Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
beyond knowable knowledge, not the torments; but I had made the trip to cold, dark desperation
before. That terrible experience of misery and depression was not part of my Antarctic journey,
though I carried the memory of it with me, and it made the peace I grasped on the ice more pro-
found.
When it snowed, refuelling was such a thoroughly unpleasant business that a rigorously demo-
cratic roster was established. The brown slopes of the moraine were then like leaves stained with
dye, and the light covering of powder revealed the different texture of each one. One snowy day,
the plane brought mail. A quixotic friend of mine sent me an old brass whistle, and as the boys had
picked up the phrase 'It's a testosterone thing' from me, my gift immediately became the testoster-
one whistle, and I was instructed to blow it when the level got too high.
Although the temperature rarely fell below minus three, a system brought high winds and per-
sistent snowfall, and we were trapped in the hut. Ben entertained us with stories of the old days,
mostly involving dogs.
'All the dogs just disappeared in front of my eyes - zip! zip! zip!' he said at the end of a long
and colourful story about a thousand-mile sledging journey. 'I crawled to the edge of the crevasse,
looked down into the gloom, and there they were, swinging in their harnesses, with Dot, the leader,
hanging forty feet down on the end of the trace!'
'What happened?' we all said at once.
'My partner lowered me down into the crevasse, and I un-clipped the dogs from the trace one
by one and hoisted them all out. I had been leading, so it was technically my fault - but the dogs
never held it against me.'
After two days of total cloud cover, plus rain and snow, incarceration began to induce cabin
fever. We decided to found a cult and broadcast Churchillian speeches over the Sound. In a fit of
domesticity I asked whether anyone minded if I washed the shelves down, and Steve said, 'It's
your hut as much as anybody else's.' The men at the Bluff had made me feel part of the team,
something that no one at Rothera had even attempted.
After four days the weather cleared, and we walked up to the penitentes, a snowfield of sculpted
ice cones named after their resemblance to monks in prayer. Their smooth, biomorphic shapes and
the simplicity of their curves and swellings and tapering gradients reminded me of Barbara Hep-
worth sculptures. They conveyed the same sense of the eternal, too; or, at least, of serenity. It was
a Cornish landscape which inspired Hepworth. I looked out over the Sound, groping in vain for
signs of the Cornwall of my childhood.
Agreeable though life was at the Bluff, after two weeks I was beginning to wish I could see a
different peninsular landscape. It seemed too far to come to sit in the same place for two months. I
asked the Rothera base commander over the radio if I could hitch a lift on a plane refuelling at the
Bluff on its way to a field camp further south. Three days later, I stumbled into the hut from my
tiny room as usual to find that the boys were taking it in turns to hit a tuning fork against a bunk
leg and then press it on their teeth.
'By the way,' Ian remembered after I had made coffee. 'You were mentioned on the early morn-
ing sched. You're going to Ski Hi this afternoon.'
