Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Ha!' she said. 'You must be Sara. I'm Kris, one of the Galley Queens. That means I cook your
meals. Pleased to meet you!' She extended a bearpawed hand.
'Go on in.'
I helped her to carry in the boxes. They contained frozen peas.
A small vestibule was piled with vermilion parkas, white bunny boots and multi-coloured hats,
and beyond it a group of women were unpacking boxes of Christmas decorations in a brightly lit
and well-heated room spread with tables. As I watched the snakes of tinsel uncoiling, childhood
memories rose like milk to the boil.
'The other Galley Queens,' said Kris, waving her hand at the women.
At that time there were 130 people at the Pole, 40 of them scientists. This made for an extremely
crowded station. Besides the dome, and the dozen Jamesways, the station consisted of a handful
of science buildings on stilts (some sporting bulbous protrusions or spherical hats), a few metal
towers vaguely resembling electricity pylons, and long neat lines of construction equipment and
shipping containers that trickled over the plateau. Despite the webs of antennae and the clumsy
cargo lines, and the fact that the buildings constituted an unsightly jumble of shapes and colours, I
cannot say that the station was ugly. It was too small and insignificant in such a vast landscape to
seem anything but vulnerable.
Later in the day, I borrowed a pair of skis and spent a while alone on the ice. A high-tech hut
which had lost its roof stood on the bare plateau, a testament to some modern Ozymandias. The
sun moved steadily, always at the same elevation, and the ice glinted secretively, shimmering in the
distance like heat. The surface was creased with tiny ridges and embossed with minuscule bumps.
It was so quiet I heard the blood pumping round my head, and I had the same sense of immersion
in a different world that I've experienced scuba diving. The silence was like the accumulation of
centuries of solitude. I was shocked that such emptiness could inspire me with awe, but it did. It
was the purest landscape, the grandest, and, so it seemed to me, the most exalted. I had a powerful
sense that I didn't exist at all. The sublime grandeur of nature can strip away layers of the ego - I
had experienced it once in the Australian outback, lying under an immense purple sky as the heat
rose off the sun-cooked earth.
Later, I stopped at the ASTRO building to see Tony. ASTRO stood for Antarctic Submillimeter
Telescope and Remote Observatory, and Tony was an astrophysicist I had met on the plane from
Los Angeles to Auckland. After telling me casually that he was going to Antarctica, he had looked
punctured when I revealed that I was too. He resembled a bear, and the label on his parka said
Ironman
, which was not a conceit but an endearing attempt to recapture the spirit of the old days
(the name had been bestowed upon him in 1986, when everyone wrote nicknames in magic mark-
er on their parka labels) and a clue to what lay below the scratchy exterior. He had designed the
building himself in 1987. His telescope, which weighed six tons, was on the roof, and he showed it
to me as a parent might reveal an infant in a cot, pointing to the damage sustained when the truck
conveying it was rearended in Arkansas. (I had heard about this harrowing episode in some detail
on the plane.)
'It detects short wavelengths known as submillimetre radiation,' Tony told me as his beard iced
up. The instrument could look into distant galaxies, and its detectors were cooled to three degrees
