Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pair of ragged red flags - 'are called Lost Love and Mount Chaos.' It was like entering a private
kingdom. The Dragon, which resembled a slender windblown channel of ice you could walk over
in five minutes, was really a two-mile-wide band of chaotic crevassing running for forty miles
down one side of the Unicorn. It was a dramatic landscape, its appeal sharpened by the fact that
fewer than twenty people had ever seen it.
Hermann's longstanding field assistant, who had travelled with us, was a gazelle-like woman
called Keri. When the plane took off and the sound of the engines faded she began spooling out
the antenna.
'You be my deputy field assistant,' Hermann said to me. We crunched off to a flag where he dug
around until he found a plywood board encrusted with crystals. Fishing out a skein of wires from
underneath it, and attaching them to a small measuring device, he began sucking up data. After a
few minutes he beamed, an expression he retained until I left the camp, and possibly much longer.
He started inscribing a neat column of figures in pencil in a yellow waterproof notebook.
'These bits of data', he said, 'are all little clues to the big puzzle.'
∗
Back at CWA they were detonating the last blasts of the season. Everyone went outside one morn-
ing to watch 750 pounds of explosives go up half a mile away. The blaster was close to the site.
A black and grey mushroom cloud surged 500 feet into the air, followed, seconds later, by a pro-
longed muffled boom.
'One less for lunch, Bob,' said José.
I skied out to see the crater. It was forty-five feet in diameter with a conical mound in the middle,
and a delicate film of black soot had settled over the ice. The blaster was admiring his work. 'My
hundredth of the season,' he said proudly.
He was taciturn, as cold as the ice in which he buried his explosives, but once I showed an in-
terest in his bombs his face mobilised and he began opening boxes to show me different kinds of
powder and expounding on the apparently limitless virtues of nitroglycerine.
'Largest charge I've used this season,' he intoned with the treacly vowels of Mississippi, 'was
9,000 pounds,' and I tut-tutted admiringly as he ran his fingers through baby-pink balls of explos-
ive which looked like candy and smelt of diesel.
It was here, above all other places, that Antarctica resembled the grainy images of the moon's
surface. After man had reached both Poles (or it was believed he had), Everest was called the
Third Pole, and when it too was conquered in 1953, interest shifted to the moon. Space became
an arena for the international race, just as Antarctica was before it: when Yuri Gagarin went up in
1961, three weeks before a U.S. manned rocket, the Americans attempted to turn their failure into
success by claiming that their astronauts actually 'drove' the spaceships whereas Gagarin just sat
there. Dogs, oxygen, actual control of the craft . . .
plus ça change
. But NASA failed to provide
the world with heroes who could keep hold of the public imagination, and only two years after the
hysteria attendant upon the first moonwalk, the U.S. public displayed such overwhelming lack of
interest in Apollo Thirteen that the networks dropped the live-from-space broadcast filmed by Jim
