Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
out his neck like a tortoise and pointed ahead. Three glossy emperors were standing in a row on
the ice, looking expectantly into the middle distance as if a bus were about to appear to transport
them to a fish shop. They saw us, and approached immediately. One of them was taller than the
other two, though they were all over three feet. Their sleek, deep yellow collars and the mandarin
streaks on their lower beaks were glowing in the sunlight, and when they were very close I could
see the New Glacier reflected in their soot-black eyes.
That feet looked as if they didn't belong to them: they were grey, scaly and reptilian, ancient-
looking, feet made for standing on the ice throughout the polar winter with an egg balancing on
top. The tall penguin was squawking and flapping his flippers.
'The edge of the sea ice is over twenty miles away,' said Steve. 'I wonder why these guys came
all that way?' We thought about this for some time, but neither of us came up with an answer.
The emperor penguin is the world's largest extant diving bird, and the adult weighs seventy
pounds. (Fossils reveal that prehistoric penguins were as tall as six feet.) On land he knows no fear.
He has no predators: Antarctica's largest permanent terrestrial resident is a wingless midge half an
inch long. I knelt on the ice next to the tall penguin, close enough to watch the nictitating mem-
branes close across his eyelids like camera shutters, and I saw how it could have been, between
human beings and animals.
∗
That evening, we ate outside. It had been so warm that the streams were flowing. At midnight the
boys began throwing a rugby ball around. I sat on a fold-up chair like Old Mother Time as a mist
stole over the glacier. I was reading a biography of T. S. Eliot. His asperity, attenuated sensibility
and dapper dress sense were a perfect foil for the vast scale of the continent, our wild appearance
and the primal face of nature all around us, and his uncertainty stood at the opposite pole to the
fastness of the ice. Besides that, he had written that in hot places, like the Caribbean, 'the spirit
sleeps'. The implication was that cold places were conducive to spiritual alertness, and this was
my experience. I had been on assignment in Jamaica some months previously and could clearly re-
member lying on a beach straight out of a tourist board brochure, fanned by a sultry tropical breeze
while the lapis ocean sussurated under a blazing midday sun and a six-foot waiter stole soundlessly
across the hot sand bearing another vat of some treacherously agreeable cocktail. Think? I don't
believe I managed a subordinate clause the whole week I was there.
∗
Over the last two days a battalion of jobs presented themselves for attention. John dispensed tasks
from long lists inscribed in a red spiral-bound notebook.
'When I get on the last helicopter,' he told me, 'I like to look back and see it looking just as it
did the day we landed.'
I packed up the foodboxes, and took the others mugs of Lipton's Hot Spiced Cider. All camps
had a suspicious proliferation of this. It came in teabags, and the packet proclaimed 'Contains No
Apple Juice', as if this were a selling point. As I carried a mug across the ice a tall figure dived in
