Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
land itself is inlaid with the human story and you can sense
those histories as you pass through it, the scenery dense with
echoes of past times. Successive generations have physically
shaped the land; levelling hilltops, digging dykes, cutting
pathways through mountains, so that the past of a region, as
well as the life of those who live in its present, is recorded in
its topography. When I first travelled to Canada, particularly
the far north-east coasts of Labrador, I felt unnerved by the
wilderness there. It took me a while to realise that it was the
absence of that dense human history soaked into the soil and
rock that unsettled me. It felt as if humans were only lightly
grafted onto the surface of those wild places and that we could
be shrugged away at any time.
Antarctica takes this impression to its extreme. Humans
have been crossing the Antarctic plateau intermittently for a
century but our tracks and footprints have been blown clean.
Any flags or markers left behind have been vibrated by storms
into ragged splinters. Even the few stations and refuges built
on that immense raised interior of the continent have silted
over as soon as our backs are turned, successive layers of dust-
like snow covering over the blemish until it is pushed beneath
the surface, encased unseen within the ice. Mankind, for the
moment, has not managed to take root here and the only
indelible mark is a diluted chemical signature in the ice - the
result of radiation and pollution carried south on the wind.
A hundred years after its first human visitors, the plateau
is not over-run with scientists or explorers. I had met people
on my transect but only because the polar community tends
to confine itself to invisible pathways, led by the common
numbers in our GPS units, and most usually converging on
the Pole. Livestock in a field seem at first glance to be roaming
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