At the South Pole - Terra Incognita - page 63

Amundsen-Scott Station. My heart was beating fast, due either to excitement or lack of oxygen,
and I sat drinking weak tea in the galley with the puppy-like physicist.
Later, the yeti directed me to a Jamesway ten minutes' walk from the dome. When I got there, I
lay down on my bed and tried to think about where I was.
'The South Pole', says a character in Saul Bellow's novel More Die of Heartbreak , 'gives a
foretaste of eternity, when the soul will have to leave its warm body.' At another point he says,
'There you saw as nowhere the features of the planet in pure forms and colours.' In reality the only
two colours were white and blue - but I liked the sentiment. In Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V ,
published in 1963, a man makes this statement about the Pole. 'But I had to reach it. I had begun
to think that there, at one of the only two motionless places on this gyrating world, I might have
peace. I wanted to stand at the dead center of the carousel, if only for a moment; try to catch my
bearings.'
I admired both writers. If they had been able to see me at that moment, supine in a tent at ninety
degrees south, I imagine they would both have said, 'God, I didn't mean it literally .' Without going
anywhere near it, Pynchon had transformed the continent into a symbol so comprehensively that
when reduced to a lower-case 'a' in his book 'antarctica' becomes isolation itself - 'a beach as ali-
en as the moon's antarctic'. I had to come, and already I knew that I would never be quite the same
again; nonetheless Pynchon's character was right when he said, 'It is not what I saw or believed I
saw that in the end is important. It is what I thought. What truth I came to.'
∗
The twelve cots in the Jamesway were curtained off with sheets of green canvas, so we all had our
own few feet of privacy. It was hot and dark inside, and when I went out to find the bathroom the
glare made my eyes smart. First of all I strode into a Jamesway marked 'Women', but this turned
out to be a joke, and the shift-workers asleep inside turned fitfully on their cots. The bathroom was
called 'The Inferno', and it was as bright as the inside of an open fridge. In the toilet cubicles a
sign read, 'If it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down.'
'Showers', another sign said, were 'limited to two minutes twice a week'. Out of the window I
could see a dozer trundling along carrying a load of snow, and a strange blue building on stilts.
I walked to the dome, and my heartbeat immediately quickened. My breathing was shallow. It
was like being on the summit of a medium-sized mountain. The altitude at the South Pole, 2850
metres or 9,300 feet, meant I was standing on a layer of ice almost one third of the height of Mount
Everest. In addition, the earth's atmosphere is at its most shallow at the Poles. The combination of
altitude and shallow atmosphere means that at the South Pole the human body receives about half
its normal oxygen supply.
The small thermometer which hung permanently from the zip of my parka read minus 29 de-
grees Celsius. This was the coldest temperature I had ever experienced, though I had once been
in New York when it was minus 23. Had I spent the previous winter in the hamlet of Crask Inn
in northern Scotland. I would have suffered minus 29.2 degrees Celsius - the coldest temperature
ever recorded in Britain. At the Pole on that first day I felt perfectly snug, bundled up in my special
clothes, though it wasn't windy. When the wind whipped up it sliced through any number of layers