Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
held an ear to the door. There was something . . . familiar about the voice. Several minutes passed.
Suddenly, an orchestra struck up. I pushed the door open quietly. There was the night watchman,
slumbering peacefully in an arm-chair, and on the video screen in front of him Julie Andrews was
leaping down an Austrian mountainside followed by a row of rosy-cheeked von Trapp children.
He had fallen asleep watching
The Sound of Music
.
Later, I sat in the sunshine on the steps of the main building drinking tea with Ben, a tall, lean
marathon runner from Sheffield who was working at Rothera as a general base assistant. I had
met him at the conference in Cambridge, and as soon as he spotted me stalking the Rothera cor-
ridors, he had welcomed me enthusiastically. I was pathetically grateful. Ben was pushing sixty
and had first come to the ice as a dog-handler in 1961. He was a vegetarian, drove a Citroen two
c.v. without a seatbelt and got up at 5.30 to meditate. He was revered by the others, who were all
a good deal younger than he, as he had worked many seasons in the south during the golden age. I
got the impression that he had come back to say goodbye.
Others were racing snowmobiles up an icy hill opposite the base. This hill was the gateway to
the rest of the island. A route was flagged to the top, where it turned right along a tortuous traverse
below Reptile Ridge, a 250-metre serrated edge extending north-west from Rothera.
'It's their base now,' Ben said suddenly.
'You're not gone yet, old boy,' said a small man who had thrown a portion of apple tart across
the room at dinner the previous night. 'And talking of going, we're supposed to be taking the boats
out.'
Ben jumped up.
'Come on, Sara,' he said. 'I'm sure there's room for you.'
We took the tea things upstairs, struggled into red immersion suits in the boot room and walked
down to the wharf. The small man was busily winching two fifteen-foot Humber inflatables with
twenty-five-horsepower engines into the water. We climbed down a metal ladder attached to the
wall of the jetty. It was a cloudless day, and the mountainsides around one side of the bay were
gilded with sunlight. The apple-tart thrower smiled at me. The bergs were spotted with seals and
penguins, and Wilson's petrels skimmed the wake behind the other Humber, the white bar on their
tails twirling gracefully over the ruffled water as if they were dancing on the hem of a slip. After
a three-month ornithological diet of skuas they looked miraculously tiny. A man in the bows was
making notes on a small green pad. He was a terrestrial biologist working in the Life Sciences di-
vision of BAS.
'Death Sciences, more like,' said the apple-tart thrower as this was explained to me. 'They
bloody kill everything!' The note-taker had spent the summer poking around under rocks in the
ice-free areas around Rothera. He was looking for insects.
'I haven't noticed any insects,' I said.
'You need a microscope,' he replied apologetically. 'They're mainly mites and springtails.'
'What happens to them in the winter?' I asked. 'Presumably they freeze.'
'No, they don't. They accumulate anti-freeze. It's a substance close to glycerol, very similar to
the stuff you put in your car. It means the water in their cells doesn't freeze.'
