Travel Reference
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bus and the tongue, resembling, from Wooville, mouse droppings on a dinner plate. We heard their
wolf-like calls, resonating off the cold blue walls of the tongue.
Until that moment, life had been absent from our landscape. Our isolation was metaphysical
as well as geophysical. We had been living in the silence between movements of a symphony. In
Letters to Olga
, Vaclav Havel used the analogy of Antarctic isolation to express the crucifying
solitude of prison. To me, in the stillness of the evening, it was like a reprieve. Again, I heard the
still, small voice. It came to me more readily this time.
In the mornings the sea ice cracked like bullets. If the weather was good, Lucia went out painting
in the Woomobile, not to get away, but so she had a different view and could stay what we liked
to call warm in the cab. She would position her palettes and her long raffia roll of brushes on the
fender, where eventually they froze. Sometimes I went with her, and watched small replicas of
our landscape appear on paper like polaroid photographs. The little metal tubes of gaily coloured
paste soon gave up the battle for plasticity, and then she would turn to her pastels. If I made notes,
everything was defined by the exotic labels on the tubes she held in her long fingers: a cerulean
blue sky dropped to French ultramarine in late afternoon, and the Transantarctics at dusk were
tinged with burnt umber or flushed with permanent rose.
One of our favourite spots was the configuration of pressure ridges around the south-west end
of Big Razorback. The island looked like a croissant from there, with a folded-down triangle at the
top. It was a spot much favoured by seals, too, and Lucia always added them last.
'Why have you put three in, when only two are there?' I asked.
'Well,' she began, 'it's to do with composition. Three's better. I mean, it suits the shape of the
pressure ridges behind. Or rather, it balances this island here . . .' I could hear myself answering a
puzzled question about why I had deleted a particular adjective and replaced it with another. The
fact was, half the time neither of us knew why we did what we did. We just knew it had to be done.
Then a weather system suddenly came in, and Antarctica shut down. Big Razorback disappeared
into a faint grey smudge and the winds roared across the Sound, battering the walls of the tongue
and tossing walls of snow through the air. I had often observed the continent's Janus character-
istic, switching abruptly from seduction to destruction, but there, living in the lee of the Erebus
Glacier Tongue, I experienced it most intensely. We saw heaven and hell in twenty-four hours, like
the human mind as described by Milton. We would be trapped inside for days, the windows mute
white sheets, listening to wind which never relented. As Frank Hurley wrote of the ice at such a
time, it 'lost all its charm and beauty, and became featureless, sullen and sinister'. Living there
alone without any contact with the outside world except for our brief morning radio schedule with
base, we were very sensitive to its vagaries. We came to know what temperature it was even before
we looked at the thermometer hanging on the antenna, and we noticed every degree of change.
I never could have imagined this happening. Before I had been to Antarctica someone asked me
about temperatures, and I replied, not altogether flippantly, that numbers bored me and the only
temperatures I recognised were cold and fucking cold. I was amused to read comments in my first
Antarctic notebook about 'getting used to temperatures of ten below'; that had come to seem trop-
ical. We tried to guess windspeeds, but we were stabbing in the dark.
