The Feel of Steel (4 page)

It doesn't help that only a metre away from our struggles a single penguin is frolicking in the dark water, as carefree as if the sun were beaming down at noon. While the humans shout and haul and groan, it loops and dives and twirls, merry as an otter.

The sky is so pure it hurts to look at it. The wind whips fine grit off the stones and slashes it into our streaming eyes. My stomach knots in animal dread, a horror of cold. What if we can't launch our zodiacs? How will we get through this night? Has
Molchanov
got another boat to save us?

At the far end of the beach we can see a clump of small huts on bare, dark scree. No lights, no sign of life – only the blue and white Argentine flag painted on the roof: Camara base. Oh God. I picture the whole gang of us having to break in, and shuddering all night in a pile on the floor of the biggest hut.

Over the wind Greg shouts at us: ‘Walk around the shore to the base! We'll bring the boats across! It's calmer there!'

I set out to trudge a kilometre on the big shifting stones, my head seething with thoughts of the pathetic will I hastily scrawled the night before I left home, of bequests I made to certain people which I now suddenly and savagely regret.

Someone shouts to me and points to a dark thing squirming among rocks two metres away – a seal, the size of a terrier. I give it one look before the photographers descend on it with their ravening lenses. I keep stumping along in my brand-new gumboots, leaning forward and stabbing my toes in among the stones, the only way to make progress against the cold wall of wind. My eyes pour liquid. I keep overtaking older couples struggling along in the same bent posture. They look up as I steam past, but in our scarves and sunglasses and headgear we don't recognise each other. We drive onwards, toes first, leaning into the wind.

Molchanov
Sue has somehow got to Camara beach before us, and is talking with a big, moustachio'd Argentinian scientist in polar gear. She shouts, ‘There's room for all of us to sleep here if we have to!' Straggling in, people jockey for position out of the wind behind a tiny orange hut right near the water's edge. We huddle there in a clump, giggling feebly. Here come our zodiacs, bounding across the fierce, darkening bay.

Greg has got soaked to the groin. His gumboots are full of water. He upends and empties them, wrings out his sopping socks and stoically pulls them back on to his blue feet.

A woman says to him, ‘You must be freezing.'

He shrugs manfully: ‘Oh – not specially . . .'

‘I mean your
feet
must be freezing,' she insists.

‘Well . . .' he says, looking away as if embarrassed; then, in a rush: ‘Oh, none of that stuff – yes! They are!'

He gives a sudden laugh and throws both arms round her in a quick hug. This guy has climbed to the roof of the world? and he mocks his own tendency to macho posturing? No wonder we all – women and men – adore him.

On the strength of his self-awareness I fight a powerful temptation to break the rules and pocket an orange pebble. I win; but my righteousness will never quite comfort me for the fact that I have not got that small bright stone, which signalled to me from among the big grey ones, and which that night I so badly wanted, and still do.

The captain has brought the ship closer in, to give us a lee. We zip splashily home. On deck, scrubbing off the penguin shit, we are already heroes to ourselves, staring-eyed, laughing a bit too wildly, half hysterical with relief and foolishness.

A woman asks Greg, ‘Tell me the truth – were you scared?'

He shakes his head. ‘No. I knew the worst that could happen was we'd get a bit wet. It's the wind that makes people panic. It's like standing under a helicopter, when everybody's shouting.'

‘Of course we're exploiting the penguins,' says an earnest woman from Canberra. ‘A bunch of ignorant tourists staring at them as they go about their business.'

‘I don't think they
feel
exploited, though,' says Greg with a straight face. ‘Beautiful as they are, it's a pretty small brain.'

Forgive me, but I'm not here for the wild life. Of course I crane to see the seals, dumb and smooth as slugs, trailing blood-coloured shit as they slither off floes at our approach. Of course I gasp at the soaring of the giant petrels. Of course I race up on deck at the shout, ‘Sperm whale! Port side!' and hang over the rail, excited by the grand dark thing heaving just below the surface and blowing with a hollow rush. And when only the rind of a whale can be seen from a following zodiac, when with a casual flip of the tail it's gone – of course with the others I groan in disappointment, and sit gripping the zodiac side in the keen wind, shrunken and shuddering with cold, heart in mouth, nose running, eyes watering, scanning scanning scanning . . .

But in my heart all I want to do is go out in the boats and look at ice. Seals, penguins and whales, to me, are only distractions from the bliss of this.

Where to find a language for these miraculous frozen forms? Couldn't there be poetry in the ship's library alongside the glossy photo books? Doesn't someone in
Shakespeare wake from a dream about
regions of thick-ribbed ice
? Would Gerard Manley Hopkins have found words for these teeming variations on surface?

On outings to Paradise Bay and to the ‘city of bergs' off Pleneau Island, we learn calm from Greg, who never calls for silence but simply manifests it, sitting beside the outboard with his handbacks resting on his thighs, his eyes squinting. The minute people stop ripping and adjusting velcro, or tearing open film packets, we start to hear the sound the brash ice is making. It's whispering all around us: chinking, rustling on the gentle swell. We sit. We stare.

The colour of an iceberg, or of a glacier wall, is impossible to name. You call it white, but when you swing your eyes away and back, you see it's the most delicate, the palest and yet the greyest green. Mint? The Nile? A no-colour. Water colour. Cloud colour. Again and again the eye returns to feast on the crumpled mystery of ice. One plumbs the word-well. The bucket comes up empty.

People whisper helpless clichés: ‘magic', ‘wonderland'. Not good enough. The forms are inhuman, but to name them we need the vocabulary of the body, of carpentry, dressmaking, masonry – all the beautiful crafts of people's hands. Pocked. Dimpled. Chiselled. Chamfered. Bevelled. Ruched. Frilled. Saw-toothed. Cloven. Striated, stippled, puckered, fringed, trimmed, carved, scrolled – or simply folded and scratched.

Always this urge to anthropomorphise grips us, as if the awe – or panic, or even, deep down, rage – provoked
in us by a landscape without human meaning were too great to bear.

On the way back from Paradise Bay, at nightfall, sitting in a silent row along the rim of the zodiac, we pass a toppled, majestic thing – an iceberg like an immense coroneted head. Wagnerian? Arthurian?
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
. A monarch brought low, shamed, blinded, submerged to the temples. Resting his cold cheek among the ripples.

Fiercely I wish I had no prior inkling of this place, that everything I'm looking at were completely new to me. I hate movies and TV and videos. People with cameras are busybodies, writers are control freaks, spoiling things for everyone else, colonising, taming, matching their egos against the unshowable, the unsayable. I long to have come down here in a state of infantile ignorance. Is this a rebirth fantasy? Or perhaps it's what Greg means when he says, ‘The power of this place quietens and humbles even the dickheads.'

The morning we go in the boats to Hydrurga Rocks (penguins, seals, and a particular bird which hovers, head into the ferocious wind, right next to my shoulder as I
stand wobbling on the ridge, crazy with the brightness of the world and the faraway satin peaks, wanting to yell with joy), a photographer loses his grip on a white plastic bag. The wind whisks it out of his hand and away it soars, inflated, skimming the surface of the water like a big white bubble of poison. We all stand transfixed, mouths gaping with horror. Later I hear that one of the blokes has chased it in a zodiac and managed to pick it up; but the distress I felt at the sight of its escape still astonishes me.