Anatomy of Restlessness (7 page)

The Major and I ate the main course. Then a big man in blue jeans came over. He had a lock of black hair rat-tailing down his forehead. He held out his Camembert on a plate.

‘Monsieur, ce Camembert n'est pas mur.'

‘What's he say?'

‘It's not ripe.'

‘It's cheese not fruit.'

‘C'est dur.'

‘It's hard.'

‘I could tell him where to stuff it but I won't.'

‘On ne met pas les bons fromages dans le frigo.'

‘You shouldn't put good cheese in the icebox.'

‘We took 'em out last week,' the Major said, ‘and they went orange.'

The man shrugged and went back to his table. He showed the Camembert to his friends and squeezed it with his thumb.

‘We'll never understand the Frogs,' said the Major. ‘Niggers are much less foreign to me than Frogs. I've lived with niggers all my life. Bright, some of 'em. Really bright.'

‘Very bright,' I said.

‘Not like the Moors. Gimme a nigger any day over a Moor. Less stuck on religion.'

‘Much less stuck.'

‘You can work with niggers, but the Moors give an awful lot of bother.'

‘How's that, Major?'

‘They won't work and they don't want anyone else to work. Government owns half this mine and doesn't even want it to pay.'

‘Perhaps it's something to do with their religion.'

‘Bloody religion.'

‘I read somewhere that Moors believe copper's the property of the Devil.'

‘It is the property of the Devil. I could have told you that. All mining engineers are Devils. For sheer arrogance they beat the lot. Think they can blast through anywhere.'

‘They are tough,' I said.

‘You know something?' The Major returned to the Moors. ‘Moors remind me of Frogs. Same look. Both look at you as though you're dirt.'

‘Don't let them get you down.'

‘But I hate 'em. We had a welder here. A Belgian. Good boy. I used to cut his hair. Fell fifteen feet and broke his neck on a girder. And the Moor who was helping him stood by and laughed. Laughed! Stood there laughing. It makes you sick.'

In the evening it was windy and flights of swifts cut the green air. It was the third year of the drought. The nomads had lost most of their livestock and flocked to the fringes of the mining camp.

In the market a marabout was reciting the suras of the Koran. He was blind. His eyes were almonds of red veins and cloudy blue-white cataracts. His words came harsh and soaring as a drum solo. An old man kept time with one hand. He rested the other hand on the marabout's shoulders. He was his father.

Some camel men were saddling up. The saddles were of red and yellow leather. The men hated the mine.

The Major hoped to get me a ride down on the company plane. He said we shouldn't know until the last minute. He telephoned and got word that a Frenchman had cancelled.

‘Cheers!' he called. ‘You've a seat.'

We drove to the airstrip but found another Frenchman who had taken his friend's place. So we drove back into town and found a white pick-up ready to leave. They were waiting for one more passenger. I squeezed in behind the tailboard.

‘I'm awfully sorry about the plane,' the Major said.

‘Don't think about it.'

‘You look pretty uncomfortable.'

‘But will survive.'

‘It does seem awful after promising the plane.'

‘I said not to worry, Major.'

‘It's a shame. Bloody Frogs.'

‘Don't let them get you down.'

‘Easier said than done. No fun stuck in the desert witch a lot of Frogs.'

The engine started and the red rear light lit up the Major's shorts and knees.

‘We're off,' I said. ‘Goodbye, Major, and thanks.'

‘Cheers!' said the Major, looking miserable.

The boy lay on the floor of the pick-up. His long tapering hands held onto a cotton sheet. He was trying to keep the dust off his clothes. They were beautiful clothes, green pants, a yellow sweater and a scarf striped orange and white. He had worn them fresh to start the journey and now they were greasy and floury with sand.

He was the best-looking boy I ever saw. He had the kind of looks to make anyone feel ugly and inadequate. He was frightened and unhappy and kept rolling his huge black eyes and shivering.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Dakar.'

‘Home?'

‘They turned me back at the frontier. I had a passport and they turned me back.'

He was all broken up about being turned back.

‘Where were you going?'

‘Paris.'

‘To study?'

‘To continue my profession.'

‘What's that?'

‘You wouldn't understand.'

‘I would.'

‘Non, Monsieur. Comprenez-pas. C'est un métier special.'

‘I know most occupations in France.'

‘But this métier, no.'

‘Say it.'

‘You will not understand. I am an ébéniste. I make
bureaux-plats
, Louis Quinze and Louis Seize.'

On 6 February 1975, Dr Estelle Neumann fell down a crevasse of the Belgrano Glacier in Chilean Patagonia.

Her death robbed Harvard University of the finest glaciologist at work in the United States; I lost a close ally and a good friend. I cannot think of Estelle without recalling her humour, her capacity for statistics and the blind, unreflecting courage that lacked the imagination to turn round.

Her work has continued, but in lesser hands; I could say treacherous hands. In February of last year, her research student Dr (now Professor) Helmut Leander, of the Institute of Glacial Studies at Kydd College, Minnesota, published a 103-page attack on her
Glaciers of the Southern Hemisphere
. Then in September, at the Symposium of World Climatology in Tel-Aviv, he described her findings as ‘irresponsible'. That evening, in the bar of the Hilton Hotel, I overheard shreds of his conversation explaining, in German and to an audience of West Germans, how the Neumann Theory was the product of its author's incurable optimism. ‘Or else,' he added in a whisper, ‘she was bought.'

I checked her figures. I double-checked them. The work took me six weeks: it left me red-eyed and exhausted. Estelle had scribbled her material over thirteen hip-pocket notebooks with black leatherette covers – equations, graphs and diagrams, which she alone could decipher, or someone as close to her as I. I was obliged to do it, as much for her memory as to reassure the organisations that had invested in our research. I found no fault with her data, her method or her conclusions.

Estelle's work was bound to upset the catastrophists. She had proved beyond question that the injection of fossil fuels into the atmosphere had no effect whatever on the temperature of glaciers. The prospects of triggering off another Ice Age, at least within the next 10,000 years, were nil. And the pronouncements of Dr Leander and his colleagues merely reflected that bias for self-destruction now engrained in American academic circles. ‘Those dodos!' she would sigh. ‘Those dodos!'

Estelle published her thesis in 1965 and from that year her work attracted the attention of the chemical, the petrochemical and aerospace industries. The Cliffhart Foundation (a subsidiary of Heartland Oil) financed our first project to the tune of $150,000. For five months we studied the structure of Tyndall Flowers, the six-petalled cavities which appear in parallel layers on the surface of melting ice and resemble the superimposed calligraphies of some Japanese Zen Master. (The other expert in the field, Dr Nonomura Hideyoshi, had retired to a monastery near Nara.)

Before we had finished, nineteen other foundations pressed us to accept whatever money we needed. No expense seemed unreasonable to their trustees: they only wished the work to continue.

On 9 October 1974, a luminous fall day whirling with scarlet leaves, Estelle and I lunched at the Harvard Faculty Club to discuss our expedition to the Belgrano ice-cap. Our Eggs Benedict were all but uneatable, our conversation drowned by the braying accents of five Oxford historians at the next table.

Estelle was forty-three, a handsome, masculine woman with black hair cropped short and worn in a fringe above her considerable eyebrows. Years of exposure to sun, wind and snow had burnished her skin the texture of shoe-leather; when not beaming with self-satisfaction, her crow's-feet showed up white.

Her dress was simple and unaffected, a sweater and tweed skirt for the laboratory, hardly anything more elaborate for the cheese-fondue parties she gave in her Cambridge apartment. But she was addicted to ‘primitive' jewellery of the worst kind – Navajo turquoise, African bangles, amber beads. That morning a golden eagle of the Veraguas Culture was flapping between her breasts; I did not have the heart to tell her it was a fake.

Over lunch Estelle gave me a critical resume of the literature on Patagonian glaciers. She could remember if a pamphlet was printed in Valdivia or Valparaiso in 1897 or 1899. She drew my attention to some new work by Dr Andrei Shirokogoff, of the Antarctic Institute in Novosibirsk, who explored the north face of Cordon Tannhäuser during the Allende years. But her conversation kept harping back to certain topographical details of the Belgrano Glacier.

She eyed me in a peculiar way. She asked a number of penetrating questions about our research fund—which was most unlike her. She even asked questions about our Swiss accounts. I can safely say that my face was a total blank until she gave up and reverted to her superior manner. She then spoke of Vaino Mustanoja's
Patagonian Researches
, published in English, in Helsinki, in 1939.

‘You'll love old Mustanoja,' she said. ‘His prose style is simply entrancing.'

Now Estelle knew nothing about prose style and her choice of the word ‘entrancing' lay far outside her usual range of adjectives.

‘I've got to have it photostatted,' she went on. ‘I promised old Shirokogoff a copy. Know something? Peabody's got the only copy in existence. Think! The Finns don't even have a copy.'

Excusing myself, I hurried to the library of the Peabody Museum and withdrew the quarto volume whose existence I had overlooked. The pink paper cover was charmingly illustrated with Mustanoja's own copper plate engraving of the Belgrano. Rustic letters, of nothofagus twigs, formed the tides. Around the borders were vignettes of the ethnographical specimens he collected from the Tehuelche Indians on his 1934 expedition and presented to the Rovaniemi Museum.

It touched me to think of these southerly artefacts in that northernmost city. I turned to pp. 141—2. The stroke of a razor, two neat folds and the sheet was in my pocket. Mustanoja's prose style, it so happens, is outstanding for a Finn:

The next page of
Patagonian Researches—
and even now I tremble at the thought of revealing its contents – describes Mustanoja's discovery of a ‘lost' valley overlooked by the British surveyors of the Holditch Commission in 1902. It appalled me to think that Estelle was aware of its existence.

On 3 November I flew from New York to Buenos Aires. I was alone, having arranged for her to give the F.Z. Boeing Memorial Lecture in Seattle, an invitation she could hardly refuse. We agreed to meet in January at a point on the Argentine frontier near Esquel.