Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I nodded.
'What you've just been doing is refracting. The soundwaves we send down are refracted back
to the surface from the earth's sediment and recorded by a line of Ref Teks, the soundwave equi-
valent of the tape recorder. The Ref Teks contain computers hooked up to geophones, and we have
90 Ref Teks 200 yards apart on a line right now, recording away. So all you and I have left to do is
pack up!'
On the way back we stopped about ten miles from camp to eat our sandwiches (tinned ham and
mustard). A narrow strip of incandescent purply blue light lay on the horizon between ice and sky,
looking for all the world like the sea. It seemed to me that it would be almost impossible, in this
landscape, not to reflect on forces beyond the human plane. Here, palpably, was something better
than the realm of abandoned dreams and narrowing choices that loomed outside the rain-splattered
windows of home.
'You're right,' said Seismic Man when I mentioned this. 'It's like plugging yourself in to the
spiritual equivalent of the National Grid out here. Wasn't it Barry Lopez who wrote that Antarctica
“reflects the mystery that we call God”?'
I called what I sensed there God too; but you could give it many names. It was more straightfor-
ward for me than it had been for some, as I brought faith with me. I can't say where the faith came
from, because I don't know; it certainly wasn't from my upbringing, since neither of my parents
have ever had it. I remember first being aware of it when I was about fourteen, the same time that
a lot of other things were happening to me. At first, it embarrassed me, like a virulent pimple on
the end of my nose. I have no problems of that kind with it now, though I have persistently abused
the giver by following the siren voices of the opposition, also dwelling in the rocky terrain of my
interior life and determined to fight to the death.
Despite a good deal of high-mindedness and a sprightly ongoing dialogue with God, in the day-
to-day hustle I constantly failed to do what I knew to be the right thing. A sense of spirituality
all too often stopped short of influencing action. I was a hopeless case. But I believed that what
mattered to God was the direction I was facing, not how far away I was. Sin, it seemed to me,
was the refusal to let God be God. I admit that it was a handy credo to espouse - but I did it from
the heart. The inner journey, like my route on the ice, was not a linear one. It was an uncharted
meandering descent through layers and layers of consciousness, and I was intermittently tossed
backwards or sideways like a diver in a current.
Not everyone agreed that Antarctica functioned as a transcendental power station. When I asked
Ranulph Fiennes about this aspect of the Antarctic experience he said, 'I do not believe that
Antarctica brings out spirituality. It didn't bring out any religiosity in Mike [Stroud], did it? I
prayed for help there, but I would have done so in Brixton. Mr Lopez writes about it but he's hardly
been there at all.'
1
On Friday 13 January a Hercules appeared in the sky. It was going to take the drill team and a few
others back to McMurdo. When it landed, incoming mail was borne inside in a metal turquoise-
and-red striped crate like a crown before a coronation. Everyone leapt up, plunging their arms into
the crate and calling out names as packages were passed eagerly from hand to hand.
