“Sure, sure. Whatever you say.” In fact Val would have loved nothing more than to try to sleep; the idea had come back, which was a sign that if she could just get under the blanket, so to speak, she would stay under for an entire day, maybe two. Not at all a comfortable feeling. But she didn’t want to argue with their hosts.
She went around the chambers of the refuge, rounding up her group and Carlos, Wade and X. Many of them appeared to be as exhausted as she was; she had to rouse them from the classic Antarctic ten-foot stare, saying, “Come on, come on, they’re flying us to McMurdo.”
And half an hour later, they and their few possessions were on board two big blimps, Addie again piloting the one Val was in. And then they were off once again, into the clouds on a rush of wind.
After that Val lost focus a bit. Despite the booming and whistling of the wind, the bouncing of the blimp and the sheer fact of their situation, she was seriously winding down, falling asleep as if making a cliff dive; sooner or later—sooner—she would hit and be gone instantly. Because of their situation she tried to fight this dive, and the strangeness of what was happening helped her, so that eventually what she fell into was a peculiar, struggling, sandy-eyed half-sleep, a kind of waking dream or conscious sleep; the direct contact of reality and her unconscious. In this state she was aware of X and Wade and Ta Shu and Addie talking on the headsets, and aware that they were flying over the Transantarctics in a marvelous blimp; but it was all jumbled together and incoherent. Brief visions of steep mountains, appearing through rents in the cloud as in Chinese landscape painting. Nunataks in a sea of white meringue. Another glimpse of green below. Addie saying Yeah that’s Shangri-la, we won’t be stopping there.
“Why not fly straight to Mac?” That was X. Her friend.
“Well, you know, if the ice shelf was still there we might. But now the sea ice is breaking up and there’s lots of open water in the bay, and I still don’t like to fly over open water, even in the blimps. In case a skua pecks a hole in the bag or whatever. So we’ll fly down the range, see the sights. The most beautiful mountains on Earth, anyway. If you could see ’em.”
“Wake up, Val, there’s another one of their camps.”
That was Wade. Nice man. She liked him. He was thinking of her.
“Uhh.”
She tried to wake. Like struggling under the surface of a syrup sea. She even slapped herself in the face. X regarded this with a curious expression, as if he wouldn’t mind helping out. Part of him. Of course. Though he was fond of her. Shouldn’t have dumped him like that, that was mean. Trolling was mean. The blimp dropped hard and she reswallowed her stomach, looked down blurrily: flying clouds, then a patch of green in spun glass; another refuge. Green valley in the ice. Then white clouds again, and Val shook her head, too groggy to remember properly what she had just seen. A waking dream.
“That’s Norumbega.”
“How many live there?” Wade asked.
“Well, it’s more a crossroads than a town. Johan and Friedrich hold things together there, maybe a dozen others.”
“Do you mind if I have us on the phone to Senator Chase?”
“Oh, yeah, not usually, but don’t do it now, okay? I don’t want anyone overhearing us during the approach. Besides you’re the senator, don’t you know that?”
X and Wade looking at each other round-eyed, in faked alarm at this news. They were friends. Val leaned her forehead against the cold window, looked down without quite seeing. Until she got some real sleep she would not be all there no matter how hard she tried. She closed her eyes and dropped into light sleep and dreams, without being aware of the phase change. The Room of a Thousand Shapes, the corked sledge. Rushing clouds, flying down the Zaneveld, a pile of bodies in the snow. She surfaced briefly, groaning. Then back under.
There’s Shambhala.
There’s Ultima Thule.
There’s Happy Valley.
There’s the Byrd Glacier, the biggest glacier in the world, look at that mama. That glacier is wider than the longest glacier in Europe is long. What a mighty river.
A wild interval, swirling around, tossing on a down-draft. That’s Skelton Glacier, sucking down a katabatic as usual. Come on you dog.
Skelton? That’s the way I came up on the SPOT train.
Yeah. A hell of a drop.
So we’re almost there.
Yeah. But listen, we’re not taking you folks right to Mac Town, understand. We don’t like to go there. Not at the best of times, and especially not now that the Marines have landed.
So where will you leave us?
Well, I said Black Island, but Mai-lis is a romantic.
Through the clouds, a stark black-and-white landscape. The sea black, dotted with brilliant white bergs. An island like a black castle, rising out of black water.
Then Addie was chivvying the blimp down, down, down, and Val pushed with all her might, and broke back up through the membrane of sleep, groggy and disoriented. Naps were not going to do the job at this point, and she needed to be awake. Addie was clipping the blimp onto a big rust anchor, half-buried in black sand.
“Okay!” she said. “Your radios ought to get Mac Town no problem now.”
She popped the gondola door, then handed them a key. “This’ll get you inside the hut. Nice to meet y’all.”
They climbed down onto the black sand of the beach. The other blimp was anchored to rocks up on Windvane Hill. Val’s group stood around as if they had just gotten off a train together. Then the blimps detached and sailed off downwind, rising quickly into the clouds and disappearing. “Where is this?” Wade asked.
“Cape Evans,” Val said. “Let’s get inside, out of the wind.”
Before you, my friends, you see the Cape Evans hut. This is the hut that Scott’s expedition built in the summer of 1910-11. They lived in this hut through the fall and winter of 1911. Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard left from here on their winter journey, and returned. Scott and his men left the following spring for the Pole. Sixteen men started out; five men did not come back. That fall and the next winter, the men surviving lived still in this hut, through the long months of perpetual darkness, knowing their comrades would never return. When spring and the sun came back they went south once more, hoping only to find the bodies of their friends. And they found them—the last three anyway, frozen in their tent, with their gear, and their twenty kilos of geological specimens, and the diaries and letters containing their stories. They had reached the Pole, and found there a tent and a Norwegian flag; Amundsen’s group had gotten there some time before. And on the way back Evans, Oates, Wilson, Scott, and Bowers all died.
The survivors left the three bodies they had found in the tent on the ice shelf, and came back to this hut. The relief ship returned at last, and they sailed away forever.
Now this hut. See inside. They are dead; their stories live. Yet so many questions remain. Why did they come here? How can we live here? How should we live anywhere on this Earth?
Our places speak for us. Our spaces speak through us. This hut still speaks their story. I will go inside now and be silent, so you can hear it.
gray light
brown room
The nine members of the group gathered before Scott’s gray weathered hut. X took the key Addie had given him, and unlocked the massive padlock on the door. They filed in one by one, all but Ta Shu, who wandered up the slope of Windvane Hill, presumably to get an exterior shot. Val waved to him and he waved back; he would be in soon. She followed the others in.