Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'I feel as if I'm getting to know a person. It's like having a love affair - I'm finding out more
and more and more, it's all different and overwhelming and intoxicating, and I don't know where
it's going to end.'
'Ha!' he said. 'I used to feel like that.'
∗
I slept in a Scott tent overlooking the lake, and woke to a perfect spring day. Clive and Mark
were already out on the ice, struggling with their instruments. We sat outside drinking coffee, and
watched them. John was stretched out on the rocky shore.
'Did you notice,' he said, 'that when I got up to go to bed at five o'clock this morning Clive
said, “Oh, can't take the pace, eh?” After fourteen years, it's still a pissing contest.' He laughed
loudly.
I was gratified that anyone could live so patently at ease in an Antarctic environment. It seemed
to like people, up there. It liked him, anyway. Even Ed, on his first trip, commented that he 'didn't
feel like a foreigner'.
Later, when everyone went out to take samples, I walked up the valley. The 1:250,000 map I
carried in my pocket was bisected by a jagged line marked '
Limit of compilation
', and the half to
the left of the Taylor Glacier was blank. I had reached the end of the map.
I hitched a lift out on a helicopter three days later, at five o'clock in the afternoon. I had
just taken a bread-and-butter pudding out of the oven. The helicopter crew were revving up for
Saturday night, and as I waved to a diminishing Ed and John I heard the pilots discussing a girl
over the headsets.
'Is she pretty?' one asked.
'I've been here so long I've forgotten what pretty is,' replied the other.
