The Nature of Ice (9 page)

Chad cherishes the quality of film, the texture of the grain, the imperfections and scratches that stream down the screen and give it charm. He finds magical the razzle-dazzle, star-crossed lovers, women's satin gowns. He is drawn dizzily, hopelessly, to happy-ever-afters and uncomplicated lives.

He gathers a handful of mugs left between the chairs and makes his way from the theatre, dimming all the lights but one. A red glow spills from the glass of the projection booth. He hears the soft slurring of breath, the nasal intake of air, an ebb before each exhalation. Hair falls across her blemished cheek, her face a porcelain mask against the crimson light. Freya Jorgensen slumps in the back row, legs limp, arms folded across her chest, a rag doll out for the count.

Hell let loose

May 1912

THOSE RASCAL DOGS HAD BROKEN out of the verandah again. They emerged through the drift, slipping and slithering over polished ice, exhilarated to come across an ambulatory man dragging an extinguished lantern and groping on all fours to find his way home. Pavlova inspected Douglas's rear while Ginger and Gadget nosed the rime of ice lining his burberry helmet. In a blizzard, the forty yards from the Stevenson meteorological screen back to the hut might be a blanket of mist spread across the sea for all he could see through the drift.

The whistling of wind formed a song, a ceaseless whine that pervaded men's dreams and did its best to drown out every thought. He wore fur mittens, two pairs of woollen socks, and still his toes and fingers throbbed. Wind savaged the body, seared any flesh left uncovered. The men of winter quarters could be likened to a band of painted warriors, at one against the foe, their cheeks and brows scarred with lines of frostnip. Twice now Hurley had paid the price of operating his camera without a glove, his fingertips blackened from freezing.

Douglas patted at a shape to gain a bearing. Wind and snowdrift had scoured the boxes of food stacked along the wall of the hut, carving grooves through softer portions of the wooden casing and leaving harder fibres raised in relief. An identical process of abrasion hardened and polished the surrounding territory, channelling snow and ice into east– west ridges of sastrugi—the frozen waves a source of direction for a purblind man.

He climbed the snow bank against the western wall and eased his body down through the roof's newly installed trapdoor.

At Commonwealth Bay, abdication to the elements came in incremental acts of surrender. They had given up shovelling snowdrift from the hut's main entry; they had let that verandah go.

By 11.45 at night the wind sounded terrific. Timbers shimmied, the hut cracked as if set to explode. When Douglas emerged from his cabin, the crowd around Hyde Park Corner—the meeting place named by Ninnis—looked a solemn gathering indeed. John Close, the expedition's so-called physical fitness expert, ten years older than his application claimed and too often disposed to idleness, looked ashen-faced.

‘What is it?' Douglas asked.

‘This wind could sweep away the whole blooming show.' Close's voice sounded reedy and thin. ‘Could lift the hut clean up and dump it in the sea.'

On a good day, Douglas found Close's timorous nature farcical—the acetylene generator for the lights would explode, they'd all perish from scurvy, if the stove ran down they would surely freeze to death in their sleeping bags. Send him out in a blizzard to collect the day's ice and you'd think he'd been banished. But tonight . . .D ouglas couldn't help asking himself where they would find refuge if the hut gave way. By the volume of shrieks the gusts were nearing one hundred and fifty miles an hour. It seemed unbelievable that air could flow so swiftly.

‘Not me alone what's concerned.' Close sniffed. ‘You ask the boys.'

Azi Webb, the chief magnetician, unfolded some jottings from his pocket. ‘Bage and I did the calculations. Eighty pound of wind to the square foot will stress the roof rafters about six thousand pounds per square inch. The full strength of the timber.'

‘How does that rate in wind speed?'

‘One hundred and thirty miles an hour, or thereabouts.'

‘The only thing holding her in place,' Bage said, ‘is the volume of snow banked around the walls.'

‘Not this one.' Ninnis thumped the wall beside his bunk. He was right: the prevailing wind quickly blasted away any accumulation of snow on the hut's southern side.

‘I was saying to the boys—God willing, we're all still here tomorrow—that we could build a snow bank,' the meteorologist Cecil Madigan said. ‘If we stack a crescent of benzine fuel cases, say, ten yards behind the hut, the wind should dump snow between it and the back wall.'

‘Put the hut in a better lee,' Douglas said. He should have thought of it himself. He left the group and pulled down the meteorological log: the day's minimum –21°F. He lingered over the monthly averages, the figures belying the wind's fury.

February     26.6 mph
March          49.0 mph
April            51.6 mph

He tried and tried again to summon memories of a world not ravaged by wind. A civilised world with freshly laundered clothes, polished fruit upon a sideboard, the softness of a woman's hand. But even his image of Paquita had dimmed, as if the features of her sweet and gentle face, the detail of her frock, were permanently veiled by snowdrift. Through these wretched months he'd written not a word to Paquita—what, of consequence, could a letter tell? That her fiancé and his men had been reduced to trogladytes, confined to a hut entombed in snow? That he, who once had hauled a sledge twelve hundred miles to the south magnetic pole—that wandering point on the earth's surface where the magnetic field rises vertically—knew naught of any landmark beyond the rise? No one outside this dismal realm could fathom conditions so brutal that the simplest task—retrieving a recording, collecting daily ice— demanded superhuman effort. The wireless masts lay fallow on the ground; the lower segments were no sooner raised than wind chafed the rope supports and he ordered them to be pulled down again. When he cast his memory back to his first Antarctic winter with Shackleton, he could recall the bitter cold, but never at Cape Royds had he known this unremitting fury. Here at Commonwealth Bay, the wind ripped and rent, bent and bullied; it had torn their whaleboat from its anchors and delivered it across the frozen harbour to kingdom come. Douglas shook his head. He would write no such letter lest the very act of doing so administered defeat.

The hut quaked. Wind shrilled. Douglas totted up wind speeds for the first half of May and estimated the average at sixty-four miles an hour.

He entered
Hell let loose
in the midnight record and placed the log back on the shelf. Winter hadn't even begun.

Collecting ice from the
glacier at winter quarters

A THOUSAND
RIVERS

FREYA KICKS OFF HER MUDDY boots, opens her studio door, strews her gear across the floor and kneels beside the heater. It's nine at night and she's exhausted. Exhilarated. In truth, she's also relieved to have got through the afternoon without giving in. She would not have guessed, this morning, how rapidly the weather could turn, or how a minus-thirty windchill could chew through so many camera batteries. The cold had drained her own reserves.

This morning, they had driven out across the ice in perfect sunshine. There wasn't a breath of wind as she and Chad McGonigal tramped around the island in silence, he sitting down a respectable distance away each time she stopped to photograph the antics of courting penguins. She followed Chad's example and kept to herself, her novice's delight at the sight of so many penguins held in check by the muteness of her guide. They'd stopped for lunch at three o'clock, the dissonant brays and squawks from nearby penguins suddenly comical beside their own silence. She had laughed aloud, then turned to Chad:
It's a noisy business, impressing a mate
. Chad had grunted and pointed at a male suitor making an elaborate display of building a nest. The adélie waddled industriously up and down the slope, ferrying a single stone at a time. They watched him posture before his would-be mate, dip his head low in rhythmic waves and finally place each stone just so.
She
looks smitten to me
, Freya had said; the female bowed her head in concert with his moves. But no.
Female adélies are a fickle
lot
, Chad muttered.
She'll as easily up and march away if he
doesn't get it right
.

They were climbing the hill when Freya registered a breeze and stopped to zip up her jacket. Soon she was battling to keep pace, or to even make headway in the stronger gusts, the wind savage on her face. Chad had beckoned her on—
It's worth
it
—taking out his point-and-shoot. She had reached the top, breathless from the cold but transfixed by the scene laid out upon the ice. They stood side by side photographing streamers of snowdrift that could have been a thousand rivers tumbling out across the white. She couldn't help herself.
Have you ever
seen anything so wild and beautiful?

Of course he had, countless times, she reminds herself now. She had held her glove in her teeth to change batteries, then had to scrabble for a cloth to clear the eyepiece of her camera which was iced over with her breath. At home she could operate any of her cameras blindfolded; out there in the cold, wearing gloves, she struggled to locate the shutter button, fumbling with buttons and dials. But within minutes of taking off her thick gloves and switching them for liners, her hands refused to function, her fingers wooden and throbbing with cold.

Tough on hands, your line of work. You want to head back?

She had hesitated. If she couldn't handle an afternoon of poor conditions, how could she expect to carry out her project?
I just need a minute to warm up.

They'd sheltered in the lee of boulders where she'd slid her bare hands into her armpits to gain some body warmth. As the feeling returned her fingers ached as though they had been slammed in a door.

This is about as rugged as it gets this time of year.
Chad had poured hot drinks from the thermos in his pack.
It gets easier,
dealing with the cold.

Freya sipped a mug of sweet black tea, and then a second, feeling a glimmer of warmth radiate through her.
I lived in
Norway until I was eight
.
My sister and I would walk to school
during winter in temperatures colder than this; we'd play outside
all the time. I don't remember feeling this cold.

Chad had nodded.
Down here, the wind's the killer.

Is there a trick to staying warm?
She'd almost been afraid to ask.

He shrugged.
You get better at knowing what clothes work
for you, at understanding your limits.
He'd offered her some chocolate and with it half a smile.
There's no formula. Somehow
you figure it out for yourself.

An unmistakable whiff of penguin now wafts about Freya's studio. She sniffs at her hands, her clothing, matted tendrils of her hair. Distracted by the acrid odour, she follows the scent across the room to her new waterproof camera pack, the base and tail straps caked in guano. Wonderful.

Freya opens her laptop and clicks on her inbox. She scrolls through an email from Marcus with the subject:
Progress on
the diaries!

>> Translated from the journal of Xavier Mertz, 18 May 1912:

At 6 pm we returned to the hut in pitch black. Such a walk has to be experienced once in a lifetime. The distance is only 300 metres, yet it took us half an hour, with great effort. The wind stole away our breath, and the severe cold bit at the uncovered part of our faces . . . First we tried our luck upright, locking arms with one another, but the wind knocked us down. For fifteen minutes we rolled about, our bodies writhing in all directions. Then the wind swept Azi away so I followed him. As we sat against a rock to catch our breath, I had to rub my hands because my fingertips were nearly frostbitten. Around the edge of my burberry cap was a bright light, ‘St Elmo's fire', produced by electricity driven through snowflakes.

Battling against the wind and darkness, the distance to the hut, and our sense of time, seemed distorted. Finally, we bumped into the hut wall with our heads.

Freya should reply to Marcus, acknowledge his email, tell him the details of her day.
I want to hear about everything.
She studies Hurley's photo,
Collecting ice from the glacier
, focusing on the two figures, crawling on hands and knees through the blizzard. She feels herself transported by needles of snow, by wretched, aching cold. How did they find their way, let alone work, in such conditions? In a less alien environment the task of collecting ice might seem mundane, but at winter quarters, these two men battling nature elevates domestic duties to the realm of the extraordinary. If her own images are even half as evocative, a fraction as strong, she will rate them a success.