Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'What did you do out there?' I asked. 'I mean, when you weren't drilling?'
'Well, just living took all our time. We worked twelve-hour shifts on the drill, and then we'd
have to set up the cook tent and all that. We had to plan what we were going to eat carefully, as
even if it was going to be a can of peaches it had to be hung up in the sleep tent overnight to thaw.'
'Was it your, er, ambition to do this kind of work?' I asked, struggling to grasp the concept that
a woman could enjoy spending weeks in sub-zero conditions manipulating a drill for twelve hours
a day.
'I do love it,' she said. 'I think this is the most magical place in the world. People say - “But all
you can see is white!” That's true, but I could never, ever get bored on the drill when I can watch
the dancing ice crystals, and the haloes twinkling round the sun. It's another world.'
The evening before they flew back to McMurdo, the drillers brought in ice from a deep core
and hacked it up on the chopping board in the galley. It was over 300 years old, and packed with
oxygen bubbles. It fizzed like Alka-seltzer in our drinks. Diane was baking cinnamon rolls. When
she opened the oven door a rich, spicy aroma filled the Jamesway. It was like a souk.
Diane inhaled deeply. 'Heaven!' she said.
The next day I moved into the igloo. It was at the back of what they called Tent City, and it took
me two hours to dig out the trench leading down to the entrance. Like all good igloos, the sleeping
area was higher than the entrance, thereby creating a cold sink. Inside, there was a carpet of rubber
mats, and a ledge ran all the way round about six inches off the floor. I spent a further two hours
clearing away the pyramids of snow that had accumulated through the cracks. When my new home
was ready, I spread out my sleep kit and sat on it. The bricks spiralled to a tapering cork, filtering
a blue fluorescent light which threw everything inside into muted focus. I was filled with the same
sense of peace that I get in church. Yes, that was it - it was as if I had entered a temple.
The previous inhabitant had suspended a string across the ceiling like a washing line, so after
hanging up my goggles, glacier glasses, damp socks and thermometer, I fished out the beaten-up
postcards that I always carry around. These could be conveniently propped on the ledge. The blue
light falling on the 'Birth of Venus' highlighted her knee-length auburn hair with an emerald sheen,
and the flying angels had never looked more at home. I felt that Botticelli would have approved.
In the mornings I sat underneath rows of cuphooks at one of the formica tables in the galley
Jamesway, watching the beakers making sandwiches and filling waterbottles before setting out to
explode their bombs. The cooks were the fixed point of camp. Bob and Mary were a great team.
Every morning they dragged banana sledges over to what they called their shop, a storage cham-
ber seventeen feet under the ice from which they winched up filmy cardboard boxes on a kind of
Antarctic dumb waiter. Mary was relentlessly cheerful, and she loped rather than walked. Bob had
an Assyrian beard, a penguin tattoo on his thigh and a reputation as the best cook on the ice. He
was hyperenergetic, very popular, and seven seasons in Antarctica, including two winters, had left
him with a healthy disrespect for beakerdom.
'What's going on out there?' someone asked one day after an explosion of historic volume.
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