Travel Reference
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if he were performing in a circus. We swooped down through the rock configuration called the
Labyrinth and beyond the dolerite extrusions to Bull Pass, a natural gallery of smooth ventifacts
like the relics of a lost civilisation.
'What's the name of the icefall?' Lucia asked.
'The VXE-6 Falls,' crackled the pilot. 'We named it after the squadron.'
I suppose it was a better name than I've-Got-A-Big-One, but only just.
Flying low on our way back to Wooville, we watched snow-snakes 1 whipping over the frozen
Sound. The marooned bergs cast long shadows, and a dark ten-foot band of open water striped the
ice. Before we were dropped off, the pilot decided to take us over Erebus, and the landscape took
wings. The crew guzzled oxygen, but Lucia and I stared open-mouthed at the fumaroles billowing
vapour. When we crossed the crater the pilot said, 'That's the guts of the earth.'
Sometimes, back at Wooville, we crawled into the configuration of ice caves underneath the gla-
cier tongue. The ice had formed arabesques like carvings in the slender windows of an old mosque,
and through it the light fell, diffused throughout glimmering blue caverns. Walls burgeoning with
delicate crystals glittered around smooth arching tunnels which opened into glossy domes fortified
by rows of stalactites. Had it been rock, it would have been a landscape painted by Leonardo, the
pinnacles yielding to glimpses of dreamy vistas of ice.
If our landscapes were canvases, they were conceived by a mind raised above the troubles which
afflict the human spirit.
Sunlight infused the sky long after the sun itself had disappeared. At first it was completely dark
by about four o'clock, and then each evening the day stretched itself a little further. When it finally
gave up the struggle the moon would coast over the tongue and the plumes of Erebus appeared
more clearly against the night sky, like feathers in a Tyrolean hat. We ate dinner by candlelight,
and the shadow of the volcano flickered on our wobbly card table. Sitting in another hut on the
same ice, a mile or two from Wooville, Scott wrote out a verse from a Shelley poem in his diary.
The cold ice slept below,
Above the cold sky shone,
And all around
With a chilling sound
From caves of ice and fields of snow
The breath of night like death did flow
Beneath the sinking moon.
Shelley wrote 'The cold earth', not 'The cold ice'. Scott naturally transposed them; who wouldn't
have? A diary entry made by Scott's physicist Louis Bernacchi was more apposite. He wrote,
'There is something particularly mystical and uncanny in the effect of the grey atmosphere of an
Antarctic night through whose uncertain medium the cold, white landscape looms as impalpable
as the frontiers of a demon world.' Standing in front of such an impalpable vision on 9 September,
we saw our first seals, illuminated by a gibbous moon. Four of them lay on the ice between Ere-
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