Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
He lent Amundsen his ship, the
Fram
, and years afterwards he said that when he saw Amundsen
sailing away in her it was the bitterest moment of his life.
One story about Nansen illustrates the importance of choosing companions carefully. He de-
cided he could only have one man with him on his longest and most arduous journey in the north,
and selected Hjalmar Johansen. Long afterwards Nansen confessed that at the very first camp after
leaving the ship he realised that he had chosen a man without any intellectual interests whatever.
It must have been a bleak moment.
∗
I signed up to help in the kitchen before Sunday brunch. The galley was the heart of the commu-
nity, and the six Galley Queens made it beat. The food they prepared was delicious too; my first
meal was calzone with spinach and cheese and lentil salad. Sometimes a Hercules brought fresh-
ies, but the station was largely dependent on the frozen food stacked in boxes under the dome.
(Freezers were unnecessary, though elsewhere on the continent I saw scientists using fridges to
stop things from freezing.) During the winter, when the station was isolated for over eight months,
they had no fresh food at all except whatever came on the mid-winter drop, when a C-141 plane
flew over from Christchurch and dropped cargo on the plateau. The previous season the crew had
pushed out one hundred dozen individually bubble-wrapped eggs, and only two had broken.
I was taken over to view the COBRA telescope by an electrical engineer who always wore a
cowboy hat. The COBRA project (Cosmic Background Radiation Anisotrophy) looked for minute
deviations in the smoothness of cosmic background radiation, itself the after-effect of the early
years of the expanding universe. The telescope was positioned ten feet off the ice on a wooden
platform, and looked like an enormous inverted fez.
The engineer was taking care of the telescope for the astronomers who built it. It was not an
easy job.
'If a part goes down on the telescope at forty degrees below, it takes three people an hour to
fix it,' he said, pushing back his cowboy hat. 'At home it would take one man no more than five
minutes.'
'Why bother then? Why not do it at home?'
'The thin air here means we have less stuff to look through to see into outer space.'
'You must hate this thing sometimes,' I said, unfreezing my eyelashes with my fingers.
'Hell, no. Most people go to the office, I go to the telescope. It's just another instrument to me -
like a toaster.'
∗
In the evenings people sprawled on the sofas in the library under the dome, swathed in candlewick
bedspreads. It was like a nest. Once a week, fifteen of them went off to the station poetry group.
They each put a word into a box, and everyone had to write a poem about the one which was pulled
out. All the words were white, like marshmallow, or cloud, or chalk.
The pool room next to the library was festooned with framed letters celebrating the establish-
ment of the station. After Scott and his party left the Pole in January 1912 it was abandoned un-
