Terra Incognita (26 page)

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.

∗

They were using explosives to find out what the ground was like under 6,000 feet of ice. ‘We're not particularly interested in ice,' someone commented breezily. Because of the inconvenient ice cover, most Antarctic geology can only be studied by remote-sensing methods like seismology. This 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 they could be detonated, the explosives had to be buried, and twelve itinerant drillers had been travelling around the ice sheet within a 200-mile radius of CWA boring a series of ninety-foot holes. They began each hole using a self-contained unit which heated water and sprinkled it on the ice like a shower head. This unit fulfilled a secondary function as a hot tub, and we got in four at a time, draping our clothes carefully over the pipes to prevent them from turning to deep-frozen sandpaper. 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 colour of cornflakes. I asked her how long she had been away.

‘Thirty-five days,' she said. ‘And my feet were never dry.'

‘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, as 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 sub-zero conditions manipulating a drill for twelve 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 haloes twinkling round 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 round 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 kit and sat on it. The bricks spiralled to a tapering cork, filtering a blue fluorescent light which threw everything inside into muted focus. I was filled with the same sense of peace that I get in church. Yes, that was it – it 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. These could be conveniently propped on the ledge. The blue light falling on the ‘Birth of Venus' highlighted her knee-length auburn hair with an emerald sheen, and the flying angels had never looked more at home. I felt that Botticelli would have approved.

∗

In the mornings I sat underneath rows of cuphooks at one of the formica tables in the galley Jamesway, watching the beakers making sandwiches and filling waterbottles before setting out to explode their bombs. The cooks were the fixed point of camp. Bob and Mary were a great team. Every morning they dragged banana sledges over to what they called their shop, a storage chamber seventeen feet under the ice from which they winched up filmy cardboard boxes on a kind of Antarctic dumb waiter. 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 an explosion of historic volume.

‘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 had 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
pulsating
with energy – 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 Seismic Man's parka. The beakers were forever gabbling to each other over the radio. They had developed their own language, and entire conversations took place between Lars and Seismic Man consisting of acronyms, nicknames and long-running, impenetrable jokes.

I had never met anyone who found life as effortless as Seismic Man. He approached everything with a positive attitude, and saw something to laugh about in every situation. As a result, everyone loved him. In addition, he was disarmingly perceptive. He seemed to have got me taped, anyway. He exemplified the easy-going languor I associate with Texas, without any of the cowboy-hat brashness.

‘Can you tape the explosives into bundles of three?' he said, handing me a roll of tape. ‘I have to set up the shotbox.'

The drillers had already made a hole, and after attaching the first two orange bundles to an electric line, we lowered them both 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 shotbox 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 football.

‘How are we measuring the soundwaves, then?' I asked. ‘When they bounce back up from the earth's crust?'

‘Well,' he said, packing up the shotbox, ‘what we're trying to do here is image the geology under 6,000 feet of ice. Seismology is the tool we use, and it operates either by refraction or reflection, the difference between the two being 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 from the earth's sediment and recorded by a line of Ref Teks, the soundwave equivalent of the tape recorder. The Ref Teks contain computers hooked up to geophones, and we have 90 Ref Teks 200 yards apart on a line 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 purply blue light lay on the horizon between ice and sky, looking for all the world like the sea. It seemed to me 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. ‘It's like plugging yourself in to the spiritual equivalent of the National Grid out here. Wasn't it Barry Lopez 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. It was more straightforward for me than it had been for some, as I brought faith with me. I can't say where the 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 fourteen, the same time that 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 espouse – 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 backwards or sideways like a diver in a current.

Not everyone agreed that Antarctica functioned as a transcendental power station. When I asked Ranulph Fiennes about this aspect of the Antarctic experience he said, ‘I do not believe that Antarctica brings out spirituality. It didn't bring out any religiosity in Mike [Stroud], did it? I prayed for help there, but I would have done so in Brixton. Mr Lopez writes about it but he's hardly been there at all.'
¹

On Friday 13 January 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 in a metal turquoise-and-red striped crate like a crown before a coronation. Everyone leapt up, plunging their arms into the crate and calling out names as packages were passed eagerly from hand to hand.

My own mail was supposed to 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 they got it eighteen months later. Then I heard my name being called. Someone in the post room 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 taxman, the bastard. I took the cards to the igloo later and put them up to block the cracks between the ice bricks, and blue light shone through the polar bears.

We went out to wave goodbye 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 bala-clava and the batteries died in minutes. All my clothes froze in the night. Besides the waterbottle, I was obliged to stow my VHF 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 it, 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 that, during the periods when I didn't have to devote every ounce of energy to maintaining my core temperature, I did love the 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 backwards) and twisted round on my sunken front path, I looked up and blinked at a pair of pale sundogs
¹
glimmering on either side of the sun, joined by a circular rainbow.

Each night, however, 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 windpants 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 queuing 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 the neck. I began nurturing uncharitable thoughts about Eskimos.