�Bit warm in here, eh?� Calloway said, flapping open the front of his flannel shirt.
�You can say that again,� Michael agreed.
�Bit warm in here, eh?� Calloway dutifully repeated.
Michael had had to get used to the sophomoric sense of humor that prevailed at Point Ad�lie, or, in his experience, at any remote camp where men tended to congregate.
Next up was the dry suit itself, which Calloway held up like a fashion designer showing off his latest creation. �State of the art, mates. TLS Trilaminate. Much lighter than the compressed neo-prene jobs, and it won't retain the surface moisture either.�
It was hard to imagine, as Michael struggled into yet another layer, to believe that it was lighter than anything else. He was already feeling like the Michelin man, and this was before they got to what would surely be the most constricting step of all�the protection of the head and face.
Calloway was digging in a duffel bag Franklin had brought in, then extracting two black Henderson ice caps�full-face hoods that left room only around the eyes and lips; a thin strip of neoprene ran above the mouth aperture. Pulling the balaclava on, Michael felt like a burglar. And over it, he knew, would come the attached latex hood. Calloway had to help him drag the hood over the top of his head, and down to the top of the orange dry suit, where it snapped closed like a suction cup, effectively turning him into a big human sausage in a complete orange casing.
�Can you turn that down?� Darryl said, lifting one bulky arm toward the nearest heater. �I'm dying.�
�No problem, mate, shoulda done it sooner.� He flicked off both heaters. �A few more minutes, and you oughta be out of here,� he said, encouragingly. He helped both men on with their mountaineering glove liners, then their three-fingered rubber dry gloves, followed by their weight harnesses (without being weighted down properly, Michael knew, a diver could bob upside down until he drowned). Finally, he hoisted onto each of their hard-shell backpacks a ScubaPro ninety-five-cubic-foot, steel oxygen tank with twin regulators. Michael could barely move.
�Any last words,� Calloway said, �before the face masks go on?�
�Hurry,� Darryl gasped.
�Remember�no dawdling down there. You've got one hour, maximum.�
He was referring, Michael knew, both to their air supply and to a human being's ability, even under all the gear, to withstand the extreme temperatures.
�The nets and traps are already down?� Darryl asked, as he wrestled his wide rubber fins over his booties and onto his feet.
�Sent �em down myself, not two hours ago, tied to the lines from the safety hole. Good luck with the fishing.�
�Before we forget,� Michael said, �I'll need that.�
He gestured at the underwater camera that had been all but forgotten in the heap of discarded clothes.
�Right you are,� Calloway said, retrieving it. �If you see any mermaids, get me a snap.�
With that, their face masks were fitted snugly into place, their regulators tested for oxygen flow, and Darryl got a clap on the back from Calloway. While Michael was stepping into his own fins and attaching the flashlight to his waist belt, Darryl lifted the safety grate away from the dive hole, and he was already gone when Michael turned back around. Calloway gave Michael his own clap on the back, a thumbs-up sign, then he followed suit, feetfirst, down the rabbit hole.
The ice cap there was about eight feet thick, and the auger had cut a hole that was wider at the top than the bottom. It was a lot like sliding down a funnel, and Michael felt his feet break through a thin scrim of icy crystals that had already recongealed since Darryl's dive. He plunged through, surrounded by a cloud of sparkling ice and bubbles, and it took a few seconds for the water to clear enough for him to see.
He was hanging suspended about a dozen feet below the dive hole, in a blue world that seemed as lacking in limits as it did in dimensions. He could see, it seemed, forever, and he knew it was because the waters, particularly at that time of the year, were as free of plankton, or any particulate matter, as any on the globe. The sunlight only dimly illuminated the ice cap, which made the safety hole above stand out like a beacon radiating sunbeams downward. A trio of long lines, with plastic pennants on them, hung down from the lip of the hole and into the unseen depths.
And though he had braced himself for the shock of the icy
water, Michael was pleasantly surprised. The gear that had left him feeling unbearably clumsy and hot up top was quite comfortable down below. The water not only made it easier to move, but it cooled the outer layers, and he felt himself positively relieved to be in the Antarctic Sea; no wonder Darryl had ducked in so quickly. But he also suspected that what felt cooling at the moment would be chilling soon, and frigid before the hour was up.
Glancing down, he could see Darryl's fins already propelling him downward toward the benthic regions. Clearly, Hirsch was not about to waste any of the time he had. The waters themselves were undisturbed and almost entirely free of any currents or tides that could, in some seas, stealthily move a diver far from his starting point. It was a great blue quiet kingdom, in which all Michael could hear at first was the intrusive clattering of his own regulator.
The seafloor sloped away from the area where the dive hut had been erected, and Michael began to follow its gradual descent. Glaciers had scoured the bottom, leaving massive striations in their wake, and dropping boulders that had been picked up miles away and strewn there like marbles. As he came closer to the floor, he could begin to see the myriad life-forms that populated even that seemingly barren landscape. The mud bore the telltale spirals and squiggles of mollusks and crustaceans, sea urchins and brittle stars; limpets clung like pale streamers to the algae-covered sides of the rocks, while starfish�some of them heaped atop each other� silently prospected for clams in the ooze. A sea spider, big as Michael's hand with the fingers spread, stood on a pointed pair of its eight legs, aware of his approach. Michael hovered in the water, raised his camera and took several shots. The creature appeared to have almost no body, just a rust-colored head and neck with two pairs of eyes; the segmented posterior sections were so reduced that they melded into the long legs. But Michael knew that the sea spider's proboscis was a deadly device, which it employed to probe the sediment for its sponge and coral prey. Once it had pierced its quarry, the proboscis then sucked up the fluids and flesh of its victims in one long and lethal kiss. As Michael swam by, the sea spider was buffeted by the wave from his fins, and toppled over in slow, underwater motion. As he turned, he could see it indignantly scrambling to its spiky feet again, ready to impale any unfortunate passerby.
Darryl was below, with a net in one hand and his other hand on a rock the size of a basketball. When Michael came closer, Darryl indicated, with a tilt of his head and a gesture, that he wanted Michael to tip the rock over. Michael let the camera dangle from his neck while he used both hands to push the rock first one way, then the other. When it finally rolled over, a swarm of tiny amphipods, the size of a fingernail, their antennae waving and their many legs pumping, scurried out, many of them landing in the net, which Darryl expertly turned inside out before transferring them to a transparent Ziploc bag. Darryl gave Michael a thumbs-up�as much as could be done, given the thickness of the gloves�then waved good-bye and Michael took the hint. Darryl really didn't want any extra commotion around him while he was trying to collect his samples and make his observations.
Nor did Michael want to be so encumbered. He had his own job to do, his own discoveries to make. He loitered above a clump of what looked like worms, each a yard long, as they writhed atop some nearly consumed carrion, and took some more photos that he would later on ask Darryl to explicate. The light was beginning to fade as he swam farther below the surface and the seafloor gradually yielded to a field of icy pressure ridges, like a gigantic sheet of crumpled white paper. From one side, a dark shape suddenly flashed into view, and as Michael peered through his face mask he saw a pair of big nacreous eyes, surrounded by a brush of long black whiskers, looking back at him.
It was one of the Weddell seals, the deepest-diving mammal apart from the minke whale in these waters, and he knew it would do him no harm. As he lifted his camera, the nictitating membrane that protected the cornea contracted, and the whiskers extended out like an opened fan.
Ready for your close-up,
Michael thought as he clicked off a series of shots.
The seal, five or six feet long, flicked one of its flippers and shot past him, looking back the whole while. It loitered then, as if waiting for this strange new acquaintance to catch up, before sailing off again.
Okay,
Michael thought,
I'm game.
These, he thought, could be some terrific, and even amusing, shots for his article. He used his fins to take off after it, and the seal�a young one if he was any
judge, with a sleek, undamaged coat and white unbroken teeth�retreated farther into the depths. Michael's oxygen tank hissed and burbled as he followed the seal around a rotten berg the size of a cabin cruiser, then over a rocky outcropping matted with brown and red algae.
The sea was truly opening up beneath him, and he sensed that if he wasn't careful, he would go too far. He clung to his vision of the sloping floor, and in the gloomy light provided by a break in the ice above, he saw something that looked entirely out of place. It was rectangular, too neatly so, and even encrusted with ice, it looked like a trunk of some kind. The seal spun in a lazy circle around it, almost as if it had been leading him here all along.
Oh my God,
Michael thought,
sunken treasure? It can't be. Not here. Not at the South Pole.
He worked his fins and rapidly drew near. Even with all the exertion, he was beginning to feel the cold seeping through the many layers of his clothing. He stopped just above it, waving his arms lazily in the freezing water. And under all the ice, under the clinging limpets and sea urchins and starfish that festooned its sides�one of the ivory-colored starfish had even spread itself out on top like a skeletal hand�he could see that it was definitely a trunk, and that its lid had fallen open. By instinct, he took out his camera and reeled off half a dozen shots.
The seal did a quick arabesque above him.
Michael went deeper, until he could actually look inside the trunk; a frozen cascade of ice spilled out, like crystal coins, but mixed in with them he could detect a hint of something darker. Plum-colored. Glistening.
He swept his gaze from left to right, scanning the seafloor. To one side, the sea descended to a bottomless black, to the other he saw�perhaps a few hundred yards off�a sheer wall of ice that clearly went from high above the cap to a depth he could never approach. Between his present location and the looming glacier, he saw something else, also plum-colored, covered with an icy sheen, but lying on the seabed. He took the flashlight off of his harness belt and aimed the beam in its direction.
It was a bottle � it had to be. A wine bottle.
Michael swam down, and with his three-fingered glove brushed
the sediment away from its neck. An urchin, attached to its base, opened and closed its mouth�a mouth was really all it was�thinking that something edible might be in reach. Michael used the tip of the flashlight to scrape it off. Ice coated the bottle from top to bottom, but under it he could see a scrap of what once had been a label, altogether illegible. He tried to prize the bottle from the seafloor, but it was not about to be plucked so easily. He would have to use both hands. He carefully balanced the flashlight between two chunks of ice moored to the bottom, inadvertently disturbing a scale worm that looked like a broken rubber band several feet long� and that then undulated off in search of calmer quarters�before trying again. To loosen the grip of the mud and ice, he had to rock the bottle carefully�the last thing he wanted to do was break an artifact that might have survived for God knows how many years. Eventually, it broke free�he felt exactly as if he had just won a delicate tug-of-war with the ocean floor�and he turned it all around in his hands, admiring it.
Before he suddenly spotted one more, a dozen yards off, even closer to the glacial wall.
Perhaps he had found a treasure trove! Thoughts of fortune certainly crossed his mind�how couldn't they?�but more than that, it was the scoop! Wait till Gillespie back in Tacoma got a load of this! A photojournalist, on assignment from
Eco-Travel Magazine,
discovering a sunken chest hundreds of feet below the Antarctic ice cap. From there on in, Michael would be able to write his own ticket.
He stuck the bottle in a mesh bag attached to his harness, and sailed closer to the ice cliff. The seal seemed to hold off, drifting along on his back and looking at him down the length of his own sleek belly.
The closer he got to the glacier, the colder the water suddenly got; it reminded Michael of the impossibly cold katabatic winds that rushed down the sides of glaciers on land and gusted across the polar plains. He shivered in his suit, and glanced at the diving watch clamped to the outside of his wrist. He would have to turn around soon, very soon, and come back later.
The second bottle was wedged beneath a rock, and he decided to leave it where it was. His regulator hissed, and he realized that he had not been breathing normally�the excitement had been getting
to him, and he'd not been paying attention. The slanted wall of the massive glacier rose above him like a sheer white cliff�not so different from one that he'd encountered on a tragic day in the Cascades�and fell away forever under his feet. Its walls were gouged and scarred, like a fighter who'd been in the ring far too many times. He ran his hand across it, feeling, even through the thick glove, the rough and ancient power of it, a mountain of ice that could slowly but inexorably demolish anything in its path.
