Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
agingly to 'You Americans', and when I issued a disclaimer, he said, 'That's better.' His sidekick
was a Russian biologist called Sasha, who was as placid as David was irascible, and the team was
looked after in the field by a genial Kiwi called Al, who wore a thin plait down his back.
Imre invited me on a day's geologising at Battleship Promontory in the Convoy Range, where
he was collecting rocks colonised by microbes. We arranged to meet for breakfast at seven the
next day, and climbed into a helicopter shortly afterwards. It took an hour to reach the Convoy
Range, flying through vast rock tunnels formed by soaring sandstone ziggurats. When we landed,
my heart was singing.
We were deposited in a shallow snowless dell on the promontory, our survival gear heaped
around us. The sun was shining: the microclimate was so mild that the previous season a scientist
had found a primitive worm in the soil. (The worm was only visible under a microscope, but it
was indubitably a worm.) We were standing in a baroque landscape of rich red and old gold rock
formations eroded by tens of millennia of wind and microorganisms and mottled by lichen grow-
ing under the crust.
'Like an ancient city,' said David.
'Underneath here,' said Imre, gesticulating triumphantly at an outcrop of sandstone turrets, 'just
one centimetre under, the rock is singing and dancing with LIFE!' He shouted the word 'life' and
performed a little dance himself.
When I first met him at the conference in Virginia, he had talked of 'painful beauty', and about
his emotional relationship with the Antarctic landscape, which could be expressed 'only by the
German word
heimweh
, a kind of painful longing for a lost home'.
We ate our sandwiches standing up and proclaimed the Republic of Battleship Promontory.
David was president, Imre prime minister, Al in charge of home affairs and Sasha KGB officer.
I was crowned Queen (it was an unusual kind of republic). The national anthem was the 'Ode to
Joy' from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. This was Imre's suggestion. 'You stand here,' he said,
'and your soul is full of joy.'
I labelled specimen boxes later while Imre and Al shuffled around wielding a geology hammer.
'In this quarter inch of rock', said Imre, holding aloft a red splinter, 'we have compressed ver-
sion of whole rainforest canopy. The micro-organisms slice off rock layer by layer, like salami.
One slice of salami takes 10,000 years to cut. So you see here biological and geological timescales
overlap.'
The micro-organisms deep froze in the winter. Like desert creatures, they had the ability to sus-
pend life.
'This rock provides a foothold for life in an extreme environment,' continued Imre, tapping his
foot in time with the beat of Al's hammer. 'If micro-organisms can live through the hostility of the
Antarctic winter, there might be some which can live in the Martian permafrost. If there is no life
on Mars, it is a bad day for biologists.'
Imre was deeply involved with what he called the 'quest for life on Mars'. He believed it would
answer the most fundamental questions of biology.
'Will we find life on Mars in our lifetime?' I asked.
'Maybe in yours - not mine. The limitations are not technological now. They are financial.'
