Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing an insulated mug of coffee. When she saw me there without a book or the creased page of
typescript awkwardly wedged between the lip of the bag and my face (an irritating problem I never
satisfactorily resolved), she looked surprised.
'What are you thinking about?' she asked, imagining, no doubt, that I was hatching a plan and
that we were about to go careering off to the ice edge or halfway up Erebus.
'Death,' I said cheerily. 'Thanks for the coffee.' She withdrew swiftly into the hut.
I had been thinking a good deal about issues of life and death. A friend of mine at home had
recently become a Buddhist, and the conversations we had in the Japanese restaurant which lay
halfway between our flats had kept coming back to me at Wooville. I realised that my fear of los-
ing my faith was based on another, more primeval fear. It was my own death that was haunting me,
of course. Faith enabled me to cope with the concept of mortality, but if I lost faith, how would I
live with the treacherous knowledge that I was going to die? If anyone asked, I had always said
that I wasn't afraid of dying - but I wasn't being entirely honest. I hadn't confronted it. My friend
and I had discussed Buddhist teachings on the acknowledgement and acceptance of mortality. It
was a long struggle, but it was infinitely more important than everything else. Yet western culture
strives to divert these thoughts and mask the concept of mortality so we don't have to confront it.
I believe that if it is not confronted, it will slosh around in the subconscious and manifest itself
somewhere, unresolved and in disguise. It might do so in an unnaturally heavy reliance on alcohol,
for example. I wasn't sure.
I did know that the marginalisation of spirituality in western culture was a shocking indictment
of the society in which I lived. In Greece, on the other hand - a country to which I had always been
powerfully attracted - an awareness of spirituality was still as indivisible and natural a part of the
landscape as the green waters of the Aegean or the wild thyme on the mountainside. I had learnt a
good deal from my peregrinations in Greece, but Antarctica had taken me further. When I looked
out of the bag at the opalescent swathes of ice and the ribbons of smoke lazily uncurling from the
crater of Erebus, issues involving Orthodoxy or the Tibetan blend of Buddhism and vexing ques-
tions of personal morality melted like so many weightless ice crystals.
Antarctica was a cultural void, a space in the imagination like the blank pages of Lucia's sketch-
books. It forced me to begin confronting a fear I had barely acknowledged. Despite everything I
had gone through to get where I was - the years of preparation and anxiety - it seemed to me then
that the external journey meant nothing at all.
∗
We had all but relinquished our diurnal clues to the summer, and became desynchronised all over
again. I caught sight of something in the distance one morning and realised it was a skua. It was
like seeing a tree sprouting out of the ice. But it was the skuas' time - they ate the seal placentas.
I was sitting on a folding chair between Wooville and Scott's hut, looking out at the Barne Gla-
cier. The wind had dropped. I suddenly became aware of a thin black line on the snow near the
Barne. It was moving. As I sat there, the line grew bigger and coalesced into the form of twenty-
four adolescent emperors who were soon waddling around our huts on their horny heels. Much of
the ice was scoured clean, and their breasts reflected yolky yellow in the blue surface.
