarctica would remain "the
womanless white continent of peace."  Rear Admiral George Dufek, an
early commander of U. S.

operations on the ice, summed it up when he said, "I think the presence
of women would wreck the illusion of the frontiersmanþthe illusion of
being a hero."  The Soviets brought the first female nonwife south in
1957, and two years later the Australian program followed suit.  One of
the first Australian women selected wrote later, "We were invaders in a
man's realm and we were regarded with suspicion."  The Americans sent
the first four women south as program participants in 1969, inciting
the memorable headline POWDER PUFF EXPLORERS INVADE THE SOUTH POLE.
When the first two females finally wintered at McMurdo in 1974 the
program managers weren't taking any chancesþone was a nun and the other
"mature, " which meant (they hoped) past the age at which she could
inflame the passions even of desperate men.
The American Harry Darlington took his wife south in 1946 when he was
chief pilot and third in command of Finn Ronne's expedition to
Stonington Island.  He had met his wife, Jennie, when she fed his husky
a bone, and the dog went on to be their only wedding guest.  When it
was suggested that Ronne and Darlington should take their wives to
Stonington, seven members of the expedition signed a petition
protesting that it would "jeopardise our physical condition and mental
balance."  Poor lambs.  Even Harry wasn't wild about the idea.
"It's no place for a woman, " he said.  But in the end Jennie had to
go, since Ronne insisted on taking his wife, and the dissenters
reckoned two were better than one.  So they went.  One man commented,
"The Admiral [Byrd] took along Guernseys.  One had a calf.  We might do
better."  Jennie had never been farther south than Florida, and she was
22 when the ship set sail.  She packed nail polish, but it froze.
"To him Antarctica symbolised a haven, " Jennie wrote of her husband in
her 1956 book My Antarctic Honeymoon, "a place of high ideals and that
inner peace men find only in an all-male atmosphere in primitive
surroundings."  She was accepted in the end, and she learned to drive
the dogs, but probably only becauseþsome good exploring
notwithstandingþthe expedition turned into a disaster.  Relations with
the British team camped nearby were strained.  (An Englishman who had
been in the field for several months mistook Jennie for a mirage and
ran away.  ) The social fabric of the American team eventually
disintegrated into violence, and Harry was relieved of his
responsibilities while forced to remain on the ice.  Jennie and Ronne's
wife, Jackie, watched the men quarrel, fight, flout safety measures,
sink into despair and allow their personal differences to take
precedence over the aims of the expedition.  Still, in Man and the
Conquest of the Pole, published in 1964, P. E. Victor wrote, "The
expedition ran into all the difficulties ordinarily caused by the
presence of women in such circumstances."  Even this was not quite as
imaginative as the conclusion of Abraham Cowley, who was caught in a
storm in the Southern Ocean in the Batchelor's Delight in the 1680s.
He wrote in his journal that talking about women had caused the
storm.
One of the Boys The only other book written by a woman in the early
years includes whale recipes and detailed instructions on how to knit
booties for penguins to protect polished floors.  In the fifties Nan
Brown spent two and a half years on South Georgia with her husband, who
was a radio operator.  The Norwegians took her whaling, and she brought
out her knitting on deck.  Her book was called Antarctic Housewife.
Nan and Jennie Darlington were both pregnant when they left the ice
(nothing else to do but procreate and knit), but the first child born
in the vicinity of the continent was supposedly to a waitress aboard a
Russian whaler in 1948, and she called the poor infant Antarctic.  The
Argentinians began bringing spouses south in 1977 to reinforce their
territorial claim, and in 1978 one of them obligingly gave birth
thereþthough she was flown south seven months pregnant.  By 1984 the
Chileans had followed, and they even established a school.
Private expeditions have been even more of a male preserve.
The abiding characteristic of most of these seems to be hostility
between membersþyou only have to read what Reinhold Messner wrote about
Arved Fuchs, what Will Steger wrote about Geoff Somers, and what
Fiennes and Stroud wrote about each other.  The American Women's
Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole in 1992-93 was refreshingly
different.
One member wrote afterward, "We each had our hard times and received
the caring support of the other three .  . . We found that although we
got annoyed by some idiosyncrasies, we still valued and needed each
individual and the qualities she had to offer the group."  I am not, of
course, suggesting that men are incapable of this kind of loving
support (God forbid).  This is exactly what Apsley Cherry-Garrard
describes in The Worst Journey in the World.  But it does seem to have
disappeared recently from their repertoire of emotions.  I found it
unfathomable that, only 80 years after the expedition Cherry describes,
things had come to such a pretty pass.
Shortly before he died Scott wrote movingly about the value of
friendship in a letter to J. M. Barrie, "I never met a man in my life
whom I admired and loved more than you, but I never could show you how
much your friendship meant to meþfor you had much to give and I had
nothing."  How many men must have gone to the grave "never being able
to show, " and how much they could learn from Scott's story.
Scott had been wooed by Barrie, creator of the eternally youthful Peter
Pan, after returning from his first expedition.  Barrie loved the idea
of going south.  "I want to know what it is really like to be alive, "
he had written to Scott.  After the tragedy had unfolded on the polar
plateau, Barrie identified Scott with Peter Pan.  For years he carried
Scott's letter around with him, whipping it out at any opportunity.  He
said, "When I think of Scott I remember the strange alpine story of the
youth who fell down a glacier and was lost, and of how a scientific
companion, one of several who accompanied him, all young, computed that
his body would again appear at a certain place and date many years
afterwards.
When that time came round some of the survivors returned to the glacier
to see if the prediction would be fulfilled, all old men now, and the
body reappeared as young as on the day he left them.  So Scott and his
comrades emerge out of the white immensities, always young."  Scott's
son, who became a distinguished naturalist and conservationist, was
named after Barrie's immortal Peter.  Barrie was his godfather, and
when the boy was five, he took him to see Peter Pan.
After the performance, Barrie asked him what he had liked best.
Peter thought hard.  "What I liked best, " he concluded, "was tearing
up the programme and dropping the bits on people's heads."  At 67 degrees south and 68 degrees west, Rothera Point sits at the entrance
of Ryder Bay, in the southeast of Adelaide Island and about one third
of the way down the Antarctic Peninsula.  Adelaide One of the Boys
Island was discovered and charted by John Biscoe as he weaved in and
out of the archipelago alongside the peninsula.  On Saint Valentine's
Day 1832, he named it after Queen Adelaide of SaxeMeiningen, queen
consort of William IV.  The point was surveyed in the 1950s and named
after John Michael Rothera, a surveyor for what later became the
British Antarctic Survey.  It was the haunt of Weddells and the
occasional fur seal, as well as a proliferation of Adelies and
Dominican gulls.  The rocks were covered with branchy lichen from a
family that exists in the Scottish Highlands.  Puffs of surf slapped
the shore, and in the bay the bergs resembled a scene cut from a marble
quarry.  The maritime climate seemed to breathe life into the continent
after the frozen immobility of the Ross Ice Shelf.
As I grew familiar with the station, and felt the weight of history
behind it, I became aware that something was missing.  I couldn't put
my finger on it until in the dining room one day I found myself staring
at a five-foot-wide framed photograph of a working dog team captioned
"In memory of the old dogs."  The ghosts of the dogs roamed everywhere
at Rothera.  On the duty board in the dining room, next to the crowded
columns headed "Night Watch" and other domestic duties, plastic letters
spelling out "Dog Feed" were jumbled in a heap at the bottom of the
board.  The "Dog of the Day" hook was still next to the front door,
field rations were still called "Manfood" to distinguish them from
"Dogfood, " and framed photographs of bearded giants gazing adoringly
at small fluffy bundles lurked in the most unlikely places.
In 1991 the Antarctic Treaty nations declared that under the terms of
the Environmental Protocol the huskies were to be "phased out" of
Antarctica by April Fool's Day 1994.  The breeding program at Rothera
was stopped immediately.  BAS had kept dogs continually since 1945,
though they had not been used in support of scientific work since
1975.
With the arrival of reliable snowmobile travel, the dogs became even
more obsolete and were retained primarily for recreational purposes.
In the Rothera archives I found a telex from the Foreign Office, dated
1963, suggesting that breeding should cease since mechanical transport
was increasing.  It was scrawled with indignant comments from men on
base pointing out that one plane was grounded and the motorized
toboggans were stranded while the Spartans, Giants and Moomins were
lazing comfortably on their spans outside the door.  Another argument
for the dogs' removal was the suggestion that they passed on canine
distemper to seals and, more plausibly, that the seal chop necessitated
by their voracious appetites was now uinappropriate to the
environmental aims of scientific organizations within the Antarctic.  "
I asked Ben about the dogs one day while we were washing up.
"You can't bond with a snowmobile, " he said.  "The huskies kept up our
morale.  The Antarctic would have been far lonelier without them.
Our dogs kept us sane, no doubt about it."
"Do you miss them?  " I asked.
"Oh yes.  You can form relationships with the dogs like you do with
two-legged traveling companions.  They were my friends.  I used to have
the same team for two years, and you got to know them so wellþI could
anticipate when trouble was going to start from a little mannerism,
say, or a low growl.  I could even tell which one had broken wind.  "
He turned away from the sink and wiped his hands.
"I'll never forget going down to say good-bye to them at the end of my
tour, just before I got on the ship.  Ask any dog handler if he'd like
to take his team with him at that moment, and he wouldn't think twice,
I can tell you."  He thought about this for a moment, then continued,
"The dogs formed a link with the past, too.  They gave the base a bit
of historical continuity.  That's all gone now.  In a couple of years
there won't even be anyone here who remembers the huskies.
" John Sweeny, who was half Ben's age, was the last dog handler at
BAS.
He was the Irishman I had met at breakfast on the first day of the
conference.
"How was the trip, John?  " someone had asked him over the cornflakes
at Girton College.
"Fine, " John replied.
UWhere have you been?  " I enquired.
"On a skiing holiday, " he said.
I imagined that this holiday had taken place in Sauze d'Our or

Chamonix.  Later, I found out that he had skied all the way across
Greenland, pulling his sledge behind him.
BAS decided that it would be fitting to send the dogs out on one last
scientific expedition to mark their departure from Rothera.
As a result John and another handler took two teams on a seven-week
survey around the Milky Way and Uranus Glaciers and on a shallow-core
drilling traverse of central Alexander Island.  It was the last dog
journey ever in Antarctica.  I read John's report of the trip.  It
ended with a quotation from Helmer Hanssen, Amundsen's dog handler,
"Dogs like that, which share man's hard times and strenuous work,
cannot be looked upon merely as animals.  They are supporters and
friends.  There is no such thing as making a pet out of a sledge dog,
these animals are worth much more than that."  The program to get the
dogs out was called Operation Tabarin, in commemoration of the
expedition that brought them from Greenland to

Hope Bay in 1943.  John and the dogs traveled, via Brize Norton, to
Newry in Maine, and then the younger ones went north to the Inuit
village of Inukjuak on Hudson Bay, where they formed a working team.
"It was a bittersweet experience, " John had told me.  "I didn't
realize until I got up there that the dogs weren't going back."  One
day, while walking around the point with one of the pilots, he stopped
in front of a slumbering Weddell seal.  You know they used to shoot
those guys around here, to feed the dogs, " he said.  "I saw it.
The romance of the huskies is very misleading.  More seals were killed
than dogs were fed.  The seal chopþthat was when they sliced them
upþwas brutal and disgusting, and the smell on the dog spans was foul
because the high-fat content of their diet had a poor effect on their
digestion."
"Don't you miss having them around?  " I asked.
"No, I don't!  They used to kill each other and snap at us!
" At eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon the men gathered
in the dining room for the smoko ritual.  A1, the cook, would appear
with trays of hot sausages, crispy bacon and fresh rolls or, in the
afternoon, his legendary flapjacks.  He was an ace cook, and so was
Dave, the wintering cook.  They always made me welcome in the light and
airy kitchen, and I used to go in there whenever I could think of an
excuse.
A cleaver on the wall was inscribed with the words "Queue Here for
Haircuts."  A1 and Dave were both from the north of England, and A1 had
been cooking for BAS since the sixties.  Six months after I returned
from the ice he was awarded the Polar Medal, and he took me with him to
Buckingham Palace.  A hundred other people were being decorated at the
same time, from doughty Bermudan dowagers to Tory members of Parliament
and a frail old lady rewarded for "services in Paraguay."  The
best-dressed man was a chieftain in a black-and-gold robe, though the
flunky announced that he came from Liverpool.  Apart from the
chieftain, the only man who hadn't hired top hat and tails was a
director of Oxfam, who looked as if he'd got his suit from the back of
one of his shops.
The queen commented to A1 when his turn came that cooking was a very
important job.
It was dark by nine o'clock now.  Field assistants were returning from
two months on the ice with their scientists, and they clattered around
the base sorting out their equipment.  Groundsheets, hoisted up to dry,
gave their storerooms the alluring air of a Bedouin encampment.

One of the field assistants was a rangy geography
 teacher called Neil with a Liverpudlian accent and hair that
flopped into his eyes.  He used the analogy of a roller coaster to
describe his Antarctic experience.  "It can be great here, " he said.
"But it's not really living."  I had just finished reading Thomas
Keneally's Antarctic murder mystery, Victim of the Aurora, published in
1977.  It was narrated by an old man who was once the artist of a
five-man team of explorers closely resembling Scott's group.  A
journalist is murdered on the ice.
"To me, " says the narrator, "the world was simple and the lying hadn't
begun when I joined the expedition.  Ever since [the murder and its
aftermath] the world has been fuelled and governed by lies.  That is my
concise history of the twentieth century."  In addition, a refugee
found hiding in an ice cave becomes a symbol of the human condition.
"But you can live, weeping and cursing, " says this character.
"Oh yeah, it's possible, " and commenting on the fact that he can't
quite stand up in his shelter, he adds, "I suppose that I'm
characteristic of mankind."  The narrator returns to the Antarctic as
an old man and is flown back to the Pole, which makes him feel sick.
"I suppose I may have been suffering the shock of reaching the Pole,
that trigonometrical siren of the Edwardian age, to find it an ice
plain without character, staffed by disconsolate young soldiers who
would rather be in Vietnam.  In other words, the Pole was no longer a
mythical place."  Like me, Keneally visited the Antarctic as a guest of
the American program.  "The basic futility of Antarctic exploration, "
he wrote after he had returned, "was .  . . brought home to me as I saw
the nullity of the place, the meaninglessness of most of the geographic
data for which men like Scott gave their lives.  The Pole itself was a
prodigious nothingness, a geographic void.  But the wealth of
impressions and memories that arose from my Antarctic odyssey will
always enrich my writing."  George, the loquacious chief builder who
had accompanied me south from Brize Norton, reappeared after a week.
He came storm il , =_ ing into our building one day and invited me to
his birthday dinner on Saturday evening.  I was touched.  He was going
to be 69.
"Are they looking after you all right here?  " he asked, adding
conspiratorially, "If not, come on over, I'll see what I can do.
" Quite what he would have been able to do was baffling.  Later, he
showed me around the builders'quarters.  "I think it's all right for
intellectuals to share four to a room, " he said, flinging open the
door of a pit room and speaking as if he had spent years acquiring this
knowledge, "but for my laddies, two is preferable."  A blizzard
descended on George's birthday, and the windows appeared to be hung
with sheets of muslin.  In the evening I fought my way over to the
party.  They had put tablecloths and candles on the tables, George and
his sidekick were wearing ties and a notice on the blackboard said
GUEST STARþ9.  30, STRIPPER.  10.  30, HAIRCUTS.
George dispensed sweet sherry, and made anyone who swore apologize to
me.
John the plumber, who was a vegetarian, told me that on his first day
he had been presented with a box of 64 microwavable veggie burgers.
Later, I heard rousing choruses of "Alouette" coming from the lounge
area, and men began appearing in thermal long johns with boxer shorts
on top.  These they referred to obliquely as their "drinking outfits.
" When I turned around later, George had his trousers around his
ankles.
"I'm the oldest man in Antarctica, " he shouted, which was almost
certainly true.
THIRTEEN FossIIB stuff and the Ski Hi Nunataks The
Clowds near the horizon were of a perfect Snow Whiteness and were
difficult to be distinguished from the Ice hills whose lofty summits
reached the Clowds.  The outer or Northern edge of this immence Ice
field was compose[d] of loose or broken ice so close packed together
that nothing could enter it, about a mile in began the field ice, in
one compact solid boddy and seemed to increase in height as you traced
it to the South, In this field we counted Ninety Seven Ice Hills or
Mountains, many of them vastly large .  . .

From Captain Cook's journal, January 1774

Fossil Bluff lies about 230 miles from Rothera on the east coast of
Alexander Island.  A group of men from the British Graham Land
Expedition were the first to set foot there.  They surveyed it roughly
in 1936 and found Jurassic fossils, so they called it Fossil Camp.
Lancelot Fleming, a member of the expedition who later became bishop of
Norwich, made a film that was put on video 50 years later, with a
narration by another member, the redoubtable Duncan Carse.
Carse had gone on to become a successful actor, playing Dick Barton in
a 1940s BBC radio series.  His mellifluous voice perfectly captures the
lost innocence of a golden age.  After the expedition he spent some
time alone in South Georgia.  In a film about that he said, "I enjoyed
a peace of mind there I've experienced nowhere else.
It was an island where I belonged."  In his diary he wrote of low
clouds hanging in pearly streamers "like wraiths of the imagination.
But through them and above, the unattainable heights of the Allardyce
Range fired the skyline with stupendous beacons of icy luminosity .

.

. no one had ever seen them before, a thousand years might pass before
they showed themselves again."  The British Graham Land Expedition, led
by John Rymill, was a private venture, and, like all the best
expeditions since Columbus, it was chronically short of cash.  The crew
was even obliged to scraighten out packing cases to retrieve nails.
They had œ3, 000 with which to buy a ship and ended up with the Penola,
a 130-tonne three-masted Brittany fishing schooner that they were able
to equip with a de Havilland Fox Moth light aircraft.
Nobody knew much about Graham Land in those days.  John Biscoe had
named it after Sir James Robert George Graham, first lord of the
admiralty and later home secretary, and it was annexed in 1908 as part
of the Falkland Islands Dependency.  Fleming's film shows the Penola
leaving London's St. Catherine's dock in 1934 to explore this terra
incognita.
She was away for three years.
They were dogged by bad luck at the beginning, but, as Carse put it,
"It came good at the end."  The expedition made numerous discoveries
and surveyed great tracts of unknown territory.  At the conclusion of
the film, Carse declares triumphantly, "Graham Land was the Antarctic
Peninsula" (it had been thought that it was part of an archipelago).
He went on, "We were the expedition that links the

Heroic AgeþScott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawsonþ with BAS of today.

We lived and worked on the watershed between Fossil Bluff and the Ski
Hi Nunataks too little regard for personal welfare and too great a
reliance on impersonal technology.  We were the fortunate ones who
practised Antarctic exploration at its all-time best."  Though it
achieved more knowledge per pound spent than any other Antarctic
expedition, the British Graham Land team never received the recognition
it deserved.  Colin Bertram, one of the surviving members, told me,
"People realized that the war was imminent, and they didn't have time
to think about us."  Nobody died, which meant that the media wasn't
interested, and the expedition had nothing to do with the South Pole,
always the sexiest part of Antarctica.
After I returned from the ice I took a train through the New Forest in
the south of England on the hottest day of the year and looked through
cracked albums of sharp black-and-white photographs of the expedition
with Alfred Stephenson (known as Steve), who said he remembered taking
everyone.  In the predeparture pictures, the men were lined up in baggy
trousers, hair slicked back from pasty morning-after faces.  On the
deck of the Penola, they were laughing into the camera as if they were
on a college trip.  I pointed to a picture of men making dog harnesses,
and Steve reeled off the dogs' names.  Barring Amundsen's, it was the
most dog-orientated expedition ever.  They had to shoot the last 80 dogs because they couldn't feed them on the long voyage home.  "I still
mourn them, " Bertram said 60 years later.
Fleming filmed a man making a canoe out of a barrel and paddling it
furiously through the pack ice.  He also recorded puppy training on the
snow fields, all hands on a storm-washed deck, and three fabulous
skiers slaloming down pristine slopes.  They were making history and
having the times of their lives.  Above all, there was an innocence
about them, something untainted.  In John Rymill's book Southern
Lights, they all seem to be indescribably happy all the time.
When they were leaving Antarctica, Rymill wrote of "a feeling of loss
as though a friend had died."
"To think, " the book ends, at that when we return to England one of the
first questions we shall be askedþprobably by a well-fed businessman
whose God is his bank book will be Why did you go there?  " Alexander
Island was roughly mapped as far back as 1821 by members of
Bellingshausen's Russian Antarctic Expedition, who named it after Tsar
Alexander I, their patron.  A second British team surveyed the Fossil
Camp site in 1948 and renamed it Fossil Bluff, and BAS scientists have
been working on Alexander Island ever since.
The focus of BAS investigations has primarily been the relationship
between glacier climate and atmospheric climate.  In the middle of
February I asked if I could hitch a ride to the small bluff camp on a
fuel flight.
Nobody raised any objection, which was a relief, as I was becoming
increasingly desperate to get off baseþfor two weeks I had been hanging
around there without much to do.  I had no idea how long I would be
able to stay at the bluff, but I couldn't have cared less about that.
Someone would presumably tell me when I had to leave.
Alexander Island is separated from continental Palmer Land by George VI
Sound, which, when I flew over it, was streaked with blue melt pools.
We landed on the edge of the island next to a line of black drums.  A
couple of men hooded in fluorescent orange were waiting to refuel the
aircraft.
After we waved the pilot on his way south, I rode the mile to the bluff
itself in a sledge.  The hut, now occupied only in summer, was
established in 1961.  It had recently acquired a smart wooden veranda
on which flapped a Union Jackþupside down, as usual.
I arrived to the smell of burning jam tarts and a lively row over who
had forgotten to take them out of the oven.  A man with a beard like
Rasputin's was defending himself on the basis that he had been
discussing an important matter on the radio.  Steve Rumble, an
electrician and winter base commander who had been on the ice for 27 months, kept his Walkman clamped to his head and remained lying on his
bunk.  Hans Cutter, a German geodesist in.
Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks evitably known as Herr Cutter, sat
at the table looking baffled at the sudden inflamed talk of tarts,
especially as it had coincided with my arrival.  The bluff's fourth
temporary resident, Ian, was standing in the middle of the hut in his
apron, grasping the tray of smoldering ex-tarts.  He was the outgoing
doctor at Rothera, an endearingly eccentric character with firm
opinions and a wild glint in his eye.  I had met him on base before he
left for the bluffþhe had been one of the few who came up to greet me
when I arrived.  Although he spoke Home Counties English, I think he
was Scottish, as I had seen photographs of him skiing in a kilt.
The population of the bluff was transitory.  The hut was used as a
stopover for science parties on their way farther south, a holiday
cottage and a place to send people if they were getting in the way on
base.  Ben, the veteran dog handler from Sheffield, had flown in with
me, and shortly after we arrived a science party of two turned up after
72 days on Uranus, a glacier that had provided many hundreds of punning
jokes for generations of Rothera Beards.  Graham was a tall glaciology
postgraduate from Belfast with ginger hair.  He was studying how light
was reflected in the snow pack.  This affected heat absorption and
yielded data that could be used to assess the rate of global warming.
His much shorter field assistant was a chunky mountaineer from

South London called Duncan.  They both said they weren't sure if they
could sleep between walls after 72 nights in a tent.  Having eaten
field rations for so long, they were astonished to find real mushrooms
in the spaghetti sauce.  They held pieces up on forks, just to look at
them.  In the evening we drank wine the winterers had made from raisins
and sultanas.  It tasted of cooking sherry, but it had been decanted
into Chateau Lafite bottles.
The hut, which for years had been known as Bluebell Cottage, was about
15 feet by 25, with a small partitioned sink area and an arched wooden
ceiling.  Built in at one end were two sets of bunks with metal legs
and no ladders.  There was a wooden table, a dresser strewn with
magazines and books, including The Bluffer's Guide to Seduction and The
Beauty of Cars, and a notice board upon which someone had pinned a
register of fuel drums, a black-and-white photograph of a killer whale,
a clutch of cartoons and a Moral Fibre Meter, inaugurated in honor of a
pilot who issued regular tirades against the flaccidity of modern
youth.
One corner was filled with communications equipment, and this area was
known as the "radio shack."  A few pictures of women had been ripped
from magazines and stuck to the wall, and pots and pans dangled from
beams.  The room was dominated by a drip-oil Aga with an antediluvian
kettle that sat in permanent residence, growling menacingly.  Off the
entrance was a slender room called Arkwright's, jumbled with tools and
bags and cases of beer, and on the other side of the hut, in a room
crammed with snowshoes, crampons, ropes, karrimats, a soda syphon, nuts
and bolts and an old wooden sign saying NO DtJMPING, was a portable
toilet.
I slept in the food store, a blue wooden hut on the slope behind
Bluebell Cottage.  A small window at one end cast an orange rhomboid on
the opposite wall in the early morning.  At nightþby midFebruary as
long as an autumnal northern nightþI had to read by torchlight.
The room was stacked with Ziplocs of split peas, boxes of suet, shiny
metal cubes of sugar packed in July 1985, a large cardboard box with
khaki foil packs of the ubiquitous "Biscuits, Brown" eaten by British
Antarcticans since the dawn of time and a surplus of sardines.  On the
floor boxes of shampoo had collapsed onto crates of leaking tile
cleaner.  The door wouldn't shut from the inside, so I had to tie
myself in.
I emptied my kitbag onto the floor.  In it were an air bed, two
karrimats, a sheepskin underblanket, a bivvy sack and a sleeping bag
with two liners.  As I inflated my air bed I couldn't help thinking
guiltily of what Wilfred Thesiger said to Eric Newby and Hugh Carless
when he saw them inflating their air beds in Nuristan in 1956.
Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks It is the last line of Newby's A
Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, "God, you must be a couple of pansies.  "
Bluebell Cottage was the only hut on an island the size of Wales (the
size of England if you counted the ice shelves attached to it), and it
had hardly changed since 1961.  I had seen photographs of Beards
hunched in the radio shack or grinning over a saucepan.  Drune, the
mountain directly behind the hut, and Pyramid, the ziggurat next to it,
were usually striated with snow.  It was always more attractive around
the hut when it snowed, a light covering over the scree and moraine
broke up the brown.  On the other side of King George VSound, the
Batterbee Mountains and Ryder Glacier changed color as the light faded
and glowed like old stained glass in the great cathe rals around the
time of evensong.
At the bluff, Ian taught me how to chart the speed and direction of the
wind, the cloud type and extent of cover, the height of the cloud base
and the air pressure at sea level.  He was a good teacher and seemed
pleased to have something to do.  He had come to the end of his year's
tour of duty as a doctor, and his replacement was already installed at
Rothera.  Everyone at Bluebell Cottage had finished whatever it was he
had been doing in Antarctica, and they were all waiting to go home.
My newly acquired skills meant I could take turns at weather
observations and relay the data back to Rothera over the radio.
Often we had to do this hourly, if aircraft were trying to come in.
The planes brought avtur, the aviation fuel used by BAS, as the bluff
functioned as a service station for planes transporting scientists
farther south.  It was a fuel-intensive business because the Otters
bringing drums of fuel had to refill their own tanks before returning
to Rothera.
Ian taught me how to test the 45-gallon drums of avtur for water
contamination and how to fill up the tanks when a plane arrived.
In addition, we occupied ourselves for a couple of hours each day atthe
drum dump, a pit into which trash had been deposited in a less
environmentally aware age.  The work involved digging debris out of the
ice and piling it into empty fuel drums.  When these drums were full,
Otters ferried them back to Rothera.
While I was working on the dump one day with Graham, the tall

Belfast glaciologist, he said irritably, "No wonder they call them the
good old days.  They chucked all their bloody rubbish straight down
where they stood."  Graham had a strong northern Irish accent, for
which he came under constant fire from the others, but no amount of
teasing could provoke him.  One day at the dump he decided to
requisition the unclaimed portion of Antarctica for Ulster.
"Storming" he said as he contemplated this idea.  He was affable,
lively and spontaneous, and he kept a tin whistle in his pocket.
Duncan, the field assistant from South London who had spent 72 days on
the Uranus with Graham and his whistle, was more reserved and less
cheerful.  I noticed that he made a quick exit from Bluebell Cottage
whenever Graham's hand approached the pocket containing his whistle.
I stayed at the bluff for two weeks and each day walked along a thin
path across the scree at the foot of Drune toward the Eros Glacier.  It
ran alongside a frozen inlet, and beyond the wind scoop on the opposite
side the glacier fell to a ledge over a pearly blue cavern.
On the way back I used to lie on the scree and contemplate the Eros,
watching the rose-pink glow of sunset die over the Batterbees on the
other side of the streaky sound.
As further evidence of Scottishness, Ian had his bagpipes sent over on
a passing Otter.  He needed constant stimulation and displayed none of
the pubbish characteristics of the other BAS men.  I got the impression
that he had not particularly enjoyed the winter as a result.
He stood on the veranda playing /'Amazing Grace.  /' It was not a great
success.
Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks "Let me have a go, " said
Graham, who was game for anything.  Ian handed the pipes over, and
Graham expended a great deal of energy producing no sound at all.
UWhy don't I blow, " said Ben, who, as a marathon runner, had a
reliable pair of lungs, "and you hold the bagpipes and press the
buttons?  " After a good deal of jostling on the veranda, a single
reedy note wheezed out of the pipes.  It had a dying fall.
"Where's all the breath going?  " said Ben.
Graham gave up and fetched his tin whistle.  Perhaps it was the first
time bagpipes and a tin whistle have ever been heard together in
Antarctica.
"And I hope the last, a said Duncan when I mentioned this.
The manfood boxes that had sustained Graham and Duncan in the field
were packed in 1986.  Everything in Antarctica was years past its
sell-by date.  When it was all over and I got home, I was shocked to
see sell-by dates in the future, as if it worked the other way around,
and that meant you weren't supposed to eat the goods.  But it didn't
seem to matterþwe were never ill.  Some things were less appetizing
than they might have been.  Upon contact with heat the tinned spaghetti
disintegrated, as it had been thawed and refrozen so many times.
In one field camp I saw a tub of Parmesan cheese bearing the printed
label "Matured ten months."  Underneath someone had written, "Frozen
ten years."  Still, care parcels sometimes arrived from A1, the
medal-winning Rothera cook, and one day a joint of beef was tossed out
of a refueling Otter.  Ian cooked it, withborkshire pudding and all the
trimmings.  He was an excellent cook.  Besides two loaves a day, he
churned out pies and scones, and one morning he produced Danish
pastries.  After we had eaten the beef, he was bored, so he cut
Graham's hair.
"We could play Trivial Pursuit after this, " said Graham brightly.
Nobody said anything.  We were bored with Trivial Pursuit.
Like everything else at the bluff, the game in the hut was an early
model, and it was an American version to boot, the orange questions
asking us who joined the National Hockey League in 1983.  Ian would
shout wild guesses to these arcane questions, which irritated Rasputin,
when we managed to coax him out of the radio shack.
Rasputin was a highly skilled surveyor on secondment from the Ordnance
Survey, the government mapping department.  He had been in the south
for five weeks, taking photographs of Antarctica so that he could go
back to Cambridge and produce detailed maps of small areas.  In the hut
he held forth on the importance of maps in society with missionary zeal
and talked eloquently about the cultural absence of what he referred to
as "map awareness."  After I had been at the bluff for a week, I
realized that I had never seen him with a camera in his hand.
"Where is your camera?  " I asked him, expecting him to whip it out of
his pocket.
"It's mounted in the back of a Twin Otter, " he said huffily.

/'It weighs more than two hundred pounds, you knowþit's not a bloody
point-and-shoot."  Three days later Rasputin went back to Rothera on an
Otter to take the next flight to the Falklands.  While we sat on the
veranda waiting for the plane, he looked south and sighed.
"Look at that, " he said ruefully.  /'Nothing between us and the Pole
except twelve hundred and fifty miles of empty ice.  So much to mapþso
little time."  I moved into the old generator shed where he had been
sleeping.
It was a lean-to on the side of the cottage with a tiny wooden door.  I
had to crouch down to get in.  The shed had a kind of wooden shelf that
served as a bed, with a sliding hatch next to it, so I used to lie with
the hatch open and look out over the sound and Georgian Cliffs,
listening to the bergs calve and the ice crack.  It was as if the
landscape were alive, just as Coleridge had imagined it.
Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks The ice was here, the ice was
there, The ice was all around, It cracked and growled, and roared and
howled, Like noises in a swound!
Coleridge conceived The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as he walked over
the green hills of southwest England between 1797 and 1798 and watched
the moon rise over the sea.  He had never been abroad, he saw the ice
with his inner eye.  Many writers have tried to transform a voyage to
Antarctica into a spiritual journey, but it was Coleridge who made me
believe that the analogy worked.  His Mariner travels beyond the
boundaries of knowable knowledge, onto the wide, wide sea of the spirit
and into the wondrous cold, the isolation of the human condition, "And
never a saint took pity on/My soul in agony."  My own Antarctic journey
offered a glimpse of the bounties beyond knowable knowledge, not the
torments.  But I had made that trip to cold, dark desperation before.
That terrible experience of misery and depression was not part of my
Antarctic journey, though I carried the memory of it with me, and it
made the peace I grasped on the ice more profound.
When it snowed, refueling was such a thoroughly unpleasant business
that a rigorously democratic roster was established.  The brown slopes
of the moraine were then like leaves stained with dye, and the light
covering of powder revealed the different texture of each one.  One
snowy day the plane brought mail.  A quixotic friend of mine sent me an
old brass whistle, and as the boys had picked up the phrase "It's a
testosterone thing" from me, my gift immediately became the
testosterone whistle.  I was instructed to blow it when the level got
too high.
Although the temperature rarely fell below minus three, a front brought
high winds and persistent snowfall, and we were trapped in the hut.
Ben entertained us with stories of the old days, mostly involving
dogs.
"All the dogs just disappeared in front of my eyesþzip!  zip!

zip!  " he said at the end of a long and colorful story about a
thousandmile sledging journey.  "I crawled to the edge of the crevasse,
looked down into the gloom, and there they were, swinging in their
harnesses, with Dot, the leader, hanging forty feet down on the end of
the harness!  "
"What happened?  " we all said at once.
"My partner lowered me down into the crevasse, and I unclipped the dogs
from the trace one by one and hoisted them all out.  I had been
leading, so it was technically my faultþbut the dogs never held it
against me."  After two days of total cloud cover, plus rain and snow,
incarceration began to induce cabin fever.  We decided to found a cult
and broadcast Churchillian speeches over the sound.  In a fit of
domesticity I asked whether anyone minded if I washed down the shelves,
and Steve said, /'It's your hut as much as anybody else's.  /' The men
at the bluff had made me feel part of the team, something that no one
at Rothera had even attempted.
After four days the weather cleared and we walked up to the Penitentes,
a snow field of sculpted ice cones named for their resemblance to monks
in prayer.  Their smooth, biomorphic shapes and the simplicity of their
curves and swellings and tapering gradients reminded me of Barbara
Hepworth sculptures.  They conveyed the same sense of the eternal too,
or, at least, of serenity.  It was a Cornish landscape that inspired
Hepworth.  I looked out over the sound, groping in vain for signs of
the Cornwall of my childhood.
Agreeable though life was at the bluff, after two weeks I was beginning
to wish I could see a different landscape.  It seemed too far to come
to sit in the same place for two months.  I asked the Rothera base
commander over the radio if I could hitch a lift on a plane refueling
at the bluff on its way to a field camp farther south.
Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks Three days later I stumbled into
the hut from my tiny room as usual to find that the boys were taking
turns hitting a tuning fork against a bunk leg and then pressing * on
their teeth.
"By the way, " Ian remembered after I had made coffee, "you were
mentioned on the early morning sched.  You're going to Ski Hi this
afternoon.  /' The Ski Hi nunataks are 220 miles from the Bluff,
northeast of the Merrick Mountains on the West Antarctic ice sheet.
They are too far south to be described as belonging to the peninsula,
so I was back in what I had come to think of as the proper
Antarctica.
Ski Hi's rocky extrusions disappeared as soon as low cloud descended
over the ice sheet.  They were first surveyed by Americans in the early
sixties, when they were named after a camp that later changed its name
to Eights Station.  Now a small team of BAS scientists and technicians
was studying that portion of the ice sheet with aerial radar equipment,
and, as a result, a rudimentary camp had been established not far from
the nunataks.  It consisted of no more than a couple of fuel lines,
half a dozen pyramid tents and a weatherhaven.
A furious wind was whipping over the ice sheet when we landed, and it
was very cold.  The tops of the tents were snowy, like mountain
peaks.
Vasco, a small, striking field assistant with flaming eyes and a big
heart, was waiting for us.  The nicknameþafter Vasco da Gamaþhad been
bestowed upon him on his journey south, as he had spent the entire
voyage from Grimsby on the bridge with the first officer, learning to
use a sextant.

Welcome to hell on earth, " he said with a grin.  Neil, the rangy
Liverpudlian geography teacher, was there too, and he took me to the
weatherhaven and made me a cup of tea.  The weatherhaven was an arched
tent, twelve feet long and six feet wide, with board flooring and a
permanently lit tilley lamp hanging from the ceiling.
An array of dripping gloves and hats also dangled from an overhead
network of string.
"It gets a bit crowded in here, " Neil said.  "You'll have to fight for
a space in the evenings."
"How many people are here?  " I asked, warming my hands over one of the
two primuses.
"Ten, with you, " he replied, toting them up on his fingers.
"Two scientists who've just arrived from a more remote camp and are
waiting to go back to Rothera, the five guys on the radar survey team,
and Vasco and I. We aren't really sure what we're doing here."
"I think we're supposed to be packing up the camp, " saidVasco, who had
followed us in.  He was shoveling snow into the small pond in the
middle of the floor.  When the snow had absorbed all the water, he
shoveled it out again.
The radio was on a jerrican, and one end of the weatherhaven was taken
up with half-empty tins and jars, their contents granitehard, packets
of soup, plastic mugs and a red plastic sack in which everyone took
turns collecting ice.
"Don't you ever turn these primuses off?  " I asked, as there was
nothing on them.
"We leave them on to heat the air, " said Neil.  "It's seventeen or
eighteen below most daysþsometimes much colder.  You'll notice the
difference between this and the Bluff.  You're farther south, and the
ice sheet is far more exposed than the peninsula."  I was sharing the
farthest pyramid tent with Keith, an electronics engineer on the radar
project.  Although an American Scott tent and a British pyramid tent
are to all intents and purposes the same, the entrance to a pyramid is
two feet off the ground, reflecting the higher levels of snow
accumulation in the "British sector" on the peninsula.
When I looked at my photographs later, I realized that the Scott tents
used by the Americans are less steeply angled, for the same reason.
Most surprising of all, I had begun to find these details
interesting.
Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks I laid my sleep kit down one side
of the tent.  Our territory was divided by a pot box, a food box and a
geophysics box, and on top of these stood a primus, a tilley lamp, a
radio, a compact disk Walkman, a James Clavell novel and a tube of
Extra Strong mints.  An open tin of peaches with feathers stuck to the
lid was wedged between Ke*his air bed and the primus, as well as a
half-full tin of Dutch camping butter (1988) and numerous discarded
wrappers of Cadbury's milk chocolate.  The acquisition of a tent mate
was not the best thing that had ever happened to Keith.  On the first
night he stayed in the weatherhaven until everyone else had retired to
their tent, delaying the moment at which he was obliged to join me.
"Hello, " I said as I heard him fighting his way through the tent
flaps.
"Hello, " he replied, in a kind of disappointed way, as if he had
nourished hopes that I might have dematerialized.  I had hatched a
cunning plan, however.  I could see from the tent that Keith was a
gadget man.  He had installed, for example, a digital thermometer that
took the temperature inside and outside the tent at the same time.
The only way to deal with a gadget man is to feign interest in his
equipment.
"This is useful, " I lied, pointing at the double display on the
thermometer.  "How does it work exactly?  " Keith cleared his throat.
I had won.
The reason Keith had enjoyed a tent to himself soon became clear.
He could have snored for England.  I didn't mind.  Being able to sleep
anywhere at any time and in any circumstances was part of a travel
writer's job description as far as I was concerned.  When Keith was
awake I enjoyed his company, once he thawed out a bit.  And he made me
tea in the morning.
"Here's breakfast, " he used to say, handing me half a bar of

Cadbury's.

If it was windy, we had to shout at each other.  On the second day I
was granted earphone rights to the CD player, and I dipped in and out
of Keith's extensive and catholic collection.  Getting dressed was not
easy, though, and it was made harder by the gloating presence of
Keith's thermometer, which informed us irrefutably that outside it was
minus 25.  I began plotting its destruction.  On really bad days, when
the plane carrying the radar equipment couldn't fly, some people never
left their tent, except to go to the toilet.  Even this was an ordeal
as it involved sliding down an ice chute into an underground ice
chamber and climbing onto an empty fuel drum.
Trapped inside for days, everyone ran out of books and started reading
the backs of food cartons.  People said that in the field they had
learned how to mix up porridge oats in Dutch and Swahili.
This followed a long-established tradition.  Gunnar Anderssen, marooned
at Hope Bay in 1902, wrote that his party had no books, and to delight
the eye with the printed word they got out their tins of condensed milk
and read the labels.  On the whole we couldn't really enjoy anything
much at Ski Hi.
Existing, as opposed to freezing, seemed to take up all our energy.
We rarely took off our windies, the fluorescent orange venule
over-the-head windbreakers and enormous trousers worn by Scott and
every subsequent Briton in Antarctica.  They suited what was often
referred to in the weatherhaven as "the Antarctic experience."  The
boys aspired to living what they perceived to be the "authentic" way in
Antarctica, eschewing the comforts of base for the derring-do they
associated with the old days.  Almost all the men became coarser and
more consciously macho in the field.  It was as if they had reverted to
a basic level of mental existence as well as a physical one.
Fancying yourself as a bit of a polar hero was harmless enough, but so
much cultural baggage came along with it.  They were committed to a
grim type of schoolboy humor.
When a field assistant shit in his overalls by mistake, he recounted
what had happened over the radio and it became the story of the day on
base, terribly funny, everyone agreed.  If someone left a camera
around, Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks you could be sure it would
be used for a few shots of someone else with a cigar up his bum to
edify the owner's mother when the film was sent home to be developed.
When the air unit left for the season, its members scrawled a final
message on the operations board, "Shaggin' in the U. K. " A man who had
recently left the ice after two and a half years sent down a photograph
of himself inflagrante.  Before the ship arrived to take us out, a list
went up asking if anyone required vegetarian food on board, and someone
wrote "Fuck off" next to his name.
And so it went on.  As Jennie Darlington wrote in the fifties, "It was
like living in a male locker room."  Why such a brittle mask?  I
wondered.  The British attitude had evolved from a culture in which no
one grew up.  In their emotional lives, the officers of Scott's day and
the generation that followed lived in a prep-school world in which boys
died heroically in one another's arms while the whole school sobbed.
How many times had I heard the latter-day men of the Antarctic
expressing regrets for the demise of the days when boys could be boys
and girls weren't there?
Alastair Fothergill, who spent a lot of time in the south producing his
award-winning Life in the Freezer television series, was perceptive on
this subject, "The Antarctic brings out national characteristics, it
really does.  The British attitudeþthough it's changingþis still rooted
in a very outdated vision of the explorer."  As I sat opposite him in
his overheated office at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol,
Fothergill continued, "It's inevitably a very male place.  For a long
time it was a playground.  It's about keeping people out, and that's a
male thing.  I get a bit sick when they moan about the tourists.
" The irony was that despite the collective fantasy of macho polar
endeavor, both Vasco and Neil, among the few who viewed the Antarctic
experience with an objective eye, said that they found camping in
Scotland tougher than in Antarctica.  It rained more in Scotland, the
tents were smaller, there were midges, you had to look farther for
water, and, hellþfood and fuel were unlimited on the ice.  As for Scott
himself, I felt sure he would have been on my side.  As an early
biographer wrote, "In some ways, Scott's sensibility was more like a
woman's than a man's."  I got into the habit of "doing the weather.  "
This involved marching out onto the ice sheet and having a good look
around.
When the pilots wanted hourlies, it was tempting to poke your head out
of the weatherhaven for ten seconds and hazard a few guesses, working
on the assumption that nothing much had changed since last time.  I
felt feeble even thinking about doing this until I saw everyone else at
it.
It even had a name, Giving Tent Weather.
As for the inner weather, I was once again struggling to cope with the
pressures of being an outsider.  The refreshing interlude at the Bluff
notwithstanding, the background hostility I was experiencing on the
peninsula was grinding me down, and, more seriously, it was getting in
the way of my response to the continent.  It wasn't quite the dark
night of the soul at Ski Hi but it was damned crepuscular.
The radar project was desperate for copilots.  Everyone else had done
the job many times and said it was boring.  It was obviously my Turn. 
I set my alarm for five-thirty, now a time of bleak halflight, and
stumbled over to the aircraft, where the technician was warming up the
hard drive of his laptop with a hairdrier.
"All you have to do, " said the pilot as he brushed his teeth in the
cockpit, "is keep looking at that dial there"þhe pointedþ"and tell me
when the needle goes beyond that figure there."  He stabbed with his
finger.  "And don't talk to me apart from that.  I have to
concentrate.
" I could see why this was not a popular job.
It was a sunny morning, and when I dared glance up from the dial, I
noticed that around the nunataks the patterns in the snow Fossil Bluff
and the Ski Hi Nunataks were as regular as a carpet.  Farther south the
blue glacier ice was glassy and cusped.  The pilot glanced darkly at me
as I looked out, and I sank back into my seat, eyes glued to the
dial.
I ended up doing this job several times.  At least I was warm, once we
got going.  Being comfortable gave it a purpose, and, anyway, there was
nothing else to do.  I was cold all the time at Ski Hi.
Sometimes, in the tent or the weatherhaven, I would think myself back
to a warm place, just to try to deceive the cold for a few moments.  I
used to imagine swimming in the Aegean Sea and diving through pellucid
green waves to the ridged and sandy bottom.  It is difficult now to
remember why I kept doing this for it never worked.
I was at Ski Hi for a week, during which time the weatherhaven became
increasingly derelict.  Everyone expected to be gone in a few days, so
there wasn't much point in clearing it up.  We all crowded in for the
evenings and took turns cooking.  One day I foundVasco stirring a pan
of tomato soup.
"There's this field assistant and his beaker holed up in a tent for
days in a blizzard, right?  " he began, addressing no one in
particular.
"The beaker goes out regularly to piss, but never the field
assistant.
Eventually the beaker says, Look, how do you do this?  It's incredible,
and the field assistant replies, Easy.  Every time you go out, I piss
under your air bed."  Apart from these bursts of wit, conversation
meandered through the same familiar topics (the arrival of the ship,
the condition of the Dash-7 plane, the mental health of BAS management,
and where they would travel when they left the ice), eventually
reaching the end only to start again at the beginning.  At about that
time we heard on the radio that a piece of ice the size of a minor
English county had broken off the Larsen Ice Shelf and was heading
purposefully for the Falklands.
This newly created iceberg inevitably propelled the press into a frenzy
of catastrophe stories about London and New York being flooded by the
tide of melted glacier water pouring off Antarctica.  The formation of
a berg, howeverþeven a huge oneþis part of the natural cycle of renewal
and not therefore necessarily indicative of imminent global disaster.
It is the gradual disintegration of the ice shelves year in year out
that is a new phenomenon, and one that is gripping glaciologists.
Since 1990, for instance, the ice that formerly occupied Prince Gustav
Channel and connected James Ross Island to the Antarctic Peninsula has
crumbled away, and not long before that the Wordie Ice Shelf on the
west coast broke up.  The regional climate on the peninsula, always the
warmest part of Antarctica, has heated up 2. 5 degrees Celsius since
the 1940s, which has weakened the ice shelves.  In 50 years, more than
3, 000 square miles have disappeared without being renewed.
Even the gradual disintegration of the ice shelves won't necessarily
raise sea levels.  According to Archimedes' principle, floating ice
displaces its own mass of water.  If, however, the crumbling of the ice
shelves causes the ice sheet lying over Antarctica to discharge more of
its ice, then sea levels will rise.  Even in that situation, the extra
discharge would have to take place off large areas of the coast, not
just the peninsula, before the rest of the planet would be
significantly affected.
Although the new berg was enormous, it was an infant compared with a 3,
000-square-mile predecessor named Trolltunga, which snapped
offAntarctica in 1967 at about twelve o'clock on the map.  The record
holder measured over 12, 000 square miles, roughly the size of
Belgium.
Neil rushed into the weatherhaven one evening and flung himself onto a
crate, hair flopping into his eyes.  He had been reading Anna
Karenina.
"I just can't stand the way Tolstoy is always absolutely completely
right about everything!  He's so incredible!  He knows every Fossil
Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks thing!  Every nuance is the right one!
Every insight makes me think Yes!
It is like that!  " We all thought about this for a while.
"Ah yes, Neil, but was he happy?  " asked somebody, stirring the ice in
a pan on the primus.
"No, " said Neil.  He was all fucked up."
"But he had a great beard, " said somebody else, "and that's what
counts."  Back at Rothera, the field assistants were hunched gloomily
over Formica tables in the labs and the sledge store, writing the
reviled end-of-season reports before the ship arrived in three weeks.
At least once an hour someone would come to find me on the spurious
grounds of a spelling inquiry.  I occupied myself agreeably enough, and
it was thrilling to be warm again.  On Shrove Tuesday, a week after I
returned from Ski Hi, I tossed 75 pancakes.  I had also been assigned
the taxing job of skua monitoring.  They were collecting data on skua
distribution in Cambridge to tackle the aeronautical problem of bird
strikes, and I had to stroll around the point intermittently, counting
the birds.
March was an odd time.  Summer had ended, yet winter hadn't begun.
One day the base commander announced the name of his winter
replacement, drawn from the ranks of the 15 winterers.  Bits of paper
were posted to the doors of the emptying labs staking out room
claims.
Twenty or so people were going out on the Dash, and 18 of us were
waiting for the ship.  Men who had been on the ice for two and a half
years began discussing what they would do first, in Stanley and in the
U. K. There was talk of trees, and fruit, and pubs, and handing over
money and getting something back.
The weather veered between savage snowstorms and sunshine and clear
skies.  Time dripped away slowly in the bad weather, and the field
assistants prowled around like caged animals.  I worked my way through
a pile of Antarctic films stored in dented tins in the tiny, windowless
archive.  Life took on an agreeably even rhythm, bleached of highs and
lows.  The days grew shorter.
The easy equilibrium was hijacked one day by the arrival of mail.
I was sitting in the library, with one eye on a pair of Adelies outside
the window, when someone tossed a pile of letters secured by a rubber
band onto the desk in front of me.  I forgot about the penguins and
began ripping envelopes open.  The first one, forwarded from my home,
unleashed a wave of regret.  It contained a stiff, embossed invitation
to my publisher's Christmas party two months previously.  Jonathan

Cape's bash was acknowledged to be the best on the literary
circuitþdrunken, stygian, overheated, late and a hotbed of incestuous
gossip.  The previous year it had been the scene of disgracefully bad
behavior, perpetrated not least by the Patron of my expedition and
me.
It was all very well to relish the absence of clutter and the spiritual
opportunities of the Antarctic wilderness, but I missed the debris of
urban lowlife.  The invitation threw me off balance, and I spent the
remains of the day kicking up snow disconsolately around the point and
glaring murderously at seals.
In the second week of March, Ben, Vasco and Steve Rumble were going on
a recreational three-day trip to Lagoon Island.  It was an
end-of-season treat.
"Why don't you come?  " said Ben.
"Won't I be taking someone else's place?  " I asked.  I had become
absurdly oversensitized to my superfluity.
"Of course not.  Nobody else wants to come.  I've asked the other two,
and they'd be pleased if you joined us.  Go on."  We fitted crampons,
stole bread from the kitchen and filled a manfood box with supplies,
struggled into red inflation suits, Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi
Nunataks winched two Humber inflatables into the bay and nudged our way
through the pancake ice.  It was a perfect day, without a cloud in the
sky.
Lagoon was the northernmost of the Leonie Islands, in Ryder Bay.
It was charted in 1936 and formed a lagoon with the island on its west
side.
When we arrived, it was five degrees above zero and the sun was beating
down.  Vasco put on a pair of shorts and took off his T-shirt.  I was
especially aware of the dateþMarch 10þas it was a friend's birthday.
The previous year we had driven up to the Peak District for the weekend
to celebrate at a hotel nestling in a dale.  An unexpectedly harsh
frost had fallen on Saturday night, and when we woke on Sunday the
temperature outside was minus five Celsiusþthe perfect excuse to stay
in bed all morning.  I made a note to write to my friend to tell him
that on the same day a year later it was ten degrees warmer in
Antarctica than it had been in the north of England.
Steve, the former winter-base commander and electrician whom I had met
at the Bluff, set about hoisting the flag.  Ben went off to doze behind
a rock, and I joined Vasco to do nothing on the veranda.
The wind soon began whipping up small white horses on the lagoon,
andVasco lit the paraffin heaters in the hut and went to sleep
inside.
I was so cold that I put my inflation suit back on and walked up to a
large area of coarse sand above the tide line.  There were many of
these raised beaches on the island, formed when the glaciers retreated
after the last ice age.
We were struck on the head by skuas dozens of times each day on Lagoon
Island.  They came at us with open beaks and extended talons.  The hut
diary was bristling with antiskua advice and designs for combat gear,
but nothing worked except holding a broom aloft and waving it
vigorously as you walked.  The hut had been built several years
previously, purely as a holiday cottage.  It was 20 feet square, on
stilts, and the walls and ceiling had been painted canary yellow.
Besides an unplumbed sink, it had two primus stoves, four wooden bunk
beds, three windows and, in the middle, a Formica table.  The shelves
around the sink were jumbled with rusty tins of peaches and jars of
separated mayonnaise.  Two tilley lamps hung from the ceiling, as well
as a coil of wire and a collection of fraying teacloths.  A single
shelf was stacked with a dozen novels and a chess set.
The evenings were drawing in, and we had to light the tilleys at eight
o'clock.  On the first night we drank rum and ate scones from a plastic
bag shoved into our arms as we left base by A1, the cook, who never
forgot field-party care parcels.  Nobody had anything particular to
do.
Steve was at the end of a two-and-a-half-year tour of duty, and inside
his head he hadn't really been in Antarctica for some months.
At the Bluff he had spent most of the time lying on his bunk with his
Walkman clamped to his ears, but at Lagoon, in a smaller group, he
opened up.  As he was unpacking the contents of his bag, he held out a
folded T-shirt.
"I thought you'd like this, " he said.  "I bought two when the
consignment arrived from Cambridge last year, and, well, you'll
appreciate it."  I unfolded his gift.  It had been produced to
commemorate the departure of the huskies.
After the sun had finally struggled over the horizon on our first
morning at Lagoon, we sat on the veranda for breakfast, an event made
memorable by the fact that I had mistaken egg powder for milk powder
and put it in everyone's tea.
There had been much discussion about climbing a mountain, and we had
brought plastic boots and a frightening array of harnesses.
Like all field assistants, Vasco was a passionate rock and mountain
climber and raced up a peak at the drop of a hat.  I couldn't tell one
end of a harness from another and had never worn plastic boots before,
but I hadn't dared raise an objection.  God smiled on me that day, as
He sent a thick cloud down over the mountains.
"We'll have to go for a walk instead, " saidVasco over breakfast as he
scanned the horizon.

Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks "What a shame, " I said.

We took the boats to Anchorage Island, another of the Leonies.  It was
reported by members of the French 1908-10 Antarctic Expedition as a
possible anchorage spot for a small ship, and charted by the British
Graham Land Expedition in February 1936.  As we climbed the spine of
the island, the lichens thickened.  Above them we spied a vein of
brassy yellow pyrite, fool's gold.
"Look at this, a said Ben when we got to the top.  "I've found a
splinter of whalebone."  He strode ahead, fiddling around looking for
treasure.
Ben was in his element off base.  In the sixties, when he was driving
dogs, he had spent almost all his time in the field.
I awoke the next day to a sound like sizzling bacon, the noise made by
ice melting in a pan on a primus.  In the months after Antarctica, I
often heard it in the boneless moments between sleep and consciousness,
then memories ached like an old wound.  Sunshine was pouring through
the window.  Steve brought tea to our bunks.
Some of the ice must have been brackish, as it was salty.  I made up a
jug of milk for our breakfast cereal, and that was salty too.  I wasn't
having much luck with breakfasts.  But it didn't matter.  Nothing
mattered.
We basked on our veranda, and a flock of Antarctic terns flew by, their
high-pitched chirp exotically foreign after the coarse squawk of the
skuas.  Later, we took the boats out and followed a minke whale around
the bergs, sailing through Daliesque arches and poking into cold blue
grottoes.  The sun was low, and the honeyed air was so still that the
growlers and bergy bits were barely moving.  It was a golden evening.
A day like that made everything worthwhile.
When we got back to Rothera, the planes were parked on the apron,
spruced up for their long flights to Cambridge like cars on a Fragments
of floating ice.  Also used to refer to lumps in custard.

showroom floor.  The four Otters looked helpless without their skis,
crouching behind the Dash.
The next day the seven pilots and five air mechanics trooped in and out
of the station, loudly discussing routes.  In the evening A1 produced a
four-course dinner, the air unit supplied champagne, a number of people
made speeches, bread rolls whizzed through the air and we all got
drunk.
I was on housekeeping duty the following morning, and when I started
the dining room looked like the site of a very small civil war in which
neither side had emerged victorious.  A pair of sneakers had been
stowed in the fridge, and congealed baked beans clung like glue to the
sandwich maker.
We saw the planes off at eight o'clock.  It was gusting 40 knots and
very cold.  Great swaths of snow were sweeping across the ramp,
tumbling over the ice cliffs and dissolving into a gunmetalgray sea.
The sun began to peek over the bergs in the bay as one by one the
pilots zipped themselves into their flying suits and took off for
Stanley, the first stop on the long haul home.
The sense of shutdown was especially powerful then.  We felt as if the
birds had migrated.  People lingered longer at the tables after dinner,
and at night the bar was empty except for two or three men playing
Scrabble.  People talked to me more easily and seemed to find the
experience less grueling than they had at first.  Our favorite topic of
conversation was Relief, the week when the ship anchored at the wharf
and disgorged a year's supplies.
"I hope that one stays, " one of the winterers said as we pressed our
foreheads against a window one morning and watched a particularly fine
iceberg in the bay.  They were waiting for the landscape to settle for
the winter and wanted their favorite bergs to be marooned, like them.
As for the rest of us, at particular moments, when the evening light
fell at a certain angle on the pack, people who had been talking for
months about going home would say that they were going to miss the
ice.
Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks On Sunday, March 19, at eight
o'clock in the morning we were sprawled out in the dining room,
clutching mugs of coffee, when we heard the low elephant grief of a
ship's horn.  R. R. S. Bransfield had appeared beyond the farthest
berg.
We all went down to the wharf.  Some of us were boarding the ship for
the day, as it was taking a clean-up team to Horseshoe Island before
Relief.  The base there had scarcely been touched since the fifties,
and as a shortterm measure it had been decided to remove the rubbish
and fix up the huts.
The captain sent over a boat with a scow lashed to its side, and we
filled nets with rolls of roofing felt and tossed them down into the
scow.  Then we climbed down from the wharf into the boat and motored to
the rope ladder dangling over the side of the ship.
We sailed on a calm, steely sea, past snowy petrels dancing in the
bands of light on the horizon and solitary penguins on tabular bergs.
A carpenter from the building team was standing next to me on deck.
He was a diminutive creature with powerful shoulders, a gallery of
tattoos and a rasping Glaswegian accent.  A rainbow arched over
Horseshoe Island.  The carpenter said it was amazing how the sunshine
changed everything.
"I'm a bit of an agnostic, " he said, "a doubting Thomas.
But thisþit makes you think there is a God."  Horseshoe Island was
shoehorned between Bourgeois Fjord and Square Bay, off the Fallieres
Coast.  A station was established there in 1955 and occupied
continuously until it was evacuated on August 21, 1960, since when it
has been used occasionally by field parties.  It was imaginatively
known as Base Y. In his book Of Ice and Men, SirVivien Fuchs recounts a
radio hoax at Horseshoe in 1955.  The Beards used to indulge in radio
pranks every five minutes in those days, but this one was particularly
well orchestrated.  Two men tuned the bunkroom receiver so that their
colleagues thought they had picked up a Falklands radio station,
whereas they were, in fact, listening to material broadcast from the
room next door.  All the music played was drawn from the meager
selection on base, so to allay suspicion one of the perpetrators
performed on the bagpipes and mouth organ (it was gratifying to learn
that at the Bluff we had unwittingly been adhering to tradition).  Even
after they had broadcast a news story announcing that Marilyn Monroe
was to lead an expedition up Everest, one man still hadn't caught on.
"The final broadcast, " Fuchs wrote, "took place the day before
everyone except this man was to leave on a sledging trip, he being left
behind as caretaker.  The news' received that evening reported a
revolution in Argentina where fighting had broken out between the army
and navy.  It included a warning that likely conflicts which would
follow at Argentine Antarctic stations could well lead to the losers
seeking political asylum at the nearest British bases, and called on
everyone to keep calm and use their heads."  Before I left England,
SirVivien invited me to his home in Cambridge to talk about his
Antarctic adventures.  A pair of porcelain penguins were guarding the
fireplace, and SirVivien was wearing a blue plaid BAS-style flannel
shirt.  He was in his eighties and still handsome, with clear, china
blue eyes and an efflorescence of nut brown eyebrows, and when his face
creased into a smile he was irresistible.
As a young man his tutor at Cambridge had been James Wordie, Scott's
chief of scientific staff.  Fuchs spent many seasons in the Antarctic,
and in 1950 the Falkland Islands Dependencies Scientific Bureau was
founded under his direction.  During the 1955-58

Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which he led, with Sir Edmund
Hillary in command of the New Zealand support party, Fuchs crossed the
continent for the first time, using dogs and tractors.  Together
theywrote a book about it, and despite the Sno-Cats, Fossil Bluff and
the Ski Hi Nunataks radio telephone and electric sewing machine they
seemed to mark the end of an unbroken line that Scott started when he
sailed down the Thames aboard Discauery.
At one point Fuchs and Hillary were invited aboard a visiting ship.
The captain sent a smaller vessel over to fetch them.
Faced with a 20-foot ladder up to the deck, Hillary was asked by a
sailor if he could manage the climb.
Fuchs was committed to the dogs.  "I remember very well, " he said,
"back at Stonington in the forties a chap got annoyed and said, Well,
I'm going outside to have a word with the dogs.  Then he'd come back in
and the whole argument had disappeared.  I spent years driving dogs,
and then I became a tractor man, perforce, though I don't think a dog
man ever becomes a real tractor man."  When I returned from the ice, a
magazine ran a competition requesting readers to submit their all-time
favorite newspaper headlines.  Several people with long memories had
sent in DR FUCHS OFF TO SOUTH ICE, but only one had saved the cutting
from the same newspaper that recorded a subsequent visit SirVivien had
made.
The subeditor, following the hallowed principle that if it works once
it can work a second time, had settled on DR FUCHS OFF AGAIN.
Relief began on Monday morning.  We had been divided into four teams,
and mine spent the morning in Navy boilersuits and hard hats unloading
boxes on the tween deck.  In the afternoon we put the goods away on
base.
Everyone's eyes lit up when they saw crates of oranges.
During the afternoon we sat on the step in the sunshine, waiting for
fresh loads and taking it in turns to fetch pots of tea and plates of
flapjacks.
Mealtimes were changed to bring us in sync with the ship.  We had tea
at five, then returned to our duties for two more hours.  It was my
birthday on the second day of Relief, and after this last shift I was
drinking tea in the dining room when A1 emerged from the kitchen
carrying a pink-and-white cake designed to look like a book and iced
with the words "Into the Unknown, Happy Birthday, Sara, " with my name
down the spine and a bookmark protruding from the top.
For the last two days we unloaded fuel drums while the winterers took
turns visiting the ship's dentist, returning looking pained and asking
Al for soup.  The grease ice, a thin film that forms before the sea ice
freezes, was thickening around the wharf every day, in Antarctica the
freeze and thaw of the sea replaced the rise and fall of sap.  When the
sun emerged, the dull matte-gray water lit up like a face breaking into
a smile.
I was appointed night watchman for my last three days at Rothera.
It was a duty shared among all the support staff to prevent the base
from burning down, among other things.  On the first night I was
suffering from excruciating period pains, and at dinner someone told me
that my face looked like a bowl of porridge.
"It's because I have severe menstrual cramps, " I announced loudly.
Silence descended, and I immediately felt better.  I didn't want to be
an honorary man, and I was fed up with carrying used tampons around in
a plastic bag in my pocket, trying to find somewhere to abandon them.
Nightwatch began with a midnight patrol.  I was convinced that I would
be responsible for the base's total destruction and that everyone would
then be able to announce triumphantly that both writers and women were
superfluous in Antarctica and that the combination of the two was
nothing short of deadly.  At twelvethirty I found myself wedged between
two small huts, shining my torch into the dial of the ice-core
freezer.
I was especially terrified of melting the ice cores.  I had heard many
stories about this happening, producing what they called the most
expensive ice cubes in Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks the history
of the world.  The dial read ten below.  "Shouldn't it be twenty?
" I thought.  "Or am I being paranoid?  " A wrong decision would either
mean having my head bitten off for unnecessarily waking a slumbering
electrician or melting hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of ice
cores.  I went to wake the hapless electrician.  I was very pleased
that I did, as the freezer was off, but it made me frightened about
what might happen next.
In the hangar I told myself cheerily that Antarctica was the world's
last refuge from fear, but the dangers lurking in the shadows of a
high, empty, unlit concrete building had been inculcated too
effectively into my psyche.  Every two hours I checked the generator
and the reverse-osmosis plant, and at three o'clock I climbed the hill
behind base to take a weather observation.  At five-thirty I turned on
the coffee urn and the pastry ovens and began the waking-up routine.
This involved creeping into pit rooms and shaking slumbering male
bodies by the tautly muscled shoulder.  It should have been a
highlight, but somehow it never lived up to expectations.
I got to know the base better during those quiet, dark nights.
Rothera was a warren of nooks and hidden corners.  I found places where
I hadn't been before, and finally poked my head into the sauna, which I
had never dared visit during the day.  It was an old fridge heated by a
spiral coil in a cast-iron bucket.  A torn copy of Motorcycling World
lay on the floor.
On my last night, people partied until dawn, so I had company on
watch.
At six in the morning we drove down to the ship in the enormous Delta
truck, its lights flashing, and fell out of the high cab onto the
wharf.
It seemed a good way to end.
I found my cabin and slept through the journey to Horseshoe, where we
collected the clean-up team.  In three days the grease ice had
thickened into pancake ice.  When we got back to Rothera, the crew
threw a party on board for the winterers.  At five o'clock the captain
gave the word, the horn sounded and after a flurry of awkward embraces,
the fifteen winterers, who wouldn't see another soul for seven months,
walked down the gangplank.  As they shrank, reeling and striding around
the wharf, they set off pink flares and yellow rockets, and we waved
until they disappeared.  Winter.  It was as if a door had closed.
FOURTEEN Afloat in the Southern Ocean Lo!  now the direful
monster, whose skin clings To his strong bones, strides o'er the
groaning rocks, He withers all in silence, and his hand Unclothes the
earth, and freezes up frail life.
WILLLXM BLAKE, from "To Winter" I once met a former captain of the
Antarctic support ship H. M. S.
Endurance.  He had a great love of the south.
"I took a ship where no ship had been before, " he said, "and that was
a thrill.  In the mid-eighties I felt that we were pushing back the
boundaries of man's knowledge.  It was good sailoring down there.
" Like Scott, he had been obliged by the Navy Act to conduct a church
service on board each Sunday, and he described reading the lesson on
deck in the wintry sunshine while Antarctic terns flew around the
prow.
The Royal Research Ship Bransfield was old and decrepit, but we had
"good sailoring" on her, too.  The journey to the Falklands took a
week.
There were three decks, one for the officers and senior BAS personnel,
one for other BAS people and one for the crew.
Each had its own mess.  Oursþthe middle oneþwas furnished with chipped
blue Formica tables seating twelve, each equipped with a row of sauce
bottles standing to attention in slots.
I was sharing a cabin with an amiable cargo supervisor from BAS HQ.
She had been invited upstairs to eat in the wardroom and I had not,
which made her feel embarrassed, but I couldn't have cared less.
The cabin had a long leatherette couch along the porthole wall.
The walls were mint green and the carpet and bunk curtains were orange,
a color scheme designed to make you puke should the roll of the sea
fail.
The builders were with us, which made the trip more entertaining and
the lounge friendlier.  One day two of them pretended that everyone had
to participate in iceberg patrol and handed out hard hats emblazoned
with the words "Berg Alert" and broom handles to shove away stray
islands of ice.  Two carpenters fell for it and dutifully stood on the
lower deck wearing the Berg Alert hats, smoking and occasionally
glancing around to see if any giant icebergs were bearing down on the
ship.  When they spotted the others taking photographs of them, the
game was up.
The BAS men who had been at Rothera for two and a half years sniggered
into their beer as they imagined the winterers back on base.
It was traditional to sabotage winterers upon departure, and on this
occasion a trout had been stowed in the ventilation system, a gallon of
green food coloring poured into the water tanks and small cubes of
Stilton cheese balanced on the lattice ceiling of the bar.  The
winterers had tried to effect proleptic revenge, knowing something
horrible lay ahead, and half a mackerel was found in a bunk shortly
after we sailed, provoking much discussion about the possible location
of the other half, which was, in fact, never found.  I discovered a
portion of trifle in my left boot.
The Southern Ocean was very still as we sailed up the peninsula.
When a penguin broke the surface, the ripples spread into enormous
concentric circles until they died far away in the silver-blue water.
On one side of the ship, serrated mountain ranges sliced through the
water, the sheerest faces, ablated of snow, shading the landscape with
patches of charcoal engraved with a fine white lattice.  The clouds
massed into dark purply tornadoes that stormed through the fuzzy peach
light of the sky, or sometimes they remained expressionless for days,
hanging down to the narrow band of light on one side of the horizon.
Icebergs came to seem as normal to us as trees on the side of a road.
We had to pick up ten men from Faraday, a small BAS station on Galindez
Island.  They were at the end of their tour of duty and were going
home.
When we got there, on a Saturday afternoon, most of us went ashore.
The bar at Faraday, a magnificent piece of polished woodwork, was
famous in Antarctic history.  Two builders had been hired to construct
a hardwood extension to the pier but instead spent the whole winter
toiling over this fine bar.  The wharf was never finished, and the men
were dismissed, though they are remembered daily with gratitude.
The current incumbents had alighted on the idea of brewing beer in fire
extinguishers, and when we arrived they were busily squirting it out of
the syphons.
We remained at Faraday for 24 hours, and I was able to roam freely
around the station and its few outposts.  In a small library tucked
away off the famous bar, I found a shoe box of replies to a collective
advertisement the base commander had placed in a dating magazine back
in England the previous year ("Dear boys, Hope you're not too cold down
there .  . . ").  Photographs stuffed between the books revealed a
recent Buddhist Night, when the residents shaved their heads, put on
their windies and sat cross-legged and barefoot.  A blurred picture of
Viking Night showed them careering through the snow in horned helmets
brandishing torches.
The station was opened as a geophysical observatory in 1954 and called
Base F, it was renamed in 1977 after Michael Faraday, the
nineteenth-century English chemist and physicist who discovered
electromagnetic induction and introduced the basic principle of the
electric motor and dynamo.  Along the way he probably believed in more
wrong theories than any man before or since, a gratifying testament to
the perseverance of the human spirit.  Geophysics had remained the main
thrust of the science at Faraday, though it was an important
meteorological station and collected weather data from British,
American and German bases.  This information eventually found its way
into the World Meteorellogical Organisation database, and who knows
what happened to it then.  There was no airstrip at Faraday.  It was a
cozy base, less institutional than Rothera, but it was about to cease
operating as a British station and be handed over to the Ukrainians,
who badly wanted a base of their own.  They had just renamed
itMernadsky.  It seemed like the end of an era.
The Faraday carpenter, who showed me a coffin he had made, decided
unilaterally that I should visit Winter Island and propelled me down
the wharf and into a small and precarious boat with a four-horsepower
Seagull engine.  The slipway at Faraday was positioned directly below
the sewage pipe, which meant that one had to dodge flying turds while
getting in one's boat.  We motored past a wooden signpost saying CROWN
LAND against which a crabeater seal was manifesting signs of
disrespect.
The hut on Emter Island was opened in 1947 as a wintering station for
three meteorologists and a general assistant.  It was maintained for
seven years until Base F opened, and has been closed ever since, except
for the year when a team making for Adelaide Island got caught out by
bad ice and bivouacked there.
Inside, it was like a set for a fifties film.  The hut was dotted with
blocks of Marmite and tiny tins of gramophone needles, "each good for
eight records."  The shelf of books included Instructtons on How to
Play the Bagpipes, novels by John Buchan, girlie annuals displaying
women in swimsuits that could have been designed for army combatþand,
harking back to the old days, Tennyson.  One room was dominated by a
massive typewriter of the kind that in a film would have been presided
over by a straight-backed woman with horn-rimmed spectacles and ropes
of fake pearls.  The thick cotton trousers folded over the back of a
chair were exactly the same as those sported by the Bransfield's third
engineer, a northerner who had come with us.
"You know you're getting old, " he said, slurping tea out of a
blue-rirnmed tin mug "when your keks [pants] are in a museum."  That
night, in 80-knot winds and horizontal rain, two bergs converged on the
Bransfield.  When our searchlight beams alighted on them, we saw that
the ice was scratched with the red ship's paint.
The Bransfield dragged her anchor, and at one pointþblack smoke pouring
from the funnel and soaked crewmen wrestling with ropes in pools of
light on the foredeckþwe were only 20 yards off the rocks.
The sun shone during our passage through the Lemaire Channel, and most
of us spent the day on the monkey deck.  Unclimbed mountains wobbled in
the polished surface of the water, and pods of whales fluked among the
bergs.  We passed the deserted red buildings of an Argentinian base and
its Chilean neighbor, the latter sporting a particularly large flag.  I
thought of my first visit to Antarctica, when I had seen the continent
through South American eyes.  The Chileans at Marsh were wonderful
hosts, they wanted to share it.
Everyone addressed me immediately in the familiar "tu" form, which they
hadn't done in real Chile until the ice was broken.
Antarctica didn't seem a problem to them.  It wasn't so much that they
had made their little bit of King George Island home, but that it was
home.  "The water in the bay, " they would say, "has lapped on our
shore."  They had a school, a hospital and a bank on base, and they
brought their wives and children down with them.  On Friday evenings
they ran a quiz show from their radio station, Radio Sovereign FM.  The
questions were about Antarctica, and all the bases on the island took
part, although first they had to find someone who could speak
Spanish.
While I was there a Chinese contingent arrived to collect their prize,
whichþI suspected to their chagrinþwas a specially baked cake.
Because it was only a three-hour flight from the tip of South America
and not permanently ice-covered, King George Island, squatting in the
archipelago named the South Shetlands by Scottish sealers, was a
popular site for bases.  Russians were there, as were Poles,
Uruguayans, Brazilians and Argentinians as well as Chileans and
Chinese.  I had eaten syrupy balls of undercooked dough at Great Wall,
drunk vodka at Bellingshausen, and been given a piggyback across a deep
stream by a Brazilian lieutenant commander.  Each country transports
its culture to the bottom of the world when it sets up in
Antarcticaþthe good and the bad.  In Bellingshausen the piles of
rubbish, the acres of crusty mud, the puffy-faced men with silver
teeth, the ghostly outlines of the metal letters CCCP that had been
clumsily jimmied off doors, the abandoned machinery of failed
scientific projects, the single inadequate Ladaþwell, they were Russian
all right.
Chile and Argentina base their Antarctic claims on medieval bulls and
decrees inherited from Spain, and they have clung to these claims like
children to comfort blankets.  One of the few things the two nations
have ever agreed on was to take a common line against Britainþtwice in
the 1940sþby reinforcing the concept of a South American Antarctic
(though later they squabbled even about that).

General Pinochet flew down to King George Is Afloat in the Southern

Ocean land in 1977 and declared that it was a continuation of Chilean
territory.  Six families were dispatched there in 1984 to institute a
"permanent" settlement.  Across the Andes the entire Cabinet took off
from Buenos Aires and landed on the ice to prove how very Argentinian
that part of Antarctica was.
Other South American republics have also cast their eyes south.
The Peruvians named their base Machu Picchu.  Much of the scientific
data produced by the poorer nations was valuable, but some of it was
privately questioned by the richer countries.  All programs are
required to submit descriptions of their science projects to an
international Antarctic science body, ostensibly so that research can
be shared.  The Uruguayans once sent in details of an experiment that
involved playing loud music to penguins to see how they would react.
Geopolitics belonged to the north, on the ice there was only one
enemyþthe cold.  I remember stopping next to a stream between Marsh and
Bellingshausen with my Chilean guide and a Russian biologist.
"We are very proud of this river between us, " said the Russian in
Spanish.
"What's it called?  " I asked.
"Volga, " said the Russian immediately.
"Mapocho, " said the Chilean simultaneously, and they both screamed
with laughter.
"En Antarttda, " the Chilean said later, "no hay fronteras"þthere are
no borders.  On the continent it was still as it had been in the
forties when Chilean and Argentinian warships arrived at the British
base on Stonington Island and the captains delivered official protests
about a British presence in their territorial waters, then followed
them up with invitations to dinner and picture shows.  "Beyond the

Polar Circle, " said the great French Antarctican Jean Charcot, "there
are no Frenchmen, no Germans, no English, no Danes, there are only
people of the Pole, real men."  The birds were especially abundant when
the whales were churning up krill, and we argued over their
identification.  Of petrels alone we recorded morphs, Antarctics,
giants, pintados (the zebras of the southern ocean), snowies and
Wilson's.  Ben was the most authoritative spotter.
"There!  " he said one day, pointing to a bird wheeling around the
ship.

a White-chinned petrel."
"I can't see a white chin, " someone piped up.  "Looks totally brown to
me."
"You'd have to be holding the bird in your hand to see the white chin,
" Ben said.  "But it's there."  While it was light, Ben was always out
on deck.
"Well, " he said, when I remarked on this, "I'll never see all this
again.  n It was as if he wanted to drink in the landscape and store it
up, like water in a camel's hump, and live off it in the seasons still
to come, sitting out his retirement in Sheffield.
What thrilled us most were not birds but whales.  We saw humpbacks and
minkes and bottlenoses, and one morning half a dozen killers came
fluking past our ship.
Whalers played an important part in the discovery of Antarctica,
especially after they had bled the Arctic dry.  A group of Dundonians
set out in 1892, their thoughts fixed on the riches waiting for them in
the Southern Ocean.  They were right to turn their attention to
southern waters, the Falklands sector of the Antarctic is the richest
whaling ground in the world.  But in technique the Scots were
outstripped by their Norwegian rivals.  Their equipment was outmoded,
and they were looking for the wrong kind of whale, they wanted bone for
umbrellas and corsets, but the market wanted oil, not least for
munitions.
Before setting out from home, I had walked along a salty spit in Dundee
to see W. G. Burn-Murdoch's paintings of this expedition in Broughty
Castle, a deserted museum with a spiral staircase curling between
mildewed floors.  The second floor featured a program from the Royal
Terror Theatre on the Discovery, advertising the Dishcover Minstrel
Troupe.  Whaling died out in Dundee before the Great War, and the Terra
Nova was the last whaler ever built by Dundonians.  But in Antarctica
the trade took off in the first two decades of the twentieth century,
after the Norwegian Carl Larsen founded Grytviken on South Georgia and
floating whale factories were developed.  The industry reached its peak
in southern waters in the 1930s.  Despite the mystiqueþan early
participant called it "the greatest chase which nature
yieldeth"þwhaling was one of the hardest trades, and it employed the
hardest drinkers.  It was not unknown for men to break the ship's
compass for its alcohol.  In the twenties a crewman wrote, "There were
two kinds of days, bad days and worse, and each lasted twenty-four
hours."  Business dropped off dramatically during the Second World War
when synthetic glycerin was developed and most of the fleet was sunk by
German raiders.  After a few dying spurts, the last whaling station on
South Georgia closed in 1965.
In the late nineteenth century deep-sea trawling took off in the north
of Britain in the wake of whaling.  My grandfather knew a trawlerman
from Grimsby whose eight sons had all become trawler skippers.  I
remember hearing this man talk about "the wondrous freedom of trawling,
when time didn't exist."  I was a child then, and he made it sound like
the most magical occupation in the worldþI wrote in a schoolbook that
when I grew up I wanted to be a trawlerman.  Now it reminded me of what
the old Antarctic explorers wrote in their diaries.
None of them could submit to the nine-to-five.
Lying on my bunk as we plowed up the side of the peninsula, I read the
last of the books I had brought south.  Fearful that I was going to
finish it before the journey ended, I went through it very slowly.
It was a volume of Edward Wilson's diaries, and in it I discovered that
Scotland had another connection with Antarctica.  Scott and Wilson had
planned their last journey south on the rose-covered veranda of a
bungalow near the mouth of one of the lovely glens of Angus.
Originally a shepherd's stone cottage, it was bought in 1902 by a
London publisher called Reginald Smith, who converted it into a tiny
shooting lodge.
Wilson and Scott went to see Smith in London in 1905 to ask him to
publish Scott's Voyage of the Discovery, which he did.  They became
friends, and when Wilson was commissioned to write a report on grouse
disease by the Department of Agriculture, Smith lent him the
bungalow.
Wilson spent months there and wrote in his diaries about long walks
when he saw snipes and corncrakes, curlews and peewits, tawny owls and
golden plover and greenfinches feeding on dandelion seed.
Scott used to visit, and once, when they went stalking, he let a deer
pass unharmed "because it was so pretty.  n The glen was called Glen

Prosen, and in 1917 Smith's widow commissioned a monument to Scott and
Wilson and their dead companions.  By the time I got there the bungalow
had become a bed-and-breakfast, so I slept in a back room, like them,
and watched the lights of Kirriemuir twinkling from the balcony beyond
the row of birches and the two plane trees where the shepherd had
tethered his cow.  The monument was fashioned out of red sandstone, and
the inscription read, "For the journey is done and the summit attained
and the barriers fall."  Circuit training took place in a cargo hold.
The teacher shouted, "Come on, lads, " adding as an afterthought, "Come
on, Sara."  The smell of diesel put me off, besides which it was very
noisy and the hold looked like a Heath Robinson design for Victorian
canning factory.
We were becoming bored.  The bar, in which we read and reread a
six-month-old copy of Hello!  magazine, was always unevenly dotted with
men, like churchgoers at a poorly attended matins.  In the mess meals
were dispatched in less than half an hour, though the menus were models
of ingenuity.  They were typed up each day, as in an old-fashioned
hotel on the coast, and featured items such as Cold Cuts, a euphemism
for Spam.  Cheese and Biscuits followed Dessert on the menu as
regularly as petrels followed feeding whales, but never once did they
make an appearance
At night, when the water darkened, we became particularly desperate.
At the end of March the nights are long in the Southern Ocean.  The
videos screened were so appalling that the best attended was Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs.  A1, the medalwinning cook from the north of
England, threw a drinks party in his cabin.  It was a
characteristically generous gesture.  Gin was scarce on the
Bransfield.

"In the old days, at Stonington, " Ben told us, perched on the edge of
Al's bunk and gripping his mug of gin as the ship did a little roll,
awe had so much gin that we used it to clean the windows."  We had
several more room parties after that, and people began finding vodka
and tonics in their toothbrush mugs in the morning.  Later, someone
initiated sundowners on deck, and we gathered around half-frozen wine
boxes in our balaclavas and parkas.  Sometimes we hadn't seen the sun
all day, though if we were lucky it found a porthole in the clouds just
before it disappeared and the vertical faces of the bergs shone briefly
with a virulent salmon light.
Then suddenly, when I woke up one morning and drew back the curtain, it
was all gone.  I ran up to the monkey deck and looked around.  It was a
clear and sunny day, the water was gray but sparkling and the blank
horizon stretched for 360 degrees around us, flat and featureless.  It
was all over.  I watched a sooty albatross hovering over the stern.  It
was just as the explorers back at home had told me it would beþas if I
had come back from another planet.  A terrible grief flooded over my
heart as if someone I loved very much had died.
On April 1 we arrived at East Cove in the Falklands and woke up to see
gently modulating hills, rays of sunshine piercing the clouds like a
Blake painting and miles of dun-colored grass.  The Bransfield moored
alongside a pontoon to refuel, and a notice went up in the mess
advising us that shore leave was not granted until we reached Stanley
and that to avoid being shot we should remain on board.  A cormorant
perched on a container on deck.
Stanley still looked like Toytownþneat little colored boxes with bright
roofs nestling among dark green bushy foliage.  Shackleton wrote in
1916 of Stanley, The street of that port is about a mile and a half
long.
It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other.
The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the
graveyard.
For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse.  "
Beyond it the camp* stretched out flat, to the south.  We languished on
the monkey deck, and those who had been on the ice for 30 months looked
hunted.
A small boat plowed to and fro as we waited.  Our mail came up, and we
fed on it obscenely in the bar while the builders shouted football
results.  Jeremy, the Patron of my expedition, wanted to know more
about the shock-provoking toilets, details of which had been included
in my last letter.  He was troubled by the distinction between solids
and liquids and was anxious to know what one did about diarrhea.
I privately vowed never to send a child of mine to private school.
In the evening we went ashore, and Steve, the man who had given me the
doggy T-shirt at Lagoon, and who had not lived in a cash economy for
two and a half years, forgot to take any money.  We visited all the
pubs.  The Globe had whitewashed walls and a brick-red corrugated-iron
roof.  It was a hotel once, patronized by seamen glad to be on land, as
we were, a spit-and-sawdust place with a pool table and Nazareth
playing on the jukebox.  At the end * The countryside beyond Stanley is
known to Falklanders as Sthe camp.  ^ Afloat in the Southern Ocean of
the evening everyone went off to a bar called Deano's, but I couldn't
face it.  I liked going home onto a ship.
Cargo began the next morning, and I spent the day in Stanley.
From open windows bursts of the armed forces radio station took me
halfway home.
I walked up to the museum along Ross Road West, beyond the memorial to
the Battle of the Falklands in 1914, when Sturdee routed von Speed, and
past skeletal hulls poking out of the gray water like icebergs.  The
Falklands attracted shipwrecks like a siren, and their presence rooted
the islands in their past.  The mizzenmast from H.

M. S.

Great Britain was lying on the shore.  The ship had limped into the
Falklands in 1886, having been driven back from Cape Horn, and remained
afloat for 50 years, until it was beached at Sparrow Cove.  In 1970 *
was salvaged and returned to Bristol, where Isambard Kingdom Brunel had
designed *. I can remember walking in a line from school to watch *
coming triumphantly home up the Avon.
At that end of town the odd horse and sheep grazed in quiet gardens and
washing flapped energetically from drooping lines, diminutive fragments
of color in the vast southern sky.  The museum was in Britannia House,
a wooden chalet with heart-carved shutters and a jumble of rusty
cannons in the garden.  Inside they had an 1895 symphonium, a
coin-operated jukebox from the Globe Hotel in a big polished wood
case.
Its vertical silver record was playing the duet When We Were Married"
from The Belle of New York.  While I was standing in front of this
object, the curator of the museum introduced himself.

Regard the museum as yours!  " he said cheerfully, flinging his arms
out to indicate the extent of his domain.  Around the corner, a sepia
photograph of a man in a rocking chair next to a blazing fire was
captioned, "About eighty years ago there was a time to relax in the
Falklands."  Later, I went swimming.  I couldn't wait to swim, I had
missed it so much.  No one was in the water except a handful of BAS men
from the ship, lounging like seals.  We were all thrilled to be
splashing about.
On the way back I tried to buy fruit in the main shop, but they didn't
have a single piece.
We spent a few days in the Falklands, waiting for a Tristar and living
on the Bransfield.  I walked through the low shrubs andMorkshire fog
grass, and when upland geese rose out of the undergrowth and flew away
from me and steamer ducks careering over the rocks flapped their
redundant wings irritably, I thought once again of solitary days in
Tierra del Fuego, a lifetime ago.  I went to Yorke Bay, where the dunes
were wired off with signs saying DANGER!  MINES, but the rolling sand
made me think of hot places.  At least there were still penguins.
Over toward Gypsy Cove stripy Magellanic penguins brayed and peered out
of their earth burrows.  When I stooped to look in at them they
fidgeted, twisting their heads from side to side.  I thought with a
pang of the fearlessness of the Adelies and emperors.  I was so
frightened of it all slipping away from me.  I followed a Falklands
thrush to the end of the bay, looked down and saw more penguins
swimming in the clear green water far below.  Then I walked slowly back
to my ship as a soft white fog fell and the boats called to one another
like partridges in the evening when the mist lies low on the winter
field.
The alarm ripped through the ship at five o'clock one gloomy morning,
and we ran around with our kit bags and bundled into a coach on the
dark and glistening tarmac quay after hasty goodbyes to those who were
sailing on to Montevideo.  One of them, a man who had ignored me during
my entire stay at Rothera, loomed out of the crowd, pressed his hand to
mine, drew close to my face and said, "It's from the Eternity Range.  "
He disappeared back into the darkness, and I opened my fist to find a
seashell.
It was a long trip to Mount Pleasant airport, and the diminutive
Glaswegian carpenter fell asleep on my shoulder.  The coach was i
Afloat in the Southern Ocean flooded with sunshine.  Outside the
windows the island looked resplendent.  By the evening we were in
Ascension, where it was 27 degrees Celsius.  After a lengthy delay
another long haul took us to the English meadows of Brize Norton.
I wondered what was going to happen to the still, small voice when I
flung myself back into the cacophony of civilization.  I wasn't afraid
of permanently losing sight of the calm and certainty I had foundþbut
it was going to have to fight off a lot of competition once I had the
nuts and bolts of urban life to worry about.
This flight was supposed to define the end, the termination of a long
physical journey and the beginning of a mental one.  But nothing
ended.
It was all one continuous journey that never ended.  I thought of a
sentence Darwin wrote in his Beagle journal, Only the other day I
looked forward to this airy barrier as a definite point in our journey
homewards, but now I find it, all such resting-places for the
imagination are like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot
catch.
" The geographical questions may have been answered, but the
metaphysical ones remain, and the most foreign territory will always
lie within.

PART THREE

We shall not cease from exploration, And the end
of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the
place for the first time.
T. S. ELIOT, from "Little Gidding" ROSSIS ANDANDMCMURDO
SOUNv

, I , v 4 t, H i e , Minna Bluff i, > R, 0 S, S i , >Mt Discovery ,
ANTARCTIC CONTINENT W o o v i 11 e I , The Erebus Tongue There are so
few temptations.  Mentally, man there is invulnerable.  He is so remote
from the human struggle, the economic uncertainties of existence, from
politics and wars, he realises that they mean just nothing at
all.
Louis BERNACCHI, veteran Antarctic explorer I arrived back in

London at the beginning of April.  All the plants on my roof terrace
were dead, but the spring sun was shining weakly through the tame
northern clouds.  As I began to pick up the threads of my life, the
Frank Hurley quotation I stuck on the kitchen wall when I got home
loomed increasingly large in my imagination.  "After life in the
vastness of a vacant continent, " it said, "civilisation seemed
disappointingly narrow, cramped, superficial and empty."  It had not
been one long idyll, but the unhappy memories began to fade before I
even unlocked my front door, and it seemed to me that I had been cast
out of paradise.  I felt perpetually thwarted.
Above all, I sensed that I had not yet completed the journey.
Something was left undone.
My Patron dragged me out to seedy Greek cafes in North London, and
random thoughts on the Scott myth bounced between us like a beach
ball.
Jeremy was writing the official biography of Cyril Connolly.
The book was also a covert autobiography, though he rarely admitted it,
and I couldn't quite see why it was necessary as he had published two
books about himself already.  So flattered was he when I told him he
was to appear in my book that he had decided to try to smuggle me into
Connolly's life.  Feeling at last he had something to offer to justify
his patronal role, Jeremy glugged another tumbler of retsina and
launched into a lengthy peroration on Connolly's response to the Scott
myth.
"You see, Connolly writes that when he was seven he shook hands with
Scott in Simonstown, South Africa, " he announced.
The Terra Nova had sailed from Britain without its captain.
Scott had remained to drum up more funds and then hurried to South
Africa to meet the ship.  We both pondered the connections between
these two extraordinary men, at least as different as we were, Patron
and protegee.  Jeremy was 50, happily married, irretrievably English
and a sedentary anarchist.  A darling of London's literary coterie, he
had hands like root vegetables and had never been farther south than
Seaford.
He looked out of the rain-spattered window, ate an olive and appeared
to be on the verge of delivering some small but crucial comment that
would enable me to decipher the legend that Scott had become.  waited,
wondering what he had done with the olive pit.
"I'm almost certain, " he said finally, furrowing his brow and waving
the empty retsina bottle at the waiter, "that Connolly made it all
up.
I talked to my friends on the
ice by E-mail and lived, vicariously, through the emotional roller
coaster of an airdrop at the Pole, when a C-141 took off from
Christchurch, refueled twice in the air and tossed out boxes the size
of upright pianos to 28 people waiting in darkness on the polar plateau
in an ambient temperature of minus 70 Celsius.  (This, surely, was a
testament to what the human spirit can achieve.  ) The Polies had
talked of little else for weeks.  When it was over and the parcels had
been torn open and the bruised fruit digested, they realized that they
were only halfway through the winter of perpetual night.  One of them
wrote about "a terrible void."  It started to seem so distant.  Nansen
had said that when he returned from the Arctic the months on the ice
were like "a far-off dream from another world."  Often, at my desk with
the window open on a long summer night, I strained my ears to hear the
still, small voice beyond the honking horns, inebriated shouts and
blasts of music from passing cars.
Sometimes I went downstairs, switched on the slide projector standing
ready on the dining table where no one ever dined, turned off the
lights and watched Mount Erebus appear on the cracked white wall.
I would soon let go of my worries about tax bills, broken washing
machines, the recalcitrant boyfriend and the vexing queue of newspaper
articles waiting to be written.  On the bad days, when I was haunted by
the old familiar ghosts, I could almost always send them away too,
though I generally had to persevere with the slides on the cracked wall
to do that and travel beyond the Transantarctics and over the luminous
plateau.
In the early days of Antarctic travel, many men got married as soon as
they reached home.  Both Scott and Byrd noted a stampede to the
altar.
Scott's men started marrying one another's relatives, to keep it in the
family, as it were.  Wright and Griffith Taylor, who now have adjacent
valleys named after them, married Priestley's sisters.
I considered this option, but a lack of suitable candidates soon forced
me to reject it.

One night, when I couldn't sleep, I went out and lay in the hammock.

It was easier to take myself south when it was dark, as by then it was
dark there all the time.  As I looked up, suddenly I realized what I
had to do.  I had seen the door close on Antarctica as darkness crept
over the peninsula.  I had to see it open again.
This time I didn't need to travel around when I got back there.  I
wanted to sit still and take it all in.
Only God knows what made me think I could do it.  The American program
alone sends people to Antarctica in August, so I asked them if they
would take me.  They chewed it over for a while and rang me up a few
times.  It was a hot summer in England.  Then one Friday night in June,
while I was sitting at my desk trying to describe the underwater call
of the Weddell seal, Guy Guthridge called from the Office of Polar
Programs at the National Science Foundation.
"Pack your bags, " he said.
On the plane to Christchurch I began a book by a clinical psychologist
called Gun Bennet.  It was called Beyond Endurance, and one chapter was
about "the intellectual inertia" of wintering in Antarctica.
To demonstrate how groups can disintegrate, Bennet described the story
of a meteorologist who had arrived at an Antarctic base in the fifties
just as winter ended.  Nobody came out of the hut to greet him and his
party, and he slowly realized that the group had collapsed during the
long months of darkness.  "We discovered, in the different rooms, " the
meteorologist wrote, "little animal dens where, as base life had broken
down and they had become no
longer on speaking terms with one another, each man had
retired to make himself a little corner in the wreck of his
personality."  Academics had had a field day with the psychology of the
Antarctic winter.  Papers had been presented to a conference on "The
Human Experience in Antarctica, Applications to Life in Space, " and,
using winter bases as laboratories for human behavior, one academic
said, "Lessons learned in the Antarctic and other extreme settings
should facilitate interplanetary exploration and the establishment of
permanent settlements in space."  The U. S. Navy recognized "a
winter-over syndrome" in which 72 percent of the sample reported severe
depression and 65 percent had problems with hostility and anger.  A
condition called Big Eye had entered the textbooks, a result of
insomnia caused by total darkness.  References were made to the
incident in 1955 when one member of the team sent in to prepare for
International GeophysicalYear developed such acute schizophrenia that a
special room lined with mattresses had to be built next to the
infirmary.
The Eskimos could have saved them the trouble of their researchþthey
know all about the depression of the long night.
They call it perlerorneq, which means "to feel the weight of life.  "
Just as "the long, dark night of the soul" is a popular literary
metaphor for spiritual turmoil, so the polar winter perfectly mirrors
the inner darkness that seems to have fallen so often.  Frederick Cook,
one of the first to winter-over in the pack ice, wrote in his diary in
1898, "The curtain of blackness which has fallen over the outer world
of icy desolation has also descended upon the inner world of our souls
. .
. The night soaks hourly a little more colour from our blood.
" A cart grated past my seat, followed by a cheery stewardess.
As she laid trays on the fold-down tables above our knees, I abandoned
Bennet and carried on with Cook.  "The grayness of the first days of
the night, " he wrote, "has given way to a soul-despairing E R R A N
C O G N T A darkness, broken only at noon by a feeble yellow haze on
the northern sky.  I can think of nothing more disheartening, more
destructive to human energy, than this dense, unbroken blackness of the
long polar night."  I wondered what in the world I was going to find.
Camilla, my old friend, flew down from Wellington to join me in
Christchurch, and I smuggled her into the clothing-issue session.
It was nine months since I had gone through the same routine in the
same room, only this time the piles were higher.  Winter temperatures
required even more layers.  I left Christchurch for McMurdo at three in
the morning on the same turboprop that had conveyed me there before,
and as we cruised over the Southern Ocean the temperature jumped up and
down while people jammed their elbows through the red webbing.  I
enjoyed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
The sky was streaked with angry apricot flashes when we landed, and the
ice had absorbed a gloomy purple light.  A mist was hanging at the feet
of the Transantarctics so that the peaks appeared to be suspended
between ice and sky.  Once again I felt as if I had come home.  That no
longer seemed bizarreþit was a comfortable feeling.
When I caught sight of myself in someone else's glacier glasses, I saw
that I was smiling.
Three days before I arrived, on August 20, the sun had risen over Ross
Island for the first time since April 24.  Already, for a few hours in
every 24 the residents of McMurdo were enjoying a dusky daylight,
though they had not yet seen the sun, as from McMurdo it was obscured
behind Mount Erebus.  My physiological clock had responded to total
light by urging me not to go to bed, I wondered if so much darkness
would have the reverse effect.
The flight was one of eight that made the round-trip between
gristchurch and McMurdo during the third week of August in the
 annual operation known as Wmfly.
The function of this complex undertaking, timed to take place during
the continent's brief cusp between darkness and light, is to resupply
the station and bring support staff to the ice to prepare for the
forthcoming science season, which begins in October.  It also allows a
six-week handover period in which the winterers prepare to leave the
ice.  Of the 244 winterers in 1995, 30 left duringWinfly (one because
she was pregnant), and 200 new faces arrived on the ice.
The first person I saw had tied a knot in his beard, but everyone
looked healthy enough after their "weary spell of darkness."  They were
fish-belly white, of course, and they all caught colds from us and
diarrhea from the freshies our planes brought them.  Most of them
weren't sure how they felt.  When I sat down to breakfast on the first
day, the woman opposite me burst out, "Wow, it's so good to see new
aces!  " yet posters appeared in the dorms saying "Coming soon to a
room near you, the roommate from hell, Winfly 1995."
"I felt the futility of my existence, " the woman at breakfast told me
when I asked her how she had found the winter isolation.
"Nothing mattered.  And the hopelessness of the world surviving.  It
lingers still."  It was like watching a whole community coming out of
hibernation.
I trod very carefully.  The experience put me in mind of an ancient
uncle in the West Country who was apprenticed as a printer at the age
of 14.
On his first day he boarded the bus to the factory at six in the
morning, clutching a packet of corned-beef sandwiches.  All was well
until a group of hoary old printers got on the bus a mile or two
later.
One of them stopped alongside my young uncle and thundered, That's my
seat, lad."  I was allocated a bed in a room in the same dark corridor
as the Corner Bar, which was no longer under the supervision of Mike
the carpenter, as he had retired to ply his trade in the north dur"S
the austral winter.
It had been left in the hands of his henchmarf John, and its only
regular social gathering was coffee at ten o'clock on Sunday
mornings.

Come along, a said John when he passed me in the gloomy corridor.
Outside the window, daylight lingered like a promise.  Six people were
lounging around the low, smoked-Plexiglas table, which was spread with
coffee mugs, plates of muffins and bottles of liquor.  When they saw
me, they fell silent and stared as if I had walked in stark naked.

"I guess it was like waking up to find a total stranger in your
bedroom, a one of them said later.
The winterers stood alone, as they always had.  I envied them.
Charles Laseron, Mawson's assistant biologist, put it like this.
"As the first rounding of the Horn is to the sailor, so a winter in the
ice is to a polar explorer.  It puts the hallmark on his experience.
Having successfully emerged from the embryonic stage, he is now fully
fledged, and can take his place in the select fraternity."  Frozen
Sausage Bill was back, his eyes still the color of cornflower hearts.
He was preparing to whip pork products out of boots at safety
lectures.
Just as the same names cropped up in the history books, so I saw the
same faces back on the ice.  J. M. Barrie, who traveled south only
vicariously, noted from his armchair that everyone who went to
Antarctica came back vowing that nothing in heaven or earth would tempt
them to go near polar regions againþand at the end of six months they
were on their knees in front of whoever might be able to get them
there.
It was certainly cold, typically about 30 below, and in those first few
days the sun didn't rise until shortly before midday, and it set two
hours later.  When a storm came in, ropes were strung up between the
dorms and the galley so that we had something to cling to.
But when it was clear, the skies were diaphanous, frosting the
Transantarctics in pastel pinks and blues, the slopes of each peak as
sharply defined as the faces of a
diamond.  Each morning was lighter than its predecessor.  It seemed as
if summer were rushing in at an unnaturally high speed, like those
long-exposure natural history films of a flower opening.
I was installed once more in the same office in the Crary.
I could see the ghostly outline of words I had written on the board the
previous summer.  My identity this time was manifest in the label
W-006, I had been demoted.  The lab was inhabited by only three groups
of atmospheric scientists busily making the most of the period of ozone
depletion and some hardy individuals heading for the Dry Valleys.
These included John Priscu and his entourage, enroute to their home on
Lake Bonney.  The contents of their large lab exploded into the
otherwise pristine corridors.  Cristina of the flying condoms was back,
hysicist and mountaineer with whom I had hiked to
Lake Bonney the previous summer.

Another pilgrimage!  " he shouted down the corridor when he saw me.
We sat up late in the lab, once the radioactivity work station, and Ed
sipped bourbon from a 250-milliliter glass beaker while two of the
graduate students sang karaoke into a Geiger counter.
I continued talking to the Polies by E-mail.  Their season hadn't ended
yetþwinter at the Pole lasted eight and a half months, and planes
couldn't go in until the end of October.  I received enthusiastic
reports about the Three Hundred Club.  Admission to this exclusive
outfit involved enjoying a sauna at 210 degrees Fahrenheit and then
running out of the dome into a temperature of minus 101 wearing only a
pair of tennis shoes.  Such excitements notwithstanding, the Polies
were ready to leave.  One of them was still banging on about the
airdrop.  His job had been to drive a Sno-Cat out to the drop zone
after the pilot radioed an all-clear.  "I tell you," he wrote, some
of those packages I brought in were labelled Do Not Freeze.
Ninety-five below, you're searching in the dark and they expect the
fucking gear to stay unfrozen."  One day another WOO appeared.  She was
an artist, a water colorist mainly.  Her name was Lucia deLeiris, and
she came from Rhode Island.
She was very beautiful, with shoulder-length mahogany hair, fine bones
and a diffident manner.  She had been south before, nine years
previously, to paint wildlife on the peninsula.  A plan was conceived
to dispatch us both out onto the sea ice in our own hut, which would be
towed to a site of our choosing where we could build up a head of
creative steam away from the confines of Mactown.  We both thought this
was a splendid idea.
As we were going to camp on the sea ice we were given our own tracked
vehicle, a Spryte, and inducted into the mysteries of driving it by
Marvelous Marvin from the Mechanical Equipment Center.  Our tomato-red
Spryte, with which we immediately bonded, was numbered 666 and bore the
logo ANTIsPRYrE.  Lucia and I thought this was a hoot.
Later, we were not so amused.
We took a daylong sea-ice course taught by a lively character called
Buck with a handlebar mustache who, when things got seedy and very
cold, had the habit of assuming the voice of an ancient redneck and
proclaiming with brio, Yep.  Just doesn't get any better than this.  "
He taught us how to distinguish a spreading crack from a straight-edged
crack and introduced us to an ice drill, with which we soon became very
familiar.
A day was spent scouting for a position for our huts (we were given
two, in case one burned down) in a temperature of minus 40

Celsius.  At the fuel pits the Antispryte froze in running mode, so we
couldn't turn it off.  It was so cold that fata morgana shimmered
around the distant sea ice.  These mirages, caused by temperature

inversion, created a landscape of
their ownþa berg floating along in the sky, a row of peaks perched on
top of mountains and a dark mushroom cloud rising gracefully from the
horizon.
Having trundled around the frozen sound for several hours, testing the
thickness of the ice with our new drill and sliding down snow hills on
our bottoms, we fixed on a spot in the lee of the Ere- 0 bus Glacier
Tongue.  It faced the four Dellbridge Islands that mark the rim of an
inundated crater that once stood among Antarctica's volcanic
foothillsþBig and Little Razorback, Inaccessible Island andTent
Island.
The site was about 12 miles from McMurdo.  The ice there was six feet
thick, and its surface was uniform, as if it had been hoed with one of
the long-handled, small-bladed implements used by Italian hill
farmers.
Further instruction followed back at McMurdo on the status of the
airwaves (some of the repeaters were not yet up), maintenance of the
drip-oil Preway heaters with which both huts were equipped and
procedures for refueling them by towing the diesel fuel sledge out to
our camp.  We dropped isopropyl alcohol into jerricans to keep our
vehicle fuel from freezing, visited Food (this was like going round a
supermarket where you didn't have to payþThe Price Is Right, they
called it) and spent hours at the Berg Field Center checking out a vast
array of gear ranging from crescent wrenches to can openers.
The Antispryte conveyed us safely to the fuel pits before quietly
breaking down.  As the first field party out since the previous summer,
we were fortunate to have taken Buck along with us for a onenight
shakedown to see that everything worked.  As it turned out, nothing
did.
When we got it going again, the Antispryte moved very slowly, with the
result that it took two hours to cover the 12 miles to camp.
It had no radio, no headlights and no door handle on the passenger side
(a handle is useful for a quick exit when .  poised on the edge of a
crack), and it complained vigorously if jammed into reverse.  But it
got us there, and Lucia and I whooped as the two red huts hove into
view.  They had already been christened Wooville.
The fuel line had cracked on one hut, incapacitating the Preway and
confining us to the other, smaller hut.  The temperature plummeted that
evening to minus 42 degrees Celsius.  We watched the flashlights die
almost as soon as we turned them on.  Having breathe life into the
remaining Preway, Buck, whose role was to ensure that Lucia and I were
capable of maintaining a camp on our own, sat in front of it to watch
us struggling to set up the Coleman stove.

Fuck this thing, " I said in exasperation.  I had set up hundreds of
camp stoves in my time, but this one was making a fool of me.
"The metal's cold, " purred Buck from his position by the heater.
"You need to warm up the fuel rod.
Once this task had been accomplished and we were fortified by hot
cocoa, Lucia and I went outside to rig up the antenna.  This involved
splitting the top of eight bamboo poles to make a resting place for the
wire and then drilling the poles into the ice.  At least Buck didn't
come out to watch.  When the antenna was up, to palpable relief all
around, the high-frequency radio behaved perfectly.  Then we battened
down the hatches and made some soup.
I awoke to find massive snowdrifts inside the hut.  McMurdo reported
that, with windchill, the air was a sprightly minus 81

Celsius.

"Yikes!  " said Lucia when this information was relayed.
This was her favorite expression.
The generator, which we had been forced to bring if there was to be any
hope of starting the Antispryte, had frozen, despite the fact that it
had spent the night on the floor of the hut between us.
Buck burned his new hat on the Preway.  We thawed the generator, and,
to squeals of surprise and delight, the Antispryte started.  As I
nudged it out of its snowdrift, I noticed that the huts kept reappearing
through the front
window.
Lucia and Buck had come out, and they were screwing up their eyes to
look at me.
Buck approached the vehicle and started mouthing something.

The hydraulics must have gone," he said when I opened the door.

You're going round and round in a circle."  Visibility shrank to 30 feet.  All hope of returning was abandoned and, once again, we made
soup.

Just doesn't get any better than this, ^ said Buck.
The following morning a tracked vehicle came to our rescue.
We returned to McMurdo and left the Antispryte to gather snow.

*The fiasco of the shakedown did not deter us, and within 24 hours
Lucia and I had obtained all the equipment we had forgotten the first
time around and prevailed upon Ron, the glowering figure who presided
over the Mechanical Equipment Center like a malign deity, to part with
another Spryte.  Why, with virtually no scientists on station and
enough Sprytes to invade a small country, he had chosen to give us the
one vehicle famed for its unreliability, only he knew.
The Wooville huts were ten feet apart, but we roped them together
nonetheless.  People have been lost in whiteouts in less space than
that, a Buck had warned.  One was a small high-tech affair called a
Solarbam that offered the luxury of a small solar light, and the other
was a regular red wooden box hut, 20 feet by 12, equipped with a set of
built-in bunks.  A small dead cockroach lay between two panes of
Plexiglas in one of the Solarbam windows.  Lucia had a sideline in the
administration of acupuncture, and when she laid out her needles on the
body-sized table bolted to one wall, the red hut quickly became known
as the Clinic.  We planned to cook in the Solarbarn, so this became the
Dining Wing.
The bathroom facilities consisted of a small metal drum with a lid that
lived outside, next to the one wall of the Clinic that didn't have a
window.  It was lined with both plastic and burlap sacks, which we
removed when full and took back to McMurdo.  The contents were frozen,
at least.  We also established a pee flag by drilling a bamboo pole
into the ice 50 yards from the huts.  Peeing on the sea ice was
allowed, but it was sensible always to do it in the same place, so the
ice around our home didn't begin to resemble a Jackson Pollock
painting.
Now we were alone in our own camp for the first time.  Before we set
out, Joe in the McMurdo communications hut had dispensed lengthy
instructions on radio operation, and we were told to check in with base
every day at an appointed time.  The call sign of the communications
hut was Mac Ops.

Mac Ops, Mac Ops, this is Whiskey Zero Zero Six, how copy?

" I said, loudly and clearly, as instructed.  Joe's voice flashed
back.

"We're sorry, no one is home at Mac Ops.  If you leave your name and
number after the beep, we'll get back to you as soon as we can.  "
Nothing happened.  "I didn't hear the beep," I said.

Beep, a said Joe.
The weatherwas good, at first.  We had a fine view of the
ransantarctics shredding the horizon across the sound.  The landscape
was dominated by Mount Erebus, the volcano named by James Clark Ross
when he arrived on January 28, 1841, at what was to become Wooville on
September 2, 1995.
It reached right down to us, as a tongue extending from one of its
glaciers trailed as far as Wooville.  There, the sea ice had frozen
around it.  One day, when I was poking around at the base of the
tongue, a beam of sunlight on a cluster of ice blocks caught my eye.
If it had been at home, the beam would have captured spirals of dust
and, in the hills, clouds of midges.  The blocks were gleaming like
rocks at the edge of the sea made slippery by the rush of a rising
tide.  In effect, that is what they were.
The temperature leaped
capriciously up and down.  One day I threw a mug of boiling water into
the air, and it froze in midflight.  When the mercury hit minus 40, our
eyes froze shut if we blinked for too long.
After a long session outside we would come in and hover around the
Preway, like cats.  When the wind abated and we grew hot digging, we
licked one corner of discarded items of clothing and pressed them on
the iced-up walls of the Clinic, where they instantly froze into
position.
Despite frequent total cloud cover and limed sunlight, the
high-frequency radio continued to run off its solar panel, which we had
taped to a window of the Dining Wing.
We made mistakes, but we made them only once.  Frozen food brought in a
cardboard box was stowed under the front step of the Dining Wing.
After the first storm the box had blown right underneath the hut, and
we had to lie on our bellies on the ice, prodding with an ice drill to
recover our freezer.  Forgetting to weigh down the toilet lid with a
block of ice resulted in our having to chase it halfway back to
McMurdo.  The huts were positioned far enough apart to prevent a fire
spreading from one to the otherþand then we parked the fuel sledge
between them.  The sleeping arrangements caused some difficulties.
On the first night Lucia slept on the top bunk and I woke up in the
early hours to perceive her, through the gloom, climbing down the
ladder and dragging her sleeping bag after her.

What's the matter?  " I asked.

"It's like the tropics up there, a she said.  "I'm sleeping on the
floor."  The concept of the tropics in our hut was too difficult to
contemplate in the middle of the night, so I went back to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning, she was already painting.

"I've worked it out, a she said.  The temperature differential between
outside and inside is so acute that the air at the top of the hut is
like the Arizona desert."  What was it like on the floor?  " I
asked.
"Glacial, " she said.  "I moved onto the table after an hour.
" Thereafter, I remained on the bottom bunk, where the air remained
stable at a pleasant temperature, and Lucia slept on the table.
If there were no jobs to be done at camp and we needed a break from
painting and writing, we would get into the Woolvilleþ altogether a
more successful machine than its infernal predecessorþand drill a few
more flags into the ice to mark our route back to McMurdo.  First, we
had to get the small generator going, as the vehicle was always far too
cold to start without having a current run through it for an hour.
Lifting this object out of the hut and onto the ice was an awkward,

two-woman job.

"I bet our arms aren't strong enough to get this started, " I said as
we prepared to pull the handle.
"We did it on the dry run at McMurdo, didn't we?  " Lucia said.
"Yes, but it started the first time then.  If it doesn't now, and we
have to keep pulling, our muscles will get tired."
"Wow, " she said.
"You think we can't do anything."  There was an element of truth to
this, and it made me flush with shame.
Lucia was quieter than I was, and smaller, and although she lived alone
and had traveled extensively, she had not spent months hanging about in
the wilderness as I had.  Yet I was the one who approached every
practical task with the attitude that we almost certainly weren't going
to be able to accomplish it.
When the generator fired up, we both did a little dance on the ice.
The drill, which was three feet in length, resembled an oversized
corkscrew, and after many hours of struggle we established our own
system for using it effectively.  This involved one person standing on
the track of the vehicle and leaning down on the top of the drill,
thereby anchoring it in position, while the other grasped the drill
handle and turned it furiously, like an egg whisk, spiraling the
corkscrew down into the ice.  When the pain in the turning arm became
intolerable, the driller would change arms, and when that
arm ached, we swapped positions.  This
routine was avoided if anyone was watching.
Drilling to establish the thickness of the ice was more arduous than
putting in flags, as it involved going deeper.  Even using the new
method, it took us more than ten minutes to penetrate three feet of
ice, but at least we did it.  If ever seawater bubbled up through the
drill hole we would get back in the Woolville, turn around and scuttle
off in the opposite direction.
Many cracks radiated from the Erebus Glacier Tongue, and we monitored
their progress keenly.  A crack is a fissure or fracture in the sea ice
produced by the stresses of wind, waves and tidal action.
Sea-ice cracks generally look like narrow furrows, they were described
by a member of the Japanese Kaman-Maru expedition in 1911 as
resembling divisions between rice paddies."  Around Wooville cracks
did not shoot out like bolts of lightning, so we did not live in fear
of an inadvertent midnight swim.  Nonetheless, we had received plenty
of advance warning.

Profiling a crack, which meant finding out how deep and wide it was
with a drill and whether it was safe to cross, seemed to us a
complicated business.

Now," I said to Lucia one day as we got out of the Woolville and
stood looking down at a rip in the ice, "the effective crack width is
determined by the required ice thickness for each vehicle."  "Ylkes!
" she said.  What does that mean?  " Haven't a clue.  It's what Buck
said."  At this point one of us would usually fetch what was known in
camp as The Book."  It was a field manual, written by the staff of the
Berg Field Center to assist scientists camping on the ice.  At Wooville
it had already acquired biblical status.
Besides ensuring that neither we nor our huts fell into the sea, we
both worked.  In addition, Lucia practiced acupuncture on herself and
sometimes on me.  It didn't seem to matter that neither of us was ill
or injuredþLucia said that the needles were "a tonic."  I would lie on
the long table in the Clinic, looking out at the thermals threaded with
mist, the moon hanging beyond the tongue, or the miasma of blues and
pinks over the Royal Society Mountains When we absorbed ourselves in
our work for too long we began to exhibit symptoms of madness, with the
result that a "Weirdometera went up on the wall of the Clinic with a
swivel dial indicating the level of madness to which each of us had
risen or fallen on any given day.
About two weeks after we arrived at Wooville," helicopter put down in
front of the Clinic, and the crewman ran over to us.

Want to come for a ride?  " he shouted.
September was a cold month to be flying helicopters.  Away from
McMurdo, the pilots never shut down.  They left contrails like
toothpaste in the clear blue sky over the sound.  Lucia and I grinned
at each other in the back as we shuttled around the valleys,
resupplying the camps at Hoare and Bonney and ferrying repeater
engineers to windy peaks.

Wow, a said Lucia over the headset, pointing ahead and pulling out her
sketchbook.  Look at that."  We were heading toward an icefall (a
frozen waterfall) thousands of feet deep.  It swelled over the edge of
a mountain and curled like a lip down to the valley floor.  Here and
there the surface of the creamy curtain burst into erratic frozen
plumes and then sank away like a fallow field.  This was the pilot's
big chance to prove what a steely chap he was, and he flew the
helicopter as if he were performing in a circus.  We swooped down
through the rock configuration called the Labyrinth and beyond the
dolerite extrusions to Bull Pass, a natural gallery of smooth
ventifacts like the relics of a lost civilization.

What's the name of the icefall?  " Lucia asked.

The VXE-6 Falls, ^ crackled the pilot.  awe named it after the
squadron."  I suppose it was a
better name than I've-Got-A-Big-One, but only just.
Flying low on our way back to Wooville, we watched snowsnakes* whipping
over the frozen sound.  The marooned bergs cast long shadows, and a
dark ten-foot band of open water striped the ice.  Before we were
dropped off, the pilot decided to take us over Erebus, and the
landscape took wings.
The crew guzzled oxygen, but Lucia and I stared open-mouthed at the
fumaroles billowing vapor.  When we crossed the crater the pilot said,
That's the guts of the earth."  Sometimes, back at Wooville, we
crawled into the ice caves underneath the glacier tongue.  The ice had
formed arabesques, like carvings in the slender windows of an old
mosque, and through it the light fell, diffusing throughout the
glimmering blue caverns.
Walls burgeoning with delicate crystals glittered around smooth arching
tunnels that opened into glossy domes fortified by rows of
stalactites.
Had it been rock, it would have been a landscape painted by Leonardo,
the pinnacles yielding to glimpses of dreamy vistas of ice.
If our landscapes were canvases, they were conceived by a mind raised
above the troubles that afflict the human spirit.
Sunlight infused the sky long after the sun itself had disappeared.  At
first it was completely dark by about four o'clock, and then each
evening the day stretched a little further.  When it finally gave up
its struggle, the moon would coast over the tongue and the plumes of
Erebus appeared more clearly against the night sky.
We ate dinner by candlelight, the shadow of the volcano flickering on
our wobbly card table.  Sitting in another hut on the same ice, a mile
or two from Wooville, Scott wrote out a verse from a Shelley poem in
his diary, * Incorporeal ribbons of snow blown across the ice and used
by pilots to assess wind speed.
The cold ice slept below, Above the cold sky shone, And all around,
with a chilling sound, From caves of ice and fields of snow The breath of
night like death did flow Beneath the sinking moon.
Except that Shelley had written The cold earth, " not The cold ice.
Scott transposed the lines.  A diary entry made by Scott's physicist
Louis Bemacchi was more apposite.  He wrote, "There is something
particularly mystical and uncanny in the effect of the grey atmosphere
of an Antarctic night through whose uncertain medium the cold, white
landscape looms as impalpable as the frontiers of a demon world.  "
Standing in front of such an impalpable vision on September 9, we saw
our first seals, illuminated by a gibbous moon.  Four of them lay on
the ice between Erebus and the tongue, resembling, from Wooville, mouse
droppings on a dinner plate.  We heard their wolflike calls, resonating
off the cold blue walls of the tongue.
Until that moment life had been absent from our landscape.
Our isolation was metaphysical as well as geophysical.  We had been
living in the silence between movements of a symphony.  In Letters to
Olga, Vaclav Havel uses the analogy of Antarctic isolation to express
the crucifying solitude of prison.  To me, in the stillness of the
evening, it was like a reprieve.  Again, I heard the still, small
voice.  It came to me more readily this time.
In the mornings the sea ice cracked like bullets.  If the weather was
good, Lucia went out painting in the Woolville, not to get away, but so
that she had a different view and could stay what we liked to call warm
in the cab.  She would position her palettes and her long raffia roll
of brushes on the fender, where eventually they froze.
Sometimes I went with her and watched small replicas of our landscape
appear on paper
like Polaroid photographs.  The little metal tubes of gaily colored
paste would soon give up the battle for plasticity, and then she would
turn to her pastels.  If I made notes during that period, everything
was defined by the exotic labels on the tubes she held in her long
fingers, a cerulean blue sky dropped to French ultramarine in late
afternoon, and the Transantarctics at dusk were tingd with burnt umber
or flushed with permanent rose.
One of our favorite spots was the configuration of pressure ridges
around the southwest end of Big Razorback.  The island looked like a
croissant from there, with a folded-down triangle at the top.  It was a
spot much favored by seals, too, and Lucia always added them last.

Why have you put three in, when only two are there?  8 I asked.

Well, a she began, "it's to do with composition.  Three's better.
I mean, it suits the shape of the pressure ridges behind.  Or rather,
it balances this island here .  . " I could hear myself answering a
puzzled question about why I had deleted a particular adjective and
replaced it with another.  The fact was, half the time neither of us
knew why we did what we did.  We just knew it had to be done.
Then a weather front suddenly came in, and Antarctica shut down.
Big Razorback disappeared into a faint gray smudge, and the winds
roared across the sound, battering the walls of the tongue and tossing
walls of snow through the air.  I had often observed the continent's
Janus characteristic, switching abruptly from seduction to destruction,
but there, living in the lee of the Erebus Glacier Tongue, I
experienced it most intensely.  We saw heaven and hell in 24 hours.  We
would be trapped inside for days, the windows mute white sheets,
listening to wind that never relented.  As Frank Hurley wrote of the
ice at such a time, it lost all its charm and beauty, and became
featureless, sullen and sinister."  Living there alone without any
contact with the outside world except for our brief morning radio
schedule with base, we were very sensitive to its vagaries.  We came to
know what temperature it was even before we looked at the thermometer
hanging on the antenna and we noticed every degree of change.  I
never could have imagined this happening.  Before I had been to
Antarctica someoneasked me about temperatures and I replied, not
altogether flippantly, that numbers bored me and the only temperatures
I recognized were cold and fucking cold.  I was amused to read comments
in my first Antarctic notebook about getting used to temperatures of
ten below, these now had come to seem tropical.

"I wish we had a windometer, a said Lucia one day, rather than a
weirdometer."  Wind speeds of up to 200 mph have been recorded in
Antarctica, but when the wind got really serious every anemometer
invented broke down on the job.  The McMurdo weather department had
rows of broken anemometer impellers mounted on plaques.  An inscription
underneath each plaque read, Damaged by wind, " followed by the
particulars, such as a95 knots, 25 October 1987."  The last in the long
line said, Dropped by Bill Sutcliffe, 23 March 1990.  Winds calm.
" When one system came in we were ensconced for five days, with only a
three-hour window in the middle when the storm dropped and we ran
around on the ice like small children.  By the end we were beginning to
study the backs of cereal packets and conduct comparisons on the three
different recipes for bran muffins printed on our foodstuffs.  We ran
out of coffee.  I grew tired of writing about ice and wind, so for a
change I tried my hand at steamy love sonnets (this experiment was not
a success).  When I turned around to see what Lucia was up to, I saw
that she had begun to paint green glaciers.

"I'm fed up with doing blue ones, a she said defiantly when she noticed
me looking.
The next day she made a batch of muffins over the Coleman stove,
undeterred by the fact that all three recipes indisputably called for
an oven.  They were very good, and very flat.  That night the wind was
so strong that it kept us both awake.  If we dropped off, a
particularly violent blast would shake the Clinic and jolt us upright,
hearts beating like a volley of artillery fire.  Then it might drop
quite suddenly into silence, as
if it had been turned off.  "At last!  " we would murmur, and settle
back into the bags.  But it was just building up its strength for a
fresh attack.  If I had heard it at home, I would have expected to see
garage roofs flying through the air.  Here I half expected to take off
over the sound and wake up in WrightValley.
This did not happen.  The door was always frozen shut on those
mornings, though, and we had to set to with an elongated S-shaped metal
bar extracted from one of our tool kits.  What its official purpose
was, we never knew.  We draped a blanket over the door jamb, but the
snowdrifts crept past it while we slept.  Strange to say, this did not
greatly affect the temperature indoors at Woovilleþit was always
cozy.
Sometimes crystals formed on the outside of the window, and when the
wind blew really hard, they moved.  It was like looking down a
kaleidoscope.  We watched snow grow up the antenna poles, and the

Woolville and the defunct Antispryte looked in the moonlight like
vehicles abandoned by Fuchs and Hillary on their continental traverse
in the 1950s.
When the storm ended the world seemed new, and the huts shed their
extra cladding of ice, like the ark dripping water.  The snow had been
blown from the foothills of Erebus, revealing polished blue ice stuck
fast to the rock, which protruded here and there like an elbow below
the treacherously seductive crevasse fields.  A thin band of apricot
and gasoline blue hung over the Transantarctics, and the pallid sun
shed a watery light over thousands of miles of ice.  The frozen sound
could have been the silent corner of the African savannah where man
first stood upright.
The storm seemed to have blanched our interior landscapes too.
We sat outside in the evening calm.  Often we saw nacreous clouds* i
High-altitude, low-temperature formations.  Nacreous clouds are the
most dramatic manifestation of polar stratospheric clouds, but they are
rare in the Arctic, northern polar regions are warmer than
Antarctica.
Nacreous clouds, typically, are visible in September.
Incidentally, the reduction in ozone occurs only when polar
stratospheric clouds are present which partially explains why ozone
depletion is significantly lower in the north.

then, drifting high up in the infinite reaches of the skyþabout ten
miles up, actually, far higher than the fluffy white clouds at home
that send down rain.  There might be 25 of them, in 25 variations of
opalescent lemons, rich reds and reedy greens.  They were brightest
just after sunset, when the glare of the sun had disappeared at ground
level but its light still illuminated high clouds.  The nacreous ones
were small and oval, and they floated along in a line like fat
iridescent pearls on an invisible thread.  As Gertrude Stein said,
"Paradiseþif you can stand it."  The dignity of the landscape infused
our minds like a symphony, I heard another music in those days.
We got to know each other pretty well.  Lucia was a perfect
companion.
In the early days she often looked worried, especially while
concentrating on the exigencies of sea-ice travel or on how to prevent
her paints and fingers from freezing.  But if something really funny
happened, she would throw back her head and laugh loudly.  Her whole
face was transformed when she did this.  It was like watching the sun
break through the clouds after a storm.  I liked her all the time, but
I liked her most then, and sometimes I contrived a reason to tell her a
funny story to make her throw back her head and laugh.  She was
good-natured, good-humored and equable, and when she was absorbed in a
task she twittered quietly to herself like a small bird.  I wasn't as
good at living alongside another human being as she was.
Cherry-Garrard wrote that in Scott's hut you had to choose whom you sat
by at dinner according to whether you wanted to talk, listen or just
sit quietly.  We had no such choice.  Lucia gave a lot, unwittingly,
during those weeks.
I always felt that I couldn't give as much as she did.
SIXTEEN

Beyond this flood a
frozen continent Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual storms Of
whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land Thaws not, but gathers
heap, and ruin seems Of ancient pile, all else deep snow and ice.
JOHN MILTON, from Paradise Lost A Hagglunds tracked vehicle containing
six winterers pulled up at Wooville.  They were out checking the ice to
the north.  That morning, a rainbow had arched over hundreds of miles
of the Transantarctics.

Jump in!  " said the driver.
The unheated back half of the Hagglunds was coupled to the front like a
railway carriage, and I lay in it on top of a mound of survival gear
and a bundle of flags.  It was 35 degrees below, and ice clung to the
nuts, the pipes and the leaking jerricans of fuel.  As the small
windows were frosted up I snuggled underneath a sleeping bag, swaddled
like a mummy.  When we lurched to a stop, the radio by which I
communicated with the cab, and which was stowed down my shirt to keep
the batteries alive, jabbed its antenna up my nose.
The back door swung open to reveal a Beard.  He began rummaging around
in the debris among which I was entombed.

"We've come to a crack," he said.  "We have to drill the ice inside
it, to see how far down it goes."  With that, he drew out a drill.
I wriggled out from underneath the sleeping bag and slid down from the
back of the truck.  The snow squeaked like Styrofoam.
The Beard and another man were hunched over the drill.
Neither of them was standing on the vehicle's tread, as we did when we
drilled.
The crack was about four inches wide, and the men got the drill three
feet down into the ice inside it in about two minutes.  Lucia and I
exchanged guilty glances.
Having established that the crack was safe, the men extracted the drill
and strode over to another crack they had spotted, whereupon they both
began sliding the picks of their axes over the top to locate the safe
edges.  Lucia and I had forgotten that we were supposed to do this.

"Ylkes!  " she mouthed at me.
A third Beard appeared from the front of the Hagglunds, clutching a
clipboard.
"Are you mapping?  " I asked.

Yep.  The guys at the Berg Field Center gave us a rough map of what
the sea ice is looking like this yearþinsofar as anyone has seen much
of it, which they haven't really, this early in the season.
We're marking any new cracks."  Hey, look at this!  8 said Lucia,
peering over the Beard's shoulder.

"Wooville's made it onto the map!  " I went to look at the man's
clipboard.  Someone had marked Wooville on the map next to a tiny black
triangle representing our hut.  It was followed, in parentheses, by our
radio call sign, the Artheads.  * * Later in the season Wooville
appeared as "Artists' Colony" on another map and a sign was made for
the door of the Clinic saying "The Ant Art Chicks."  Ice was everywhere
in those days, like sand in the desert, though it was never
uncomfortable.  I would not have wished to be elsewhere.  Shackleton
wrote a poem called Two Ways, a and I tried to remember it so I could
stick it on the wall of the Clinic, You may love the calm and peaceful
days, And the glorious tropic nights .  .

.

But all the delight of the summer seas, And the sun's westing gold Are
nought to me for I know a sea Elth a glamour and glory untold .  .

.

We never washed while we were in camp.  We did have a fair supply of
clothes, however.  I was reading Nansen's Farthest North at the time.

Listen to this," I said to Lucia, who was lying on the table and
sticking needles into her arms.  "In Franz Josef Land, Nansen and

Johansen turned their shirts inside out once a month instead of washing
them.  We could try that."  You always want to do what the old guys
did, a she said, despite the fact that they had such a miserable
time.
We can go back to McMurdo and use the washing machines."  What about
the dry washing'system then?  " I persisted.

Loads of the polar explorers adopted that."  What does it involve?
" Lucia asked patiently, wiggling a needle.

"It's quite simple, " I said."  "You put away dirty clothes until the
ones you're wearing are even dirtier, then the old ones seem clean, so
you can change them round.
She started laughing, so I decided to keep this gripping subject to
myself.  I was especially keen on other people's ingenuity.
Admiral Byrd used to wash a different third of his body each night, and
I had heard an engineer on station explaining how to make a pair of
underpants last a month.  (Switch them back to front after a week, then
after another week turn them inside out and do a week each way round.

) Outside, Wooville had created its own landscape of wind scoops and
drifts, and inside it looked increasingly like home, scattered with the
ratty pages of a typescript, balls of tissues tinted with blue
watercolors, and wodges of photocopied diaries.  We established
inter-hut communications on ourVHFs.
"Dinner is about to be served, a Lucia's voice would crackle over the
radio.  "All residents of Wooville proceed to the Dining Wing.
" After three weeks I solved the intractable camp problem of how to
read in bed by positioning the Coleman lantern on our only stool next
to the bunks.
Each night ended with its sigh as the mantles faded into the gloom.
I had been in manyAntarctic camps, but nothing compared with having my
own.  I developed a more intimate relationship with the continent,
living with it at Wooville.  Already I looked on Erebus as a friend.
We had claimed Antarctica back from the colonization of science.
Wooville was the only nonscience camp on the continent, and we had as
much right to be there as the beakers.
I have nothing against either science or scientists, but they don't own
Antarctica.  You might think they doþthe entire human occupation of
Antarctica is predicated on the belief that science is an unending
process of amelioration.  Whatever is said about knowledge for its own
sake, the only justification for science in any sphere is that it is a
tool of improvementþand, as such, it functions as a highly effective
shield for concealing the truth about Antarctica.  There is a pressure
to believe in the deification of science on the ice, otherwise, one
would have to admit that the reason for each nation's presence in
Antarctica is political, not scientific.  Like the emperor's new
clothes, everyone knows but nobody says.

Wooville II, Cape Evans

Every week or so we cleared the snowdrifts from
the inside of the Woolville, fired up the generator to warm the engine
and headed back to McMurdo, where we would see Ron's little face spying
on us from his tiny window at the top of the Mechanical Equipment
Center.  He was very paternal about his Sprytes.  In town we washed
ourselves and our clothes, recharged all the batteries, raided Food,
took slices of wheat bread from the galley, unpacked and repacked and
filled up our fuel tank and our water containers.  We stayed one night,
occasionally stretching it to two.  I picked up E-mail messages from
the people I had left behind at Rothera.  They told me stories about
their snowmobiles breaking down in the darkness of the far reaches of
Adelaide Island.  Rothera was 2, 000 miles away, but it seemed close.
We socialized during these stopovers.  Sometimes I had dinner with the
Kiwis at Scott Base, where I felt more at home than ever.
Their winter had apparently passed without a hitch.  Only the North
Islanders got sick, a a South Islander told me.
I had expected that Lucia and I would cling together at McMurdo, having
grown accustomed to each other's company, but in fact we barely saw
each other.  And as if by unspoken agreement, when we set out again for
camp neither of us asked what the other had done on station.
On one particular occasion we stayed an extra night in McMurdo for the
annual Flag Tying Party in the Heavy Shop.  The station's whole
population came out for this event to drink beer, eat pizza and tie
flags onto bamboo poles in preparation for the forthcoming science
season.  The Heavy Shop was a cavernous building crowded with huge
pieces of mechanical equipment in various states of repair.
During the party dancing broke out among the pools of engine oil.
The largest machine in the Shop was a D-8 low-groundpressure tractor
with 54-inch treads.  It was inscribed with the word Colleen
carefully painted in a Gothic script, and a man in blue overalls was
leaning against it.  When he saw me looking he shouted over the strains
of Joe Cocker, "Want to see my Antarctic girl?
We climbed up over the tracks to pat the padded ceiling in the cab and
admire the monster blade.
There were fewer than six other stretch D-8s in the world, and three
lived at Willy Field, an outpost of McMurdo about a mile from the
station.  The next day an Antarctic veteran called Gerald, Colleen's
swam, drove me out to meet them.
The enormous canary-yellow machines, made by Caterpillar in the
fifties, had seen 40 years of Antarctic service and were engraved in
the hearts of all who had worked on them.  They had walked themselves
to the Pole, and they had flown there dismantled (this took four
flights).  One of them, at Byrd Surface Camp on the West Antarctic ice
sheet, was back in use after spending 17 years buried under the snow.
The catwalk platforms, once fixed above the tread, had regrettably been
removed by some philistine of the past.  Veterans could remember seeing
operators sunbathing on the platforms while the machine was moving
along.
When we arrived at Willy Field, Gerald leaped out of the truck and up
onto the tread of a D-8 in one movement.
"A gasoline engine gets the diesel engine started," he shouted as he
fired it up.  Which is why it's suitable for these temperatures."  He
jumped down, crunching the snow.  This is Becky, by the way.
" We contemplated the steaming beast.

They could almost be living creatures," I said.
Gerald stared at me blankly.  Then he blurted out, "But they are living
creatures."  Fetching a chair from a nearby hut, he positioned it in
the cab, next to the driver's seat.  We climbed in.  I sat on the
chair, and Gerald began dozing a pile of snow
the size of a minor English county.

"I could tell which of these I was driving with a blindfold on, 8

Gerald shouted as we dozed along rocking gently to the rhythm of the
enormous tracks.  Suddenly he yelled, You try, a and whipped back the
brakes until they screeched like a freight train.  We shifted places,
and I drove Becky down the skiway.  On the way back, in the limpid
light of Windless Byte, we stopped.

You see, Sara, a said Gerald, taking off his glasses, "I can't paint,
or write, or hold a rhythm.  I express myself by making perfect flat
surfaces on ice."  He came from a German Baptist background and an
Amish community, but he had left it and moved to Wyoming with his
wife.

What was leaving like?  " I asked.  Having spent some time in an Amish
community myself, I knew how they felt about members leaving the
fold.
I admired the Amish very muchþthat was why I had gone to Lancaster
County to live with themþbut the way they shunned men and women who
could not be as they were was one aspect of their faith that I found
hard to swallow.  * Gerald thought about this for a while.  Then he
said, "It was like going to Antarctica."  A helicopter put down at
Wooville at nine o'clock one morning to take Lucia and me to Lake Hoare
in the Taylor Valley.  We had been invited by the residents of one of
the only other field camps set up this early in the season.  t We had
often chatted with them on the VHF, comparing temperatures and being
neighborly.

* Another was their disapproval of higher educationþat times one almost
felt of any education.  t It was quite likely that for several weeks
Luaa and I had been the only people living in a field camp (as opposed
to a base) in an area one and a half times that of the United States.
The sound was veined with cracks, and the band of open water I had seen
the previous week was gone, submerged by a pressure ridge meandering
over the landscape like the Great Wall of China.

Three beakers and a mechanic were in residence at Lake Hoare.

Condom Cristina was living there too, but she had temporarily returned
to McMurdo.  Every helicopter brought condom advertisements for her
from her colleagues at Bonney, the story had become enshrined in the
legends of the valley.  Nobody had put a tent up yetþit was too cold.
I slept on the floor of a small lab.  It was odd to be in a camp doing
science.
I hiked up toward Lake Chad, following the route I had taken to Bonney
the previous summer.  The ice was cracking like a whip on tin.
Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a white bolt of
lightning flashing across the chalky blue.  Of course, I knew this
landscape, but I had never seen the pink glow of dawn over the Canada
Glacier, or the panoply of sunset over the Suess, or, in between,
sunlight traveling from one peak to the next and never coming down to
us on the lake.  We lived in a bowl of shadow during those days.
One morning the sun appeared for ten minutes in the cleft between the
Canada and the mountain next to it, and everyone stopped working to
look up.  The lake was carpeted with compacted snow, and from the
middle, where the Canada came tumbling down in thick folds, the Suess
was cradled by mountains like a cup of milky liquid.
On our last night, Lucia went outside after dinner to empty the
dishwater into *s drum.  Suddenly she appeared at the hut window,
gesticulating furiously.  I rushed out, thinking that perhaps the
propane toilet had exploded again.  But that wasn't it.  She was
looking up at the electric gallery of the southern lights.  The sky was
streaked with faint emerald shadows, splaying out in several directions
to the horizon, changing shape, spreading and bleeding into the
blackness.  Iridescent coppery beams roamed among the stars
like searchlights, sporadically leaping forward
into the middle of the dark sky.  Toward the east, a rich and luminous
topaz haze rolled lazily back and forward like a tide.  At one moment
the whole sky was a rainbow, flaming with radiant mock suns.
"Heavenly music, " I murmured.
The following week John Priscu sent a message inviting me up to Lake
Fryxell for a night.  When the helicopter dropped me off, the five men
in John's team had just arrived from Lake Bonney, their base farther up
the valley.  Ed came bounding out to meet me.  They had tossed their
sleep kits over the floor of the Jamesway, which was being blasted with
hot air by a diesel blower, and were preparing equipment to pull out
ice cores that would be taken back to Bonney the next day.
They reminded me of a raiding party of Huns descending from the hills
for a spot of marauding among the isigoths.
Each flight of the drill measured three feet, and after the fifth had
been screwed on, they usually hit water.  Ice drilling had been going
on up there at Bonney for a month in temperatures of minus 50.

Everything breaks when it's this cold, a Ed said when I joined them on
the lake later.  You flip the lid off a tin with a screwdriver, and
the metal shaft snaps."  They were pursuing notVisigoths but
cyanobacteria, unicellular photosyntheTic organisms generally
considered algae.  These bacteria live in sediment in the ice, and the
scientists knew they had them when the core contained a tissue-fine
dark layer.

"In certain parts of the lake, it's like a rain forest, 8 Ed said.
When they went inside, it took half an hour for their beards to
unfreeze from their balaclavas.
The day I returned to Wooville, September 22, the sun rose shortly
before seven and set exactly 12 hours later.  We were halfway there.
It was suggested that we might like to relocate Wooville for a change
of scene, and we decided to take up the offer.  After a few rounds of
discussion, we settled on Cape Evans.
Before two men arrived from McMurdo in a Sno-Cat to tow the huts to
their new location, Lucia and I broke down our camp so that everything
was tightly secured for its passage over the ice.  We were to follow
behind in the Woolville.  Our pee flagwas so firmly frozen in that it
had to be sawed off at the base.  Despite our best efforts, the
Antispryte failed to start and had to remain at Wooville, each day
heaped with more snow and looking as maladjusted as we knew it to be.
We made the two men tea in the Dining Wing before setting out.

What's the news on station?  " I asked.
"A circus!  " replied one of the pair, a man with a beard like a
medieval depiction of Noah.

The planes are gonna be here bringing the summer folk soon, and all
hell's gonna break loose.  Everyone's getting ready."  You must have
wintered," I said.  You're used to peace and quiet."  Yep, 8 said
the man, as tea and flat muffins disappeared into the wilderness of his
beard.  "My fifth winter.  Say, is that a cockroach in there?  " It
wasn't just the station that was changing.  One morning around that
time we saw our first emperors.  The velvet backs of their necks were
flecked with gray, and they blinked at the pale sun as it struggled
through the cloud cover among the translucent bands of colored light
behind Big Razorback.
We loved the new Wooville as much as its predecessor.  On one side we
overlooked the striped Barne Glacier, its corduroy-fluted, perfectly
vertical cliff sharp against the pearly sky, and on the otherlScott's
hut and Wend Vane Hill.  At midday on our first morning I asked Lucia
to walk out with me to a berg a short distance from the Barne

Glacier.  I had just reread one of my favorite entries in Scott's Just
before lunch the sunshine could be seen gilding the floe, and Ponting
and I walked out to the bergs.  The nearest one has been overturned and
can be easily climbed.  From the top we could see the sun clear over
the rugged outline of Cape Barne.  It was glorious to stand bathe in
brilliant sunshine once more.  We felt very young sang and cheeredþwe
were reminded of a bright frosty morning in Englandþ everything
sparkled and the air had the same crisp feel.  There is little new to
be said of the return of the sun in Polar regions, yet it is such a
very real and important event that one cannot pass it in silence.
It changes the outlook on life of every individual, foul weather is
robbed of its terrors, if it is stormy today it will be fine tomorrow
or the next day, and each day's delay will mean a brighter outlook when
the sky is clear.
We were glad to be back on the sea ice after our brief holiday in the
science camps of the valleys.  Inspirational as they were, the dry
mountainous landscapes did not seem like the real Antarctica.

"It's good to be home," I said to Lucia as we sat down at the wobbly
card table for our first meal at Cape Evans.

You called it home!  " she said, smiling broadly.  Then she added,
"I'm afraid I overcooked the beans."  On clear days, when I walked
around the newWooville or looked out from the long window by my desk,
the landscape spoke to me so directly that it no longer seemed to be
made of ice.  It had become a kind of cosmic symbol of harmony and of a
peaceful freedom beyond poverty, gas bills and unrequited love.  For
Shackleton, a Louis Bernacchi noted in his diary on the Discovery
expedition, "Antarctica didn't exist.
It was the inner world that engrossed him."  At last I understood what
he meant.
We often had storms, and when they came, being drawn by Lucia was an
occupational hazard of Woovillian life.  The wind was so strong that we
were knocked over taking the few steps to our pee flag, and in some
areas the relentless gusts scoured the sea ice clean of snow.  If
Scott's hut disappeared, we knew we were in for a long session.
We were obliged to wear our parkas for the ten-foot journey between
huts.
To vary the routine, we took turns doing the morning radio schedule in
each other's accents.  I'm not sure which was worseþmy American accent
or her English oneþbut neither of them ever fooled anyone.  I tried
occasionally to identify signs of incipient madness.  Would we start
using Lucia's paints to divide our bodies into thirds, like Byrd?
In reality, we had never been saner.
On October 3 Joe from the McMurdo communications hut came to stay with
us.  A pair of ozone scientists dropped him off in a Spryte.
We went outside to greet him.

Come on in, a said Lucia as she clapped Joe on the back.  He had come
to seem like a friend, we had spoken to him so often.

Thanks, 8 said Joe.  It seemed odd to hear his voice coming out of a
mouth rather than a metal box.

Your solar panels are the wrong way around," he said the minute he
got inside the Dining Wing.  They're pointing into the hut."  I had
been broadcasting our success with the solar panels, especially after I
discovered that no one in the valleys had theirs working.  How the
radio had continued operating with its recharging panels the wrong way
around I never knew.
Later that day we drove over the sea ice to Cape Royds, taking a
circuitous route to avoid the cracks that were by then fanning out from
the bergs and the shore.  Joe came along.

Look!  " he said suddenly, pointing up into the sky.  Lucia and I
squinted into the glare.

"I can't see anything," I said.

"That black dot," said Joe.  "It's the first plane of the season,
heading for McMurdo from Christchurch."  We carried on in silence.
For Lucia and me, the start of the season marked the beginning of the
end.  The female seals were getting fatter, and we had been seeing ice
blink in the skyþreflections of open water in the lower cloud layer
that appeared as a heavy purple blanket above the bright band of light
on the horizonþso we knew what we would find at Cape Royds.  As we
crested the hill beyond Shackleton's hut, there it was below us.

Water.

On our return to Mactown in the second week of October, we witnessed a
virtual population exchange, in the first six days of the summer season
300 people had changed places.  The parties were fun, but it was hard
to socialize after the seclusion of Wooville.  Besides that, since my
last visit south, to widespread incredulity, I had given up alcohol.
For some years I had been living near the edge, and I had decided to
make a trip to the unknown territory of the interior.
I do not believe it was a coincidence that this change occurred after
my long Antarctic journey.
Drinking large quantities of wine had always seemed like part of the
big picture, an essential ingredient in the creative process and a
harmless method of making the lights brighter, keeping the demons at
bay and enjoying temporary respite from the treachery of the Nomadic
Thoughts.  It was what people like me did.  Only most people did it
rather less excessively than the small group I called people like
me.
" A curious thing had happened by the time I got back from
Antarctica.
I didn't need it anymore.  I knew that the peace I had experienced in
the south would always come back to me, even if I had to sit out more
bleak times waiting for it, and that meant I needn't be frightened of
what my vagabond thoughts might uncover.  The demons hadn't
disappeared, but they had shrunk.  Many things changed.
Living without a glass of wine in my hand was another voyage of
discovery.  Like all the best journeys, it had its long moments of
agony, too.  But I couldn't jump ship now.  It was too thrilling.
A psychologist had come in to interview the winterers before they
disappeared.

The lore has it that Antarctica fosters insanity," he said, "but the
facts don't support the theory.  The reality is that the opposite shows
up.  In other words, it shows how valiant and intrepid the human spirit
can be in adversity."  An influx of new people swarmed over the
station, and in the galley we had to wait in queues.  Those of us who
had come in on Winfly said that we now knew how the winterers must have
felt when we pitched up.  The Winfly experience glued us togetherþ even
Ron, the dispenser of the Spryte vehicles, came to seem like an old
friend.
At the same time, it was good to see some old friends back at

McMurdo.

David appeared, the chain-smoking Russian geocryologist with the ink
black hair that hung over his eyes like a sheepdog's, and he gave me a
pair of earrings made out of mammoth tusk to match the ring.
The Kiwi pilots who had taken me to Terra Nova Bay were back, and we
had a great reunion.  A fish biologist brought the news that Britt had
asked Hans to marry her.  The Corner Bar revved up.  Housing had tried
to close it down, but of course, they had not succeeded.
One day I heard a familiar Chicago accent booming along a corridor in
the Gary.  It was Nann, the porcelain engineer from the Pole, her hair
still looking as if it had been arranged by a blowtorch.

so you came back!  " I said as we embraced.
Couldn't stand another minute with that
sucker, a she said, and I knew she meant her husband.
It was a relief, nonetheless, to get back to Wooville.
Various science parties were heading out into the field, which meant
that the airwaves were busier and that my accent was no longer the
source of limitless hilarity.  Soon after our return to Cape Evans, we
heard that Wooville was to be disrupted by the arrival of a diving
project.
I made a NO DIVING sign and strapped it to the Welcome To Woovillea post
we had erected.
I had also purloined the plastic penguin with the target on its chest
from the Corner Bar.  We positioned it near Wooville, its back to the
sound.  We watched visitors climb down from their vehicles, layer up,
load film into their cameras and stalk the bird.
I watched an enormous Reed drill, mounted on a tracked vehicle,
lurching along the flagged route, and soon Wooville was swarming with
people and pitted with diving holes.  The divers were studying larval
development in Sterechinus neumayeri sea urchins, and they were anxious
to get under the ice before the algae began to bloom.  A heated hut had
been dragged out to cover the main hole, so when the floor hatch was
open and the two divers had suited up, we all crowded in.  The hole
resembled a giant glass of Alka-Seltzer.  Looking down at the fat white
amphipods coiled like ropes on the seabed, Lucia and I were amazed to
see what we had been living over for so long.

What temperature is the water?  8 I asked one of the divers as he
peeled off his dry suit after half an hour under the ice.

"Minus 1. 8 degrees Celsius," he said.  The skin around his mouth was
numb with cold, and he was talking as if he had just been to the
dentist.

"Look," he went on, waving a bit of old leather.  "I found a shoe from
Scott's expedition."  "If the water temperature is below freezing," I
asked, feelingþ and soundingþstupid, "by doesn't it freeze?
"The salt lowers the freezing point, a said the diver, toweling his
hair.  The saltier the water, the lower the temperature at which it
freezes.  That's why you spread salt on highways when it snowsþas the
salt dissolves, it lowers the temperature at which the water on the
road surface freezes."  A helicopter arrived to whisk the urchins to
the aquarium at McMurdo.
The shoe went back in someone's pocket.
Day after day Erebus appeared without its swaddling clothes.
The absence of wind seemed like a miracle after what we had been
through.
Soon we began taking the card table outside and eating lunch on the
ice.
Occasionally, the silence was broken by the snort of a seal coming
through the grease ice that had formed over the dive holes.  It was
between a gurgle and a squeal, and when the female seals flopped out,
they were so fat they could hardly move.  By mid-October there were
many seals, especially around Big Razorback and Hutton Cliffs.
The temperature in those days might swing between ten above and ten
below in 12 hours.  We began to see mist rising from open water to the
north.
Hillocks of snow grew on the sea ice overnight as pressure ridges
formed.  We sensed that something dramatic was happening to the
environment.  A visiting climatologist sitting on a folding chair at
the card table, looking out at the ice blink on the horizon, put it
like this, You are currently living through the greatest seasonal
event on earth, in terms of mass and energyþthe growth and decay of
Antarctic sea ice."  Put like that, it was apocalyptic.
When sunlight falls on its fissured cliffs, the Barne Glacier is one of
the wonders of the natural world, and we never grew tired of looking at
it.  Lucia was gazing out at it one day through the window next to the
long table.  Suddenly she winced.

"I must have some Winder, a she said, narrowing her eyes as if in
pain.
I began rummaging through the first aid kit in search of an
antiflatulant.  But she was only being American.  She
wanted to clean the window.
An igloo went up in front of the huts, built by a pair of atmospheric
scientists who came to stay for a week.  They were on holiday, taking a
break from monitoring the ozone layers in the stratosphere and
measuring stratospheric particles that affect ozone depletion.  This is
done by filling balloons with helium and sending them up 100, 000 feet.
Shortly after they arrived, they marked out an ambitiously large circle
on the ice.  This resulted, four days and three nights later, in an
astrodome of igloos.  As we had only one ice saw, the carving knife was
called into service.  The entrance was supposed to be facing Scott's
hut, but, due to an architectural error, it ended up facing the pee
flag.  The igloo had a carved ice figurehead above the door and a
window made out of a disk of ice frozen into shape in the lid of a
pan.
When it was finished we ate a celebratory meal inside, and then we all
slept in it.
In the second half of October, the seals pupped.  The snow on the sea
ice was smeared with blood, and we began to see small brown sausages
next to the long gray ones.  The pups weighed about 45 pounds at
birth.
At two days, they discovered that they could bite their own tail
flippers.  Seal milk has the highest fat content of any vertebrate
(approaching 70 percent), and the pups gained five pounds a day.
It was like watching dough rise.
On the night of October 22, I slept outside.  There was no wind, and
the temperature was hovering around zero.  The sun set shortly after
eleven o'clock, and all night I heard seals calling.  The eastern
slopes of Erebus were violet at first, and then they were bathe in rosy
pink alpenglow and, between two and three o'clock, when the sun rose
above WindVane Hill, they became sunflower yellow.
Immediately before I awoke, I had a vivid dream.  I dreamed I was going
to die.  I was at home, and everyone was there.  There was no panic or
fear or sadness, and when I opened my eyes I felt peaceful and happy.
It had all seemed so real, and I lay still in my sleeping bag,
mummified in polypropylene, wondering what to deduce from it.
After a while, Lucia came out of the hut carrying an insulated mug of
coffee.
When she saw me there without a book or a creased page of typescript
awkwardly wedged between the lip of the bag and my face (an irritating
problem I never satisfactorily resolved), she looked surprised.

What are you thinking about?  " she asked, imagining, no doubt, that I
was hatching a plan and that we were about to go careering off for the
ice edge or halfway up Erebus.

Death, " I said cheerily.  Thanks for the coffee."  She withdrew
swiftly into the hut.
I had been thinking a good deal about life and death.  A friend of mine
at home had recently become a Buddhist, and conversations we had had
before my departure kept coming back to me at Wooville.  I realized
that my fear of losing my faith was based on another, more primeval
fear.  It was my own death that was haunting me.  Faith enabled me to
cope with the concept of mortality, but if I lost faith, how would I
live with the treacherous knowledge that I was going to die?  If anyone
asked, I had always said that I wasn't afraid of dyingþbut I wasn't
being entirely honest.  My friend and I had discussed Buddhist
teachings on the acknowledgment and acceptance of mortality.  It was a
long struggle, but it was infinitely more important than everything
else.  Yet western culture strives to divert these thoughts and mask
the concept of mortality so we don't have to confront it.  I believe
that if it is not confronted, it will slosh around in the subconscious
only to manifest itself elsewhere, unresolved and in disguise.  It
might do so in an unnaturally heavy reliance on alcohol, for example.
I wasn't sure.
I did know that the marginalization of spirituality in Western culture
seemed to me a shocking indictment of the society in which I lived.  In
Greeceþa country to which I had always been power fully attractedþan
awareness of spirituality was still as indivisible and as natural a
part of the landscape as the green waters of the Aegean or the wild
thyme on the mountainside.  I had learned a good deal from my
peregrinations in Greece, but Antarctica had taken me further.
When I looked out of the bag at the opalescent swaths of ice and the
ribbons of smoke lazily uncurling from the crater of Erebus, issues
involving Orthodoxy or the Tibetan blend of Buddhism and vexing
questions of personal morality melted like so many weightless ice
crystals.
Antarctica was a cultural void, a space in the imagination like the
blank pages of Lucia's sketchbooks.  It forced me to begin confronting
a fear I had until then barely acknowledged.  Despite everything I had
gone through to get where I wasþthe years of preparation and anxietyþit
seemed to me then that the external journey meant nothing at all.
We had all but relinquished our diurnal clues to the summer and became
desynchronized all over again.  I caught sight of something in the
distance one morning and realized it was a skua.  It was like seeing a
tree sprouting out of the ice.  But it was their timeþskuas eat seal
placentas.
I was sitting on a folding chair between Wooville and Scott's hut,
looking out at the Bame Glacier.  The wind had dropped.  I suddenly
became aware of a thin black line on the snow near the Bame.  It was
moving.  As I sat there, the line grew bigger and coalesced into the
form of 24 adolescent emperors who were soon waddling around our huts
on their horny heels.
When the seal pups were about ten days old, it was time for their first
swim.  In an attempt to lure their progeny, the mothers plunged
enthusiastically into the holes, bellowing loudly.  As the reluctant
pups remained doggedly on the ice, their mothers began to sound
increasingly exasperatedþbut they always won in the end.  At about this
time we had a cold snap.  The ambient temperature reached minus 30, and
with windchill we had minus 60.  The antenna broke in eight places, and
I got a metal burn on my hand from a wrench.  It was like old times.
All too soon the terrible day came when a Caterpillar arrived to tow
away the Clinic.  A group of seal physiologists had returned for
another season, and they needed their hut.  We moved all our gear into
the Dining Wing and, cramped as it was, continued to live there.
After a week we steeled ourselves to visit the Sealheads.  There were
four of them, all men, and the Clinic resembled a refugee camp on the
wartom border of an African country.

Does it seem different?  " they asked as a stack of beer cans toppled
over, ripping another animal from the Woo Zoo we had stuck on the wall,
beast by beast, throughout our tenure.

"Yes!  " we both said, simultaneously.
"How?  " one of them asked.

"Wcll a I said you're in it a During most of October the sunsets had
consisted of a display of shifting colors that lasted for hours.
Each night they lingered a little longer over the Transantarctics, and
from the window next to the long table we could see, all night, a
flaming band of light in the west.  On October 25, for the first time,
the sun stayed with us.  I no longer needed the Coleman lantern to read
at night, and our candlelit dinners were a distant memory.  I watched
the female seals shrink until their hipbones showed.  The poignant
beauty of the last weeks was almost unbearable.  I knew that I would
never live in such splendor again in my life, not if I had a hundred
lives.  But it was time to go home.  The Solarbam was a small place in
which to live and work, and one night I found a napalm tablet for
lighting the Preway nestling up against my toothbrush.  I was fed up
with having willy slits in my long johns, pee bottles in my pocket and
a VHF antenna up my nose.  I wanted Cox's
apples, the hammock on my roof and a bathroom without a seal in it.  I
wanted to hear the Whitmanesque roll call of the shipping forecast
before I went to sleep, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Gale Force Nine,
Showers, Good.

SEVENTEEN Restoration

Talk of ex-soldiers, give me
ex-antarctics, unsoured and with their ideals intact.  They could sweep
the world.
APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD, from The Worstpourney in the World We jumped
over the soft cracks in the snow to reach Scott's hut, and Lucia opened
the door with the heavy metal key.  It was our last full day at
Wooville.

Remember_a she began, grinning mischievously.

"I think we've been through that enough times," I said.  I knew she
was about to refer to our first visit to the hut, when I had struggled
to pull the wooden bar back from the door before unlocking it.  To free
up my hands, without thinking I had put the key in my mouth, where it
had instantly frozen to my lips.  Lucia had been obliged to exhale
energetically over my face to unstick the key without the loss of too
much of the skin on my lips.  No lasting damage had been done, but the
image of me parading around Wooville with the key to Scott's hut glued
to my mouth had kept Lucia amused throughout our tenure at Cape
Evans.
As sunlight poured through the door, crusts of snow gleamed on the
shovels hanging in the small vestibule.  For no real reason, we
wandered through to the stables at the back of the hut.  They were
under the same roof as the living quarters but separated by internal
wooden walls.  The first of two openings on the left in the small
snowbound vestibule led to a storage area and then the stables.
In the second opening they had hung a sturdy wooden door that opened on
to the living quarters.
The stables consisted of a row of eight horse stalls of conventional
design.  Each horse's name had been stenciled at the end of its
stall.
"Abdul, a Lucia read.  "Is that a common name for an English horse?  "
She had an endearing habit of assuming that everything Scott had done,
or indeed everything that she observed me doing in our camp, was
indicative of activities in which all English people were permanently
engaged.

"No," I said firmly.  "I've never heard of a horse called Abdul
before."  She was standing alongside a window at the end of the stable,
concentrating on a lightning sketch of the horse stalls.  Next to her I
noticed the blubber stove where Oates had cooked up bran mash for the
horses.  I narrowed my eyes and imagined Oates thereþI had seen him
standing exactly where she was, in one of Pontings photographs.
He used to sleep in the stables sometimes, to be near the sick ponies
during the night.  He was much taller than Lucia, but there was
something similar in the chiseled nose and high cheekbones .  .

.

I waited till she had put her sketchbook back in her pocket.
On our way into the main part of the hut, I stopped in the storage area
at the large pile of glistening seal blubber, slabbed like peat and
stored by Scott's men for winter fuel, and bent down to touch it.

"It's amazing that it's still tacky," I said, even after the iron
freeze of so many Antarctic winters."  "It must have smelled gross when
the hut was heated, a Lucia said.

"I don't know how they stood it.  Look at those hockey sticks hanging
on the wall.  I've not noticed them before.  That's an idea.  We could
have had a game of hockey."
"Do you think two people can play on their own?  8 I said, fingering
the spokes of a crumbling bicycle hooked on the wall of the passageway
between the stable and the main part of the hut.

Sure they can!  " she said.  "At Wooville they can, anyway.
" "Yikes," I said.
Standing in the kitchen in the main part of the hut, I realized how
much the place had come to seem like home.  We could have shut our eyes
and reeled off the contents of the shelves, from the red Dutch cheeses
that looked like cannonballs, their metal shells corroded, up to the
set of tiny fluted metal pastry molds.

You know, I've always wondered, a Lucia said, pointing up to a shelf
above the officers' bunks, why they brought that trilby hat down
here.
" Maybe it was for dressing upþI mean for plays or little cabaret
sketches, " I offered.  They used to dress up a lot."  "Do Englishmen
often dress up in costume, then?  " she asked, looking puzzled.

"It's a class thing, I supposeþit was a kind of male upper-class
ritual."  I immediately regretted saying this, as Lucia was fascinated
by the class system and had often interrogated me on the subject.
I had tried to paint her a comprehensible picture and was irritably
aware of my inability to do so.  Sure enough, I had reminded her of
unfinished business.

Now, a she said, "during the night I was thinking of what you said
about tea' meaning two different things according to which class you
come from.  You said that tea'means the evening meal in working-class
circles and a midafternoon cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches with the
crusts off or one of those things you toast_ a "A crumpet," I
interrupted.

"That's it, a midafternoon cup of tea, dainty sandwiches and a crumpet
in upper-class circles.  When I come to see you in England"þvisiting
each other in our respective countries was now a popular topic_if I
meet someone on the sidewalk who invites me for tea, how will I know
the time to go and what I'll be fed?  Will I have to say, Excuse me,
are you upper-class or working-class?  to find out?  "
"Well, no, you
can tell by the accent," I began, wishing I'd never introduced her to
the concept.

Well, I can't, can I?  What's your accent?  "
"Sort of middle, 8 I
said miserably.
She threw me a vexed look, and then, sensing that I couldn't be
bothered to talk about it anymore, she began getting out her pastels.
I realized how much I was going to miss her.
It was too dark in the hut to paint properly, so once she had laid out
her tools on Scott's desk, Lucia went outside and shoveled the snow
away from the windows.  The hut sprang to life like a mosaic sluiced
with water.  Scott's bunk was tucked in the left-hand corner at the end
farthest from the door, shielded by a seven-foot-high wooden partition
separating his quarters from those of the officers.  The
noncommissioned men slept at the other end of the hut, nearest the
door.  Half a wall of wooden boxes stenciled with brand names extended
between the officers and the men, originally this wall stretched right
across the hut, broken only by a narrow gap for traffic, but it had
been demolished by the members of the Ross Sea party who camped in the
hut.  Presumably, they were desperate to find anything still
languishing in the boxes.  Now, except for Ponting's darkroom, which
was next to Scott's cubbyhole and directly opposite the entrance at the
other end, the rest of the living area consisted of one large open
space.  It was about 50 feet by 25, and narrow bunks were positioned
around the edge while the middle was occupied by a long table and, at
Scott's end, a black metal coal stove.
The corner on the right at the far end, opposite Scott, functioned as a
laboratory for the expedition scientists, and in it three or four
benches and tables were piled with a plethora of vials and test
tubes.
The kitchen, still overflowing with supplies, was at the other end, on
the right near the door, and here they had installed another stove.
Scott's den was about eight feet by six, and besides the bunk and a few
bookshelves on the partition walls it contained only his desk.
Two other bunks were also tucked away in there, a few feet from Scott's
on the other side of the desk and underneath the medicine shelves.
These were occupied by Bill Wilson, the chief scientist, and Lieutenant
Teddy Evans, who went home with scurvy and returned in command of the
Terra Nv.  So Scott had never really been aloneþat least outwardly.
At the foot of Scott's bunk the light revealed a hot-water bottle we
had not seen before.  We felt as if we were massaging the hut back to
life.  It never heated up though.  It was colder inside than out, like
a reverse greenhouse.
They had been very happy in the hut, as we had been in ours.
Who wouldn't have been, in that place?  This is what CherryGarrard
wrote about its position.  He began by saying that he had seen a lot of
volcanoes.
But give me Erebus for my friend.  Whoever made Erebus knew all the
charm of horizontal lines, and the lines of Erebus are for the most
part nearer the horizontal than the vertical.  And so he is the most
restful mountain in the world, and I was glad when I knew that our hut
would lie at his feet.  And always there floated from his crater the
lazy banner of his cloud of steam.
Lucia had decided to paint the freshly illuminated bunk, and positioned
her stool so that it faced the hot-water bottle.  When I shone my torch
into the corner behind her, the beam lit up a small brown glass bottle
on a shelf full of medicines.  A neat, printed label announced simply POISON, and near the base of the bottle another
label read HARRODS.

"Isn't that a store for fancy people?  " Lucia asked, following the
bearer of the torch.  Oh God, I thought, here we go again.  I nipped
sharply into Ponting's darkroom.

"Look at this!  " I called.  Lucia came in.  "It's a glass negativeþit
shows a man having his hair cut here in the hut!  8 The image was
fogged, but there, indubitably, was a gnarly old explorer sitting on a
stool next to Scott's desk, a pipe protruding from his mouth at a
jaunty angle and a pair of scissors held to his already cropped scalp
by another man.
Both were wearing baggy trousers.  I had an idea.

"I could cut your hair," I said, and we could set up an
automatic-exposure photograph in hereþI mean, to be exactly like
them.
" This didn't go down at all well.

What are you going to cut it with?  " she asked.  That Swiss Army
knife you carry around?  It's too blunt to cut the muffins."  It seemed
only fair that she should let me do it after I had submitted like a
lamb to the acupuncture needles.  As I was thinking about how I might
persuade her, she walked out of the darkroom and into the main part of
the hut.

"Do you think they missed Cape Evans when they were back at home?  "
she called.  The ones who made it home, I mean."  They all said they
did."
"Do you think we will?  " I looked at her standing there, a stick of
chalk poised in midair, and I realized how rich our lives had been at
Wooville.  As Frank Hurley put it, "We had learned to find fullness and
contentment in a life which had stripped us of all the distinctions,
baubles and trappings of civilisation."  "I'm sure I'll never stop
missing it," I said.  "I'll think of it every day, sitting in my flat,
looking out at the traffic.  I know nothing will ever be like this
again.  I'll never feel quite so separated from my anxieties.
It's as though God has given me a gift, once in my life, to step off
the planet for two months and listen to a different music."  Doesn't
it make you unbearably sadþI mean, that it's over?
" I had to think about that.  "In a strange way, it doesn't.
I sort of feel I'm taking it with meþin my heart, if that doesn't sound
naff."  What does naff' mean?  " Drippy."  That didn't help.

Mawkishly sentimental."  She said no more, and I wandered aimlessly
around as she painted, imagining them in this place or that, cozied up
in their hut.
I wondered why in the world the bunks were so infernally small and what
had induced them to bring down a blue-and-white Chinese porcelain
decorative bowl.  I remembered, too, reading about a piano they had
brought in from the ship (despite the fact that no one could play
it)þbut this had vanished.
After some timeþit might have been ten minutesþLucia said, No, it
doesn't."  I knew immediately she was answering my question about
whether what I had said sounded naff.  We often had conversations that
included long pauses.  We had learned the rhythm of each other's
thoughts.
She too, I knew, was preoccupied with the notion that it was all
over.
She called out, What was that quotation you were telling me last
night, you know, about being restored to a natural stateþit was by one
of those guys you call Beards?  " Many of our speech idioms had rubbed
offþhers on me and mine on herþbut I had failed to introduce "Beardsa
as a term one could use generically, without qualification.

"It was by Reinhold Messner," I said.  The greatest mountaineer
alive.
When he was down here, slogging across the plateau, he wrote, It seemed
to me as if I were restored to that time and that state when nature
alone was God.  "I went down to Scott's quarters to look over her
shoulder at the pastel drawing.

"Is it okay?  " she asked.

The megaphone's good, 8 I said.  They had presumably brought this
object so they could converse from the ship to the sea ice.  It had
ended up hanging on a hook above Scott's desk.  I had tried to think of
a use for it at Wooville, but alas!  I was too attached to my VHF.

There's something wrong with the way this light falls here," I said,
pointing to a corner of the painting.  We had grown accustomed to being
frank about each other's workþfalse politeness seemed absurdly out of
place.  It would have been like wearing couture parkas.

How about a touch of Naples yellow there?  " I said, pointing again.
She looked at the sketch and then at me, wide-eyed.

"I've taught you too much, a she said.
Before I could go home, there was one thing I still had to do.
In the hut a single shaft of light from the midnight sun cut above the
mound of snow piled against the window and shone onto the long wooden
table, casting distorted shadows against the far wall.  It was the
table loaded with bottles that Ponting photographed while roistering
English voices rang around the hut.  Lucia was sleeping peacefully in
our own quiet hut, a hundred yards away.  The wind reverberated in the
small entrance hall like the sound of a train in a tunnel, though the
rest of the hut was almost silent.
I lay awake for many hours, my head on Scott's pillow, as he, weighed
down by heavy responsibilities, must often have done.
How very different the end had been for him.  Here, then, tonight, 8 he had written in his diary, awe have reached the end of our tether.  ^
The distended shadows shifted along the old wooden walls as the sun
wheeled across the sky.  I was thinking about my first day in
Antarctica and the view from the top of the snow hill as the
vulcanologist tap-tapped snow into his specimen tin.  I could remember
it as if it were yesterday.  A great deal had happened since then.  I
had traveled thousands of miles, lost a lot of body heat, watched
hundreds of beards ice up, realized how little I had seen, or knew.
Antarctica was more of a terra incognita than ever.  Byrd used the
image of a beach and a tide to convey the changing of the seasons in
Antarctica, the polar day was the beach, and the night was the tide.  I
had seen it come in, and I had seen it go out.  It had all happened so
fast.  But I still felt the same about Antarctica.  It was the great
thrill of my lifeþon top of the snow hill, on Scott's bunk, in what was
about to become my future.  It had allowed me to believe in paradise,
and that, surely, is a gift without price.
Then I laid my head on his pillow, and went to sleep.
Ulysses ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON "It little profits that an idle
king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an
aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard,
and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel, I will drink Life to the lees.
All times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with
those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Through scudding
drifts the rainy Hyades Vert the dim sea, I am becoming a name For
always roaming with a hungly heart, Much have I seen and known, þcities
of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least,
but honoured of them all, And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windyTroy.
I am a part of all that I have met, Yet all experience is an arch
wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades For ever
and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, Epilogue To rust unburnished,
not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!  Life piled on life Were all too
little, and of one to me Little remains, but every hour is saved From
that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things, and vile
it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this grey
spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought .  . .
There lies the port, the vessel puffs her sail, There gloom the dark,
broad seas.  My mariners, Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and
thought with meþ That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and
the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheadsþyou and I are
old, Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.  Death closes all, but
something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not
unbecoming men that strove with Gods.  The lights begin to twinkle from
the rocks, The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs, the deep Moans
round with many voices.  Come, my friends, Tis not too late to seek a
newer world.  Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding
furrows, for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.  It may be that the gulfs will
wash us down, It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the
great Achilles, whom we knew.
Epilogue Though much is taken, much abides, and though We are not now
that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we
are, we are, One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and
fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to
yield.
A P P E N D X Bread-and-Butter Pudding (Antarctic Version) Essential
ingredients Bread (plenty) Sweetenerþsugar is best, if not, use
watered-down honey, treacle or syrup.  At a pinch, jam (British) or
jelly (American).  In extremis, cocoa or drinking chocolate.
Not powdered orange drink, please.
Liquidþpreferably some form of milk.
Desirable additional ingredients Fatþbutter, margarine or, if you must,
oil Dried fruitþany kind.  If none available, use tinned fruit.
Liquor.  There is usually a bottle of something lurking at established
campsþBailey's, more often than not.
Cinnamon Eggþeither liquid (the stuff that comes in cartons) or
rehydrated powder.  In the highly unlikely event of receiving fresh
eggs on a resupply, on no account should these be used in a b & b
pudding.  They are far too precious.

Appendix Utensils You will need a heatproof vessel.

Established camps invariably have some kind of tin or pot among the
kitchenware, if not, try ransacking the scientists' equipment.  You
really do need an oven for this dish.  If, however, you are laid up in
a tent, Beards love nothing more than experimenting for hours with foil
and other items in order to create an oven-on-a-stove.
Method Slice the breadþany kind will do.  (Do not, however, attempt to
use Cabin Bread.  This is a euphemistic brand name for large, dry
crackers.  Like eating sawdust.  ) Apply the fat to the bread in
whatever way you can, I know how tricky spreading can be at 20 below,
and how difficult it is to butter bread with cooking oil.
Just do your best.  Grease the pot.  Begin layering it with slices of
bread and abutter."  Between layers, add handfuls of fruit, spoonfuls
of whatever sweetener you are using, sprinklings of cinnamon,
dribblings of egg liquid and milk and splashes of any liquor you
have.
Do not be tempted to use beer.
Antarctic dried fruit normally requires a lot of soakingþin the case of
BAS dates at least ten minutes' hard work with a geology hammer as
well.
If you are short of fruit, use nuts if you have them, but avoid the
salted kind.  If you have neither fruit nor nuts you might as well
start lobbing anything in as long as it isn't actually savory.
Breakfast cereals work well.  Cookies can be used in place of sugar and
fruit, but do crumble them up well so that at least they no longer look
like cookies.  If you are reduced to using the British green foil packs
of "Biscuits, Brown, " you might start asking yourself whether it's
worth continuing with this project.  Cans of rice pudding aren't great
in a b & b, but people will still eat it.  The Kiwis have good
chocolate chips, which go well.
Appendix You should end up with the consistency of a dense, mushy
sandwich.  Top off with a final layer of bread and butter and sprinkle
something sweet on top.  Put pot in the oven for a while.  If you have
a grill, after removing from the oven sprinkle with extra sugar and
grill for another while.
Get on the radio and call everyone in.
SEE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Excellent Antarctic bibliographies are
available.  In the United States the Library of

Congress publishes antarctic Bibliography for the National Science
Foundation.  It also produces the monthly Current antarctic
Literahure.
In the United Kingdom the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI)
publishes Polar and Glaciological Abstracts.  Most major books and
journals about Antarctica are listed in The Antarctic (Clio Press,
Oxford, 1994, ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara, 1994), compiled by James
Meadows, William Mills and Harry King.

Amundsen, Ronne, The South Pole, John Murray, London, 1912.

Bainbridge, Beryl, The Birthday Boys, Duckworth, London, 1991.
Baughmann, T. S. , Before the Heroes Came, University of Nebraska
Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1994.
Beaglehole, J. C. (ed.  ), The Journals of Captain James Cook,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1961.

Bellow, Saul, More Die of Heartbreak, William Morrow, New York, 1987.

Beltramino, Juan Carlos M. , The Struchure and Dynamics of antarctic
Populaeon, Vantage Press, New York, 1993.

Bennet, Gun, Beyond Endurance, Secker & Warburg London, 1983.

Birkin, Andrew, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, Constable, London,
1979.
Brittanico, Mercurio (Bishop Joseph Hall), Mundus Alter et Idem,
Frankfurt, 1605, new English edition Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass.  , 1937.

Byrd, Richard E. , Discovery, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1935.

Select Bibliography , Alone, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1938.
Chill, Tim, "Antarctic Passages, " in Pecked to Death by Ducks, Random
House, New York, 1993.

Campbell, David, The Crystal Desert, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1992.

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley, The Worst journey in the World, Chatto and
Wmdus, London, 1922.
Cook, Frederick A. Through theFirstantarcticNight WsIIiam Heinemann,
London, 1900.

Darlington, Jennie, My Antarctic Honeymoon, Doubleday, New York, 1956.

Debenham, Frank (Tune Backed.  ), The Quiet Land, The Diaries of Frank
Debenham, Bluntisham Books, Harlston, 1992.

Dodge, Ernest S. , The Polar Rosses, Faber & Faber, London, 1973.

Eliot, T. S. , The Waste Land, Faber & Faber, London, 1925.

þ, Four Quartets, Faber & Faber, London, 1944.

Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot, Yale University Press, London,
1991.
Hattersley-Smith, G. , The History of Place-Names in the Brissh
antarctic Territory, British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, 1991.

Headland, Robert, Chronological List of antarctic Expedihons,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.

Holt, Kare, The Race, Michael Joseph, London, 1974.

Huntford, Roland, Scott and Amundsen, Hodder & Stoughton, London,
1979

(published in the United States as The Last Place on Earth).

, Shackleton, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1985.
Hurley, Frank, Argonauts of the South, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York,
1925.

Jacka, Frank & Eleanor (eds.  ), Mawson's Antarctic Diaries,

Adelaide University Press, Adelaide, Australia, 1988.

Joyce, Ernest, The South Polar Trail, Duckworth, London, 1929.

Keneally, Thomas, Victim of the Aurora, Wslliam Collins, London &
Sydney, 1977.
King, H. G. Red.  ), The Wicked Mate, the Antarctic Diary of Victor
Campbell, Bluntisham Books, Norfolk, 1988.
Select Bibliography Kushner, Tony, Angels in America, Nick Hern Books,
London, 1992.

Lansing, Alfred, Endurance, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1959.

Lashly, William, Under Scott's Command, Victor Gollancz, London,
1969.

Le Guin, Ursula K. , "Sur, " in The New Yorker, February 1, 1982.

Lessing, Doris, Afterword to The Making of the Representativefor Planet
8, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982.

Loper, Barry, Arctic Dreams, Macmillan, New York, 1986.

Marret, Mario, Antarctic Venture, William Kimber, London, 1955.
Mawson, Douglas, Home of the Blizzard, William Heinemann, London,
1915.
Mear, Roger, and Robert Swan, In the Footsteps of Scott, Jonathan Cape,
London, 1987.
Messner, Reinhold, Antarctica, Both Heaven and Hell, Crowood Press,
Marlborough, 1991.

Mickleburgh, Edwin, Beyond the Frozen Sea, Bodley Head, London, 1990.

Nansen, Fridtjof, Farthest North, Macmillan, London, 1897.
Newman, Stanley (ed.  ), Shackleton's Lieutenant, The "Nimrod" Diary of
A.

L. A. Mackintosh, Polar Publications, Auckland, N. Z. , 1990.

Paltock, Robert, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a
Cornishman, Relating Particularly his Shipwreck near the South Pole,
Berwick, London, 1784 (first published anonymously).
Poe, Edgar Allan, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
Harper and Brothers, New York, 1838.

Pynchon, Thomas, V, Jonathan Cape, London, 1963.

Pyne, Stephen J. , The Ice, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City,
1986.
Richards, R. W. , The Ross Sea Shore Party, Scott Polar Research
Institute, Cambridge, 1962.
Riffenburgh, Beau, The Myth of the Explorer, Belhaven Press and Scott
Polar Research Institute, London and Cambridge, 1993.

Rodgers, Eugene, Beyond the Barrier, Naval Institute Press,

Annapolis, 1990.
Ross, Sir James Clark, A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the
Southern and Antarctic Regions, John Murray, London, 1847.

Rymill, John, Southern Lights, The Travel Book Club, London, 1938.

Scott, Captain Robert F. , The Voyage of the Discovery, Macmillan,
London, 1905.

, Scott's Last Expedition, Smith, Elder & Co.  , London, 1913.

Shackleton, Ernest, The Heart of the Antarctic, Ellliam Heinemann,
London, 1909.

, South, William Heinemann, London, 1919, Trafalgar Square, 1992.

Simpson-Housley, Paul, Antarctica, Exploration, Perception and Reality,
Routledge, London, 1992.  Spufford, Francis, May Be Some Time, Faber
& Faber, London, 1996.  Stoppard, Tom, Jumpers, Faber & Faber, London,
1972.

Stroud, Mike, Shadows on the Wasteland, Jonathan Cape, London, 1993.

Thomson, David, Scoff's Men, Allen Lane, London, 1977.
Verne, Jules, Le Sphim des glaces, Paris, 1897.  Wilson, Edward, Diary
of the "Discovery" Expedition, Humanities Press, New York, 1967.

, Diary of the "Terra Nova" Expedition, Blandford Press, London,
1972.
U N P U BS H E D S O U RC E S Most of the archive material at the
Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge is fragile, and tends to be
accessible only to researchers.
Blackborow, Perce, talk given at YMCA Boy's Club, Newport, family
archive, undated.  Bowers, H. R. , diary, 1910-12, SPRI.
Cherry-Garrard, Apsley, diaries and notebooks, 1910-13, SPRI.  Grisez,
Dave, diary, 1955-57, private archive.  Letters to Mrs. Oates, various
authors and dates, SPRI.  NankyokukiþRecords of Antarctica, Japanese
Antarctic Expedition 1911-12, translation in progress, Lara Shibata and
Hilary Shibata, care of SPRI.

Oates, L. E. G. , letters to his mother, SPRI.

Orde-Lees, T. H. , diaries, 1915-16, SPRI.  Scott, Captain Robert F. ,
Discovery diaries, 1901-2, 1904, SPRI.  Shackleton, Ernest, diary of
Southern Journey, 1902-3, SPRI.  Stuster, Jack, "The Modern Explorer's
Guide to Long Duration Isolation and Confinement, " prepared for NASA
by Anacapa Sciences, Santa Barbara, 1995.  The South Polar Times,
various issues, SPRI.  Spencer-Smith, A. , sledging diaries, 1915-16,
SPRI.
Wild, Frank, sledging diary, 1908-9, SPRI.  Worsley, F. A. , diary/log,
1916, SPRI.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I owe everything to two people, Guy Guthridge at the National

Science Foundation in Virginia and Frank Curry at the British Antarctic
Survey in Cambridge.  Elthout them, there would have been no
journeyþjust a dream.
Mario Zuccelli, who heads up the Italian Antarctic Program, also
contributed hugely by getting me to Terra Nova Bay against what looked
like insuperable odds.  Malcolm Macfarlane (in summer) and Warren
Herrick (in winter) made me more than welcome among the New Zealanders
at Scott Base and in the field.  The Chilean Antarcticans started it
all by taking me to Marsh, their station on King George Island.
Many people helped me on the ice, and I want to thank them all.  I can
mention only a few here, the others know who they are.  The scientists
who took me along when they didn't have to at all include Hermann
Englehardt at the Dragon on Ice Stream B, Imre Friedmann in the Convoy
Range, Ross Powell at the Mackay Glacier, Brian Howes and Dale
Goehringer at Lake Fryxell and John Priscu at Lake Bonney.  Tony Stark
helped me get to grips with astrophysics at the Pole.  My thanks go to
the South Pole summer crew, 1994-95, with whom I celebrated Christmas,
and to Gaetano Rizzi and the Italians with whom I traveled
aroundVictoria Land.  At McMurdo innumerable people helped, especially
Kristin Larson and Lisa Mastro in the Crary Lab, Robin Abbott, the
Helicopter Queen, Kirk Salveson, and everyone at the Berg Field
Center.
I especially want to thank Lucia deLeiris.  She and I had our own camp
on the ice for many weeks.  At Rothera and elsewhere on the peninsula
Ben Hodges, A1 Wearden and Steve Rumble generously extended the hand of
friendship at a difficult time.
In warmer climes, my editor in London, Tony Colwell at Jonathan Cape,
taught me so much.  "Thanks" seem inadequate for what he has done for
meþbut I give them anyway.  Joe Fox at Random House in New York took
the book on and encouraged me greatly, and, tragically, he died while I
was finishing it.  I owe a debt to my agent, Gillon Aitken, to Oliver
Garnett, who created my polar library almost single-handedly, to Robin
Gauldie, who ransacked his encyclopedic mind, to the endlessly obliging
Shirley Sawtell and her colleagues at the Scott Polar Research
Institute, and to Mike Richardson at the Foreign Office, who sanctioned
Terra Incognita from the beginning, and told me funny stories.
John Hall, Richard Hanson, Mary Sutton and Bruce Tate at the British
Antarctic Survey headquarters in Cambridge were always helpful, and it
was a pleasure to work with them.  Many people sat through interviews,
they all appear in the text, named or unnamed, and I thank them all.
Some people read Terra Incognita in its early versions.  On the ice
Lisa Williams and Bob deZafra read an entire draft and made many
helpful suggestions.  Bruno Nardi commented on almost every line of the
first chapters in between dispatching balloons into the stratosphere.
On solid ground, Bob Headland, archivist at the Scott Polar Research
Institute, read the typescript carefully and gave me the benefit of his
imagination, insight and vast polar knowledge.  The SPRI librarian,
William Mills, generously helped with bibliographical queries.
Professor Robin Humphreys provided a cogent reading, and so, as always,
did Phil Kolvin.  Cindy Riches once again proved an incomparable
reader.  She picked over many drafts, and her contribution was
incalculableþI can see her hand on every page.  More than anyone else,
she has shared this journey, and that, surely, is what friendship
means.
The lines from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and "Little Gidding, " both
included in Collected Poems 1902-1962, are quoted with the kind
permission of the publishers, Faber & Faber.  I am also grateful to
Faber for permission to reprint the lines from W. H. Auden's "Atlantis,
" which appears in Collected Poems, to Edwin Mickleburgh and the Bodley
Head for permission to quote from Beyond the Frozen Sea, to A. P. Watt
Ltd.

on behalf of MichaelYeats for the extract from The Cold Heaven by W.

B. Yeats, which appears in The Collected Poezns of W. B.

Yeats and to Mrs. Angela Mathias for her generous permission to use
many lines from The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley
Cherry-Garrard.
I am indebted to STATravel in London for organizing all my commercial
flights, as they always have, and to Damart for thermal gear, G. B.
Britton for Goretex and Thinsulate boots, Moomba Marketing for survival
aids, Taunton Leisure and Pentax Ltd.  for discounted goods, Sunshine
Ellis in New Zealand for emergency gear repair, my local Marriott at
Swiss Cottage for training facilities, and Johnson & Johnson for
condoms to protect microphones against moisture.
The New Zealand Operational Support team of Roger Sutton and Jo Malcolm
in Christchurch, and of course Camilla Sutton (Wellington Branch), saw
me come and go four times over the course of a year, always with smiles
and an open house.  They made New Zealand a home for me.
Finally, the Patron of my expedition, Jeremy Lewis, did nothing patrons
are supposed to do (though neither of us was ever clear what this might
have involved), and I in turn did not hang a framed photograph of him
in my tent.  But he did so much, so much that I cannot convey my thanks
on a page.  He had a clearer idea of what I wanted to write than anyone
else, and talked or wrote to me about it almost daily, from the heady
era of the synopsis to the crucifixion of the last months.  I am
miraculously fortunate to have benefited from his wisdom, and I shall
never be able to repay it.

S. W.

March 1996

A B O U T T H E A U T H O R A journalist and broadcaster, SARA

WHEELER has written two previous travel books, Travels in a Thin
Country, on Chile, and An Isind Apart.  She is a regular contributor to
the BBC and generally spends half the year abroad on writing
assignments that take her from the Amazon jungle to the Bangladesh!
delta.
She is coeditor of Amazonian, the Penguin Book of Women's New Travel
Writing and writes a column for The Sunday Times, Travels with My
Baby."  the end.