Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
voices calling in a dream. We passed a mummified young seal on the moraine, its adolescent form
coated with a mossy green fur.
'You are now', said Ed slowly and dramatically, 'in a place which knows no degradation.'
I know a good metaphor when it leaps out at me and this was the perfect illustration of the time-
lessness so often associated with Antarctica. As an American journalist who came south with the
U.S. programme in the fifties wrote, 'Antarctica knows no dying.'
Propped up in my sleeping bag the previous night, I had written a letter to Jeremy Lewis, the
Patron of my expedition. We had often talked about the symbolic properties of Antarctica. 'Can't
help thinking I'm in Never-Never Land,' I wrote. The absence of decay, such a salient character-
istic of my surroundings, reinforced my perception of the continent as a kind of Shangri-La (the
residents of which enjoyed perpetual youth - also a key element in the legend of the dead Antarctic
explorers), or an Eden shorn, by its absence of an indigenous population, of the pain of the human
condition. Jeremy had steadfastly refused to accept that the notion of Antarctica as Arcadia was
anything but bizarre, definitive proof (as if further evidence were required) that I was 'an odd fish'.
'An Eden has to be lush,' he would protest as we downed glasses of wine at crowded literary
parties to which we may or may not have been invited. 'Comfort and the abundance of nature and
warmth are its intrinsic properties. Think of the centuries of visual representations - all verdant
and pastoral. Have you ever seen an Arcadia strewn with blocks of ice and peopled by indistin-
guishable characters with iced-up beards and swaddled in thermals?' Then he would extend his
glass-holding hand in the direction of a passing waiter.
When I got there, I knew I was right. Everything was a symbol, in the context of Eden, and it
made no difference whether the setting consisted of rolling green fields or thousands of miles of
ice. The discomfort inevitably caused by a hostile environment like Antarctica was irrelevant. I did
see it as paradise. When he received my letter, Jeremy wrote back with the grudging concession, 'I
suppose James Hilton's original Shangri-La was reached via near-Antarctic extremities of cold.' It
seemed like a small victory.
Ed led the way up an ice slope to the defile on one side of the Suess and we hiked along a narrow
path next to walls of beaten ice which led to a rocky escarpment and down to Mummy Pond. Ed
wanted to 'get a feel for the ice', and he knelt down on the pond as if he were bowing to Mecca.
He had told me earlier that for anyone who studies ice, coming to Antarctica was like making the
hajj. 'The history of the planet is calibrated in the ice,' he said. He had been an English graduate
before turning to science, and tried to persuade me that mathematics was a language like any other
language, even stopping, when it got complicated, to draw equations in the sugar snow with his ice
axe.
The skyline of the Transantarctics was now straight ahead of us, and over to the right loomed
the Matterhorn, marked on Ed's map in pencil as the Doesn't Matterhorn. As we continued over
rippling plateaux of coarse alluvial sand between vast sculpted, triangular, wind-formed rocks Ed
said, 'Not many people have seen this.' He turned to me with a broad smile, hand extended. 'Here's
to it!'
Then we began the approach to Lake Bonney, the twin peaks ahead the only thing between us
and the polar plateau. These triumphal gateways of promise were backlit against a pearly blue sky,
