Terra Incognita (42 page)

‘Wow,' she said. ‘You think we can't do anything.'

There was an element of truth in this, and it made me flush with shame. Lucia was quieter than I was, and smaller, and although she lived alone and had travelled 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 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 upon 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, spiralling 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 Woomobile, turn round 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, wive and tidal action. Sea ice cracks generally look like narrow furrows – they were described by a member of the Japanese
Kainan-Maru
expedition in 1911 as ‘resembling divisions between rice paddies'. Around Wooville cracks did not shoot out like bolts of lightning, or open up like Sesame, so we did not live in fear of an inadvertent midnight swim. None the less, we had received plenty of instruction in the subject. ‘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 Woomobile and stood looking down at a rip in the ice. ‘The effective crack width is determined by the required ice thickness for each vehicle.'

‘Yikes!' 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, and at Wooville it had already acquired biblical status.

Besides ensuring that neither we nor the huts fell through a crack into the sea, we both worked. In addition, Lucia practised acupuncture on herself, and sometimes on me. It didn't seem to matter that neither of us was ill or injured – Lucia said 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 Societies. When we absorbed ourselves in our work for too long, we began to exhibit symptoms of madness, with the result that a ‘Weirdometer' went up on the wall of the Clinic with a swivel-dial for each of us indicating the level of madness to which we had risen or fallen on any given day.

About two weeks after we arrived at Wooville, a 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, and they left contrails like toothpaste in the clear blue sky over the Sound. Lucia and I grinned at one another in the back as we shuttled around the valleys, resupplying the camps at Hoare and Bonney and ferrying repeater engineers to windy peaks.

‘Wow,' said Lucia over the headset, pointing ahead and pulling out her sketchbook. ‘Look at that.' We were heading towards 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 civilisation.

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

‘The VXE-6 Falls,' crackled the pilot. ‘We 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 snow-snakes
¹
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 vapour. When we crossed the crater the pilot said, ‘That's the guts of the earth.'

Sometimes, back at Wooville, we crawled into the configuration of 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, diffused throughout glimmering blue caverns. Walls burgeoning with delicate crystals glittered around smooth arching tunnels which 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 which 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 itself a little further. When it finally gave up the struggle the moon would coast over the tongue and the plumes of Erebus appeared more clearly against the night sky, like feathers in a Tyrolean hat. We ate dinner by candlelight, and the shadow of the volcano flickered 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.

Shelley wrote ‘The cold earth', not ‘The cold ice'. Scott naturally transposed them; who wouldn't have? A diary entry made by Scott's physicist Louis Bernacchi 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 9 September, 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 wolf-like 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 used 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 Woomobile, not to get away, but so 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 coloured paste soon gave up the battle for plasticity, and then she would turn to her pastels. If I made notes, 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 tinged with burnt umber or flushed with permanent rose.

One of our favourite spots was the configuration of pressure ridges around the south-west 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 favoured by seals, too, and Lucia always added them last.

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

‘Well,' 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 system suddenly came in, and Antarctica shut down. Big Razorback disappeared into a faint grey 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 twenty-four hours, like the human mind as described by Milton. We would be trapped inside for days, the windows mute white sheets, listening to wind which 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 someone asked me about temperatures, and I replied, not altogether flippantly, that numbers bored me and the only temperatures I recognised were cold and fucking cold. I was amused to read comments in my first Antarctic notebook about ‘getting used to temperatures of ten below'; that had come to seem tropical. We tried to guess windspeeds, but we were stabbing in the dark.

‘I wish we had a windometer,' said Lucia one day, ‘rather than a weirdometer.' Windspeeds 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 ‘
95 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,' 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. It seemed as if the hut would take off over the Sound and that we would wake up looking out on the ventifacts of the Wright Valley.

This did not happen. The door was always frozen shut on those mornings though, and we were obliged to set to with an elongated s-shaped metal tool 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 Wooville – it was always cosy. 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 as for the Woomobile and the defunct Antispryte, in the moonlight they resembled 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, here and there, protruded like an elbow below the treacherously seductive crevasse fields. A thin band of apricot and petrol 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.