“Maybe,” Val said, remembering South Georgia Island.
“No, you see it time after time,” Elspeth insisted. “Men going to their deaths for some idea or other. Following a script, living out an ideology—there are a lot of ways of putting it.”
“Some people break under stress,” Val said despite herself.
“Yes they do. But that’s another story—that’s Lord Jim, a story that all these men knew very well. It was a cautionary tale to them—break down once, and your honor is lost forever. That’s why so many of them died in the trenches, going to certain death to make sure that they didn’t look like a shirker.”
Jim shook his head. “World War I killed that story for good.”
“I know what you mean by that,” Elspeth said. “But I’m not so sure it did.”
Ta Shu spoke again. “All stories are still alive,” he said. “All stories have colors in them.” He looked around at them, an older man from a different culture, weathered and strange, incongruous in his red parka. “This present moment—this is clear.” Although actually the light in the tent was its usual virulent blue; but they took his point. “The past—all stories. Nothing but stories. All colored. So we choose our colors. We choose what colors we see.”
Soon after that the big loads of food in them and the exhaustion of the day’s climb both hit at once, and they groaned through the icy brilliant air to their tents, to fall in their bags and sleep deeply, no matter the incandescent brightness lasting through the night. And the next morning they got up and ate breakfast in silence, contemplating no doubt the day ahead of them. They broke camp and got it stuffed into its bags and into the sledge, and then they were off again. Val hauled the sledge by herself, starting slow so that people could get warmed up gradually. The hard field of firn covering the head of the Sargent Glacier was pretty easy going.
Then they had to climb into the saddle between Bell Peak and the high ridge of the Herbert Range to their right, and this proved to be a mean little wall; it took three hours of hard hauling to get the sled up it.
Finally they made it, however, and Val took the sledge and pulled it across the saddle until she reached the far side, where they had a full view of the Axel Heiberg. It would make a dramatic lunch spot.
She pulled up the final slope to a little snow-covered knob she had camped on during a previous expedition, and gestured to the others as they straggled up after her, waving at the view ahead. “Lunch time!” she cried.
While she waited for them she goggled at the view. A good two thousand feet below them, down the steep snow-blanketed slope of the glacier’s sidewall, lay the great ice river itself, the Axel Heiberg, pouring down from the polar cap in a truly frightening icefall, like an immense waterfall that had frozen to stillness and broken to shards. Then below them it flattened out and curved around the shoulder they stood on. It was easy to see that they could have taken the flat, broad, curving road of the lower Heiberg glacier in from where it poured onto the Ross Sea, and avoided every difficulty they had overcome in the previous two days, also the tricky work of successfully descending the slope leading back down to the glacier.
What also became suddenly clear to the understanding was just how huge and strange the Transantarctic Mountains were. This stupendous ice stream had torn a trench in the range so clean in its lines that it was hard to grasp how big it was; but it was almost as deep as the Grand Canyon, and considerably wider, and when one’s sense of scale came into focus, so to speak, it was hard not to feel a bit frightened, like a speck on the side of the abyss. It was clear also from this vantage point that the mountain range was a dam holding back the polar ice, the ice pouring down these giant spillways ten thousand feet to the sea. There was nothing like it anywhere else in the world, and standing there it was easy to feel the truth of that.
Ta Shu, the first one to join Val on the knob, needed no time to make his feng shui analysis. “This a very big place,” he declared, puffing and grinning at Val.
Jorge and Elspeth arrived and just stared at the scene, looking appalled. Jim arrived and was stunned. Jack arrived and said “God damn!” and hooted a few times. “Wow! Will you look at that!”
“God damn is right,” Jim said, checking out the precipitous slope they now had to descend. “Why didn’t Amundsen just follow the dogs!”
7
Down the Rabbit Hole
blue sky
white snow
The South Pole was cold. At first when Wade climbed out of the Herc and saw the white glare and the dark blue sky, it was familiar enough to make him think it was going to be like McMurdo or the Dry Valleys. Then the cold shot up his nostrils into his head and his snot froze, with a tickling sensation that was only a little painful. After that there were icicles inside his nose. This seemed to stabilize the nasal situation, and after that his nose stayed relatively warm—warm, with icicles inside it!—and the sensation of cold shifted elsewhere, to the various joints in his clothing: between boots and pants, and at his wrists, neck and eyes. Cold!
By this time he had rounded the nose of the Herc, and was walking across the smashed snow of the runway. He passed a little glass-walled booth topped by a big sign: “South Pole Pax Terminal.”
Beyond it stood the new Pole Station, gleaming in the sun like a blue spaceliner stranded on the snow. Actually like three spaceliners, all standing on thick blue pylons, and linked by blue passage tubes. At the end of the leftmost module a cylindrical blue control tower stood overlooking the scene. Farther across the glittering white plain, past heaped mounds of snow and a line of yellow bulldozers, he could see just the tops of a little sunken village of antique Jamesways. Farther still, a pale blue geodesic dome stuck out of snow that appeared to be in the process of burying it entirely; the old station, apparently.
A man approached Wade and introduced himself: Keri Hull, NSF rep for the Pole. He led Wade to the spaceliner and up metal grid stairs like those Wade had seen in ski resorts. From here the new station looked like a segmented flying wing, aerodynamic in the polar winds. They went through the usual meat-locker doors, inset into the curved blue wall.
Keri led Wade down a hall to a bright warm galley. They sat down at a long table with a few other people; one of them got him a mug of hot chocolate, and he held the mug in both hands gratefully. The inside of his nose began to defrost. The room was full of people eating and talking. It was steamy.
“First a few words about the station,” Keri said. “We’re supposed to do this for everyone. We’re at 9,300 feet here, and because of the Earth’s spin the atmosphere is thinner at the poles than at the equator, so our nine three is the equivalent of about 10,500 feet at the equator. It’s a hard ten thousand, too, because of the cold and the dryness. So stay hydrated and don’t run around too much in the first days of your stay. And if you have a persistent headache or loss of appetite, see the station doctor and she’ll fix you up. Officially we recommend avoiding caffeine and alcohol, but, you know—moderation in all things.” He grinned and sipped from a giant coffee mug with his name painted on it. “Just pay attention to your body signals and behave accordingly. Okay? Good. Now—how can we help you down here at ninety degrees south, Mr. Norton?”
“I’d like to have a look at the whole station, with the idea of going through the various, um, incidents that have been reported, kind of step by step.”
Keri frowned. “You mean going into the old station?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. That’s against regulations, I’m afraid.”