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and one morning he produced Danish pastries. After we had eaten the beef, he was bored, so he
cut the obliging Graham's hair.
'We could play Trivial Pursuit after this,' said Graham brightly.
Nobody said anything. We were bored with Trivial Pursuit. Like everything else at the Bluff, the
game in the hut was an early model, and it was an American version to boot, the orange questions
asking us who joined the National Hockey League in 1983. Ian would shout wild guesses to these
arcane questions, which irritated Rasputin, when we managed to coax him out of the radio shack.
He favoured a more intellectual approach to the game.
Rasputin was a highly skilled surveyor on secondment from the Ordnance Survey, the govern-
ment mapping department. He had been in the south for five weeks, taking photographs of Antarc-
tica in order to go back to Cambridge and produce detailed maps of small areas. In the hut he held
forth on the importance of maps in society with missionary zeal, and talked eloquently about the
cultural absence of what he referred to as 'map awareness'. After I had been at the Bluff for a week
I realised that I had never seen him with a camera in his hand.
'Where is your camera?' I asked him, expecting him to whip it out of his pocket.
'It's mounted in the back of a Twin Otter,' he said huffily. 'It weighs more than 200 pounds, you
know - it's not a bloody Box Brownie.'
Three days later, Rasputin went back to Rothera on an Otter, as he was supposed to be taking
the next flight to the Falklands. While we sat on the veranda waiting for the plane, he looked south
and sighed.
'Look at that,' he said ruefully. 'Nothing between us and the Pole except 1,250 miles of empty
ice. So much to map - so little time.'
I moved into the old generator shed where he had been sleeping. It was a lean-to on the side of
the cottage with a tiny wooden door. Like Alice, I had to crouch down to get through it. The shed
had a kind of wooden shelf which served as a bed, with a sliding hatch next to it, so I used to lie
with the hatch open and look out over the Sound and Georgian Cliffs, listening to the bergs calve
and the ice crack. It was as if the landscape were alive, just as Coleridge described - though he had
never seen anything like it:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
Coleridge conceived The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as he walked over the green hills of the
south west of England between 1797 and 1798 and watched the moon rise over the sea. He had
never been abroad; he saw the ice with his inner eye. Many writers have tried to transform a voy-
age to Antarctica into a spiritual journey, but it was Coleridge who made me believe the analogy
worked. The Mariner travels beyond the boundaries of knowable knowledge, on to the wide, wide
sea of the spirit, and into the wondrous cold, the isolation of the human condition - 'And never a
saint took pity on/My soul in agony'. My own Antarctic journey offered a glimpse of the bounties
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