Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
My own mail was supposed to be waiting back at base. It could have been worse: Shackleton
and the crew of the
Endurance
missed their mail by two hours when the ship sailed out of South
Georgia, and they got it eighteen months later. Then I heard my name being called. Someone in the
post room must have known where I was and slung my bundle into the metal crate. It was like a
minor Old Testament miracle. The bundle included eight Christmas cards, three of them featuring
polar bears, two pairs of knickers from my friend Alison and a bill from the taxman, the bastard.
I took the cards to the igloo later and put them up to block the cracks between the ice bricks, and
blue light shone through the polar bears.
We went out to wave goodbye to the drillers. The plane attempted to take off four times. It was
too light at the back, so the drillers, we heard over the radio, had to stand in the tail.
That night I found a hillock of snow on my sleeping bag and was obliged to reseal the igloo
bricks from the outside. It was perishing cold in there all the time and getting to sleep was an un-
meetable challenge. I tried to listen to my Walkman to take my mind off the pain but the earphones
got twisted under my bala-clava and the batteries died in minutes. All my clothes froze in the
night. Besides the waterbottle, I was obliged to stow my VHF radio and various spare batteries in
between the bag liner and the sleeping bag to prevent them from freezing.
'It's like sleeping in a cutlery drawer,' said Seismic Man, who had made valiant efforts to stay
in the igloo. 'Why are you putting yourself through it, when there are warm Jamesways a few hun-
dred yards away?'
It was the romance of it, if I was honest. I liked the idea of living in my own igloo, slightly
apart from camp, on the West Antarctic ice sheet. Besides that, during the periods when I didn't
have to devote every ounce of energy to maintaining my core temperature, I did love the blue haze
very much. I had noticed that when the sun was in a certain position it was faintly tinted with a
deep, translucent claret. The surface of the bricks gleamed like white silver all around me. When
I crawled out in the mornings (this had to be accomplished backwards) and twisted round on my
the sun, joined by a circular rainbow.
Each night, however, produced a new torment. That evening my knees got wet (this was caused
by a rogue patch of ice on the bag liner), so I moved the windpants doing service as a pillow down
under them. This meant that the mummy-style hood of the bag flopped down over my head, rais-
ing the problem (they were queuing up for recognition now) of imminent suffocation. The digital
display on my watch faded. Out of the corner of my eye I spied a fresh cone of snow on the floor
near the entrance. Forced out of the bag to plug the hole with a sock, I brushed my head against
the ceiling and precipitated a rush of ice crystals down the back of the neck. I began nurturing un-
charitable thoughts about Eskimos.
The morning after the departure of the drillers I went straight to the galley to thaw out, noting
that I had forgotten to stand the shovel upright with the result that it was now lost in accumulated
snow. Camp had shrunk from forty-five to twenty-two overnight. Patsy Cline was blaring out of
the speakers and Bob and Mary were playing frisbee with a piece of French toast.
