The Feel of Steel (3 page)

The zodiacs rise and fall at the bottom of the gangway, down which we blunder in single file, puffy in our grotesque wet-weather gear of Goretex, rubber, velcro and large coarse zips.

As we bounce across a kilometre of water towards a line of brown and white cliffs, the penguin stench hits us: shit and feathers, with an overlay of fish.

On the stony beach, people fan out with their camera equipment and become solitary. Each photographer attempts to establish an intense relationship with an
individual penguin. I tiptoe past these strivings, feeling like an intruder.

I note with relief that some penguins are not waddling about on their flabby feet, or standing in forward-slanted throngs on points of land, but are lying, singly or in twos and threes, flat on their bellies on the grey rocks, their eyes closed to slits, doing nothing at all. Just loafing about. I long to emulate them. But I'm afraid even to seat myself on a rock. What if I fall asleep, or slip into an ice trance, and the zodiacs forget me and I get
left behind
?

This is of course impossible, due to a rigorously enforced system of tags, labels, life-belt counting and so on – but it's my first twinge of primal dread, mixed with a swooning sensation. I'm tired. I'm guilty about not liking penguins. I'm cold. I have to keep wiping my nose. I'm incapacitated by all these bulky clothes. I'm lonely because everyone else is hiding behind a camera. Everywhere I turn, my view is blocked by some keen bean with a tripod. I fight the sense that a person with a camera has a prior right to any view we both happen to be looking at. I am being driven insane by photography.

OK, one sub-group of the voyage is actually here to be coached by Darren, a tall quiet young professional photographer; but your average punter on board has brought at least one camera and several kilometres of film. I have left my Pentax at home. I tell incredulous shipmates that it's too old and heavy to carry, but the real reason is that at the pre-trip briefing a couple of months ago, people spoke so fanatically of bringing
a back-up camera in case their main one fell overboard or got splashed in the zodiac that it brought out the party-pooper in me. I determined on the spot that I would go to the icy continent in a state of heroic lenslessness; that I would equip myself with only a notebook and a pen.

But I forgot something. The cold.

Two degrees Celsius doesn't sound that scary, specially if you've been reading about Shackleton's journey in the open boat, or Apsley Cherry-Garrard's
Worst Journey in the World
– tales in which temperatures of seventy below scarcely raise an eyebrow. Still, the expedition guides urge us over and over again to take the cold seriously, to dress in layers against it, to keep dry, to wear several pairs of gloves. I have brought cotton ones, wool ones, and a pair of mittens made of stiff stuff like leather. Have you ever tried to take notes wearing boxing gloves?

With my huge bulging paws I wrestle the notebook and pen out of my pocket and start describing things, partly to justify my presence, partly to keep from falling asleep: ‘Penguins: ridiculous, helpless-looking creatures, always in a flap. A penguin looks like a person trying to walk in an inverted sack; it has to strain its feet apart to keep the neck of the bag open round its ankles. The clifftops are crenellated: you expect to see the feathered heads of Indian warriors peep over them; it's like Arizona.'

Oh, shut up, smart-arse.

I stow the book and sit down gingerly on a little point of rock, out of the wind. In this bay the sound of the
ocean is hushed. Further around the rocky beach stands a wall of ice. Its vertical face is snicked with tiny hollows, in each of which there lurks a droplet of the same secret, tawdry green that seamed this morning's icebergs.

A chunk of ice the size and shape of a double bed (with base) detaches itself from near the top of the wall, and floats gracefully down and out of my line of sight – slow, ethereal. But it lands with a shocking roar and a smash, and there's a fluster in the water, which dies away. Back inside the ice river there's a constant groaning and creaking, an occasional crack like a pistol shot.

Mild sun shines on my up-turned face. None of these gargantuan cataclysms has anything to do with me. Nothing is my fault. While the ice behaves as it must, I am permitted to sit here on a rock, strangely at peace.

Something funny happens to time, down here. The nights are so short and the light is so foreign, we're so buffeted by weather, bombarded by new sights, wrung out with wonder, that the memory starts to pack up. We lose our grip on the sequence of events. Cameras are impotent against the slippage. Our guides work late into the night to counteract it: each morning we wake to find, wedged under our cabin door-handle, a two-page account of the activities of the previous day, complete with map, and a plan for the day ahead. This is not just
their usual efficiency: it's protection against an attack of severe existential anxiety.

At the lunch table Nicola and Sue,
Molchanov
workers, relate how they lassoed a small iceberg and brought it back for cubes in the bar.

‘We were hauling and hauling! It was like a birth! And suddenly there was this great big THING in the zodiac! Just as well there were no men there! If there'd been men they would've gone, “Stand back, girls! Let
me
handle this!” We were determined – we were like, “This iceberg is not going to beat us!” '

The sole bloke at the table, Michael, another mountaineer, quiet, with a modest, introverted demeanour, who has lost his toes and parts of his feet to frostbite on Everest, sits looking on, half smiling.

‘The food on this ship is great,' says another woman at the table, lifting her forearms off the cloth which is dampened to prevent the plates from sliding about. ‘It must be the cold – I've been eating four times my usual rations and I'm not even putting on weight!'

That night we sail into our second storm, force ten on the Beaufort scale. It is colossal. I hardly sleep. Never before
has it been strenuous just to lie down. I'm stiff from neck to feet all night long. In daylight, speechless people stagger hand over hand along the corridors and up to the bridge, where there are rails to grip, and one grips them hard, gulping and shaking, exhilarated, scared.

The sea is a heaving grey field of waves as big as apartment blocks, which rise with majestic deliberation and smash themselves over the bridge. For a few seconds after each impact, the ice fragments cascading down the glass blot out the world, then camouflage it, abstracting it into wild patterns of white, grey and streaming loden green.

Hanging on with aching arms, flexing my knees and swaying with the madness, I begin to understand that the
Professor Molchanov
is not just a dead contraption of rivets and chunks of metal, but an entity, a living being.
It
transforms into
she
. She bounds, throbs, moans. She has a sense of her own springy wholeness, as she quivers on the lip of a wave, gathering herself for the next plunge. The aliveness, the working beingness of her goes straight to the heart: I admire her, she moves me. For the first time in my life I understand how one can love a ship.

‘My feeling of this part of Antarctica,' says Greg, ‘is usually much more gentle. But this time it showed itself in a really raw way. We got a faceful.'

The next evening we go ashore at Half Moon Island, to inspect a penguin rookery. While we're beaching the first zodiac, a sudden wind springs up and slashes across the bay, making the water bristle. The stones underfoot, as we scramble out of the boats and up the steep beach, are grey and clanking, big as bread-and-butter plates. Camera mania flourishes at once, obliterating all social contact: I mooch about on my own, crabby and left out.

A lone penguin, separated from its fellows, stumps along beside me on its damp pink feet. We cast an ill-tempered glance at each other. It's a companionship of sorts, I suppose. I am just starting to appreciate the pearly sheen of its dress shirt when it loses interest and staggers away behind a beautiful old clinker-built rowboat which has sagged and half collapsed on the stones. I slog on by myself up to the saddle, where I am rewarded by a splendid vista: white peaks all crumbling down on the other side of a narrow channel, in which mad dark water is bumping with frozen lumps. The wind up here (‘the cleanest air in the world') nearly bowls me over. Breathe it, Misery Guts, and let that be enough.

Way down behind me, there's a commotion at the water's edge. A bunch of tiny people is struggling to drag the second zodiac, then the third, up on to the beach. The light is weakening and the wind is growing stronger by the minute. On the crest I'm having to crouch and claw at the ground so as not to be blown off my feet.
Professor Molchanov
looks very small, out there in the bay, and awfully far away.

I scramble crab-wise down to the shore. Seven people
are battling to hold the third zodiac steady. Waves are slopping over its stern, crashing and dragging at it; it's filling with water, we can't pull it up. Night's coming, there's a harsh side-on swell, and why should the wind drop?