Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 labelled 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' pota-
toes. 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. Finally I made
flowers for the table out of a cardboard box, and napkin rings for the toilet-paper napkins out of
the silver powdered egg bag.
The food was enthusiastically despatched, and the occasion proved that a meal is much more
than the sum of its parts. Someone had brought a Walkman with speakers, and we listened to Van-
gelis's
Antarctica
. Jim suggested that at midnight we should go outside to see in the 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 the others tormented him as his was the shortest
beard. The sun was immediately behind the peak of Mount England, and we stood apart from each
other, lost at that moment in our own private worlds.
Various bottles - the dregs of the season - appeared among the kerosene tins, and we tried some-
what ineffectually to warm them up before disposing of the contents. At two or three in the morn-
ing Ross said he had to listen to Georg Solti's live recording of Beethoven's Fifth with the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra before going to bed, so we went outside to hear it soaring over the ice. The
glaciers sent the sound up like the walls of a cathedral. All the ice ridges opposite were edged
with gold, and I wondered how Beethoven could not have been looking at the same scene when he
wrote the music. He had probably made his own journey, but in a different way.
∗
I woke late on New Year's Day, sweating in the bag; the tropical weather had returned. I lay there
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 went to get coffee I found a
fried breakfast left for me in the pan. I couldn't face it, and when no one was looking I crept over
to our waste hole in the sea ice and watched the food and its puddle of grease slide silently into
the depths. Then I took the coffee back to my 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 Village offering ear piercing 'With or Without Pain'.
Mike was sitting at an open-air desk made of crates, labelling data. The others were packing up.
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 garrulous - the antithesis of Mike - and permanently astounded
