Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The team consisted of four men and five women. 'Here,' said Jaqui before we left. She was the
base cleaner. 'Take this.' With that, she bundled a yellow parka into my arms. 'So you won't feel
the odd one out,' she said. The Kiwi women had raised their collective wing and taken me under
it. It was like coming home.
We set off in high spirits and a Hägglunds tracked vehicle, bound for an old hut on the ice shelf.
The Kiwis had been maintaining the hut for years - it was only a few miles away, but it was off-
station, and that was what mattered. We stopped en route at the skiway on the southern side of Hut
Point peninsula for a couple of hours downhill skiing. They had fixed a towrope to the back of an
old truck, and imported some juggernaut tyres for tubing downhill.
After exhausting ourselves on the slopes we drove on to the hut. Lighting the Preway always
constituted something of a drama in Antarctic huts, but once we had done it there was nothing
further to do but snuggle around it and sip mulled wine. The hut, in full view of Erebus, was
hard by the snowfield used by the New Zealanders for survival training. Besides building igloos,
snowholes and snow walls, they had carved a lifesize bar, complete with barstools, draught pumps
and glasses.
'It makes us feel at home,' someone commented.
On the spur of the moment I decided to sleep in an igloo, as the ambient temperature was above
zero and the wind had fallen to a whisper. When I woke up next morning sky-blue sunlight was
trickling through the bricks and splashing on to the blue-and-yellow sleeping bag. I crawled up the
tunnel and watched the plumes of Erebus dissolving into the limpid sky. The sun had warmed the
motionless air, the clouds had fled, and nobody else was awake.
I lay down on my parka. Sometimes I lost myself so thoroughly in Antarctica that I felt as if I
had fallen off the planet and forgotten who I was. It was as if all my points of reference had dis-
solved like the Erebus plumes, or I had wandered off into some country of the mind to which I
alone had a passport. When I felt it most acutely I had to close my eyes and think about something
that was still going on in the inhabited world. It was a device to ensure I didn't lose my grip on
reality, like looking up through a periscope on a submarine for reassurance that the world is still
there. The image that leapt most readily into my empty mind was that of a beak-nosed nun crouch-
ing on a chequered floor in a tiny Byzantine chapel. A single oil-lamp in a niche cast flickering
light around the entire biblical cosmogony, and on the chipped fresco at the back a mass of faces
were permanently twisted into the tormented screams of the damned.
The nunnery was high on a mountain in the middle of the Greek island of Evia. I had spent sev-
eral weeks there five years previously staying in a bare room above a courtyard filled with gerani-
ums bursting from terracotta flowerpots. The rims of these flowerpots were regularly whitewashed
by the beak-nosed nun. It was an operation modelled on the painting of the Golden Gate bridge,
for when she had finished, she started at the beginning again. The Sisters spent at least half their
waking hours in the chapel, and services were punctuated by brief hiatuses during which an argu-
ment stormed to and fro over which psalm was to be sung.
In the years since I had walked back down the mountain, I often found myself thinking of the
nuns. They represented something solid and permanent when everything else seemed to be sliding
away like loose scree.
