The Response of the Spirit - Terra Incognita - page 94

recapture it myself. I know, too, that my powerful ambitions to get on in this world will conflict
with the pure light that I saw for a moment, but I can never forget that I did realise, in a flash,
that nothing that happens to our bodies really matters.
We arrived early to pick up the biologists, and sat down to eat our sandwiches. The skuas com-
plained bitterly about this flagrant trespass. The sandwiches were peanut butter and jelly, a par-
ticularly American combination and very nasty indeed. The whole of the Cape Crozier area was
characterised by the dull background roar of the Adélie colony - some 170,000 breeding pairs. The
chicks were sixteen days old, about ten inches tall and very lively. From a distance they looked
like grey puffballs.
The Kiwi beakers, who were monitoring the Adélie diet, came trudging up the hill carrying their
buckets like children coming home from the beach.
'Know what's in those buckets?' asked the crewman.
'No,' I said.
'Penguin vomit!' he announced triumphantly.
'Krill 1 dip, anyone?' shouted Bruce, the younger Kiwi. The pair of them had climbed into the
helicopter when we first picked them up and begun chatting over the headsets as if they had known
us all their lives. In fact, none of us had ever seen them before. They had a straightforward and
pragmatic approach to whatever the day threw at them, and viewed the world with a healthy per-
spective that I had observed in many New Zealanders.
'What exactly do you do to the penguins?' I asked dubiously over the headset after we had taken
off.
'Put catheters down their throats, introduce a little ambient temperature salt water and apply
pressure to their abdomens,' said Jack cheerfully. He was the project leader. 'They throw up pretty
quickly.'
Hardly surprising, I thought. The crew made gagging noises.
'What do you do with the vomit?' I continued in spite of myself.
'Bottle it,' said Jack. 'And take it back to New Zealand to have a closer look. Or sell it as chut-
ney.'
When we landed at Cape Bird, everyone agreed that we should shut down and climb out for a
turn on the cape.
The wind had carved the band of twisted ice fastened to the shore into a series of apocalyptic
shapes, and the Adélies waddled among them like spectators at an art exhibition.
'There's between thirty and forty thousand breeding pairs here,' said Bruce, 'and see how well
they blend in with the environment.' It was true - they melted into the snow-streaked black vol-
canic rock. Penguins were everywhere. Antarctica was the antithesis of the jungle or the rainforest,
where everything burgeoned and mutated and thousands of species and tens of thousands of sub-
species co-existed. (I remembered fungus forming on my rucksack in the Amazon Basin as quickly
as ice did in the south.) As the biologist David Campbell wrote in The Crystal Desert , 'A paucity
of species but an abundance of individuals is a recurring evolutionary motif in polar areas.'