Then another flake of gray rock came off under the pointy end of his hammer, and he and Harry both saw the rounded double bump and the shard behind it. When Michelson hiked up to join them he found them both flat on their chests, their faces centimeters from the stone, their sunglasses pulled off to enable them to see the object better. “What’s this I see?” Michelson cried.
“I’m not sure,” Harry said. “But I think it may be the legbone of a frog. Oh my God.”
“Call it your famous scallop shell,” Graham said, sitting back and grinning crookedly up at Michelson. He felt the sun lance through the chill and drive into his face, a very pleasurable sensation.
The world is a body. Rocks are the skeleton, arteries are watercourses, trees are the muscles, clouds are the respiration. We are the thoughts. Here then we can say that the body has been stripped to the skeleton, for there are no muscles, or veins, or arteries. Yet still the breath of clouds. A skeleton that breathes under its white cloak, and from time to time wakes, and thinks.
We walk up the ice road to the inner highland, the inner self. Morning in sunwashed camp: exercises in chih-fa, the method for the fingers. Valerie, our roshi, the shepherd of this pilgrimage, is purest form in the art of chih-fa. No tea ceremony could have cleaner lines than her breaking camp zazen. The way she cares for us is a joy to behold. And now here we are again, walking. Walking for hours, in the footsteps of Amundsen.
What can we make of Amundsen? His story is a knot. All his life he had been a man of the north, all his career had been an exploration of the north. He had found a Northwest Passage; he had desired for years to reach the North Pole. Then came news of Cook’s and Peary’s claims to have reached it, in the midst of his preparations for his own trip there. But he had no desire to be the third man to the North Pole, nor even the second. This casts his desire in a different light. What he wanted then was not the North Pole, center of his life’s work and placement. He wanted to be first. It is not at all the same thing. Not a hunger for place, but for position. A concentration on time rather than space; a desire to write one’s name on history, rather than to occupy a place on Earth.
Thus when Amundsen wrote of the strangeness of standing at the South Pole, after all his life trying to get to the North Pole, he was only partly correct. In a deeper sense he was standing exactly where he wanted to be: first. And indeed he has been remembered, especially on this continent, where there has been so little human history that what happened at the start still overshadows all. So he made his mark on time. First to the Pole. When did he reach it? I can’t remember.
The method Amundsen used to reach the Pole is also a knot, and difficult for us to come to terms with. On the one hand he had a genius for contemplating his polar experience and analyzing his methods, and making continual innovations in equipment and technique to improve them. His trip used the finest combination of modern and archaic technology possible in his time, much of it custom designed by Amundsen and manufactured under his direction.
But his change of destination, from one end of the Earth to the other, he hid from all, for fear of losing his financial support. This is one of the strange things about his trip that have puzzled people ever after. Even his men did not know where they were going; he did not tell them until after they left Norway. At that point he also sent a telegram to Scott, which said “Going south.” This shows he too was aware of reaching the Poles as a kind of medieval joust, with certain rules of fair play. Amundsen obviously did not agree with Scott’s notion that no one else should get to try until Scott either won or died. But he did agree they were running a race. So he sent Scott his notice.
And then he used dogs, and ate them. Of course many of us eat animal flesh, and in any market in China you can see more cruelty to animals in a single day than anything Amundsen and his men did to their dogs in their entire polar careers. We cannot judge him. But there is something about planning to use dogs to pull you to the Pole, while eating them as you go, that strikes the British mind at least as somewhat cold and overefficient. The British are both unsentimental and highly sentimental at one and the same time—like the Chinese. And dogs are our comrade-helpers, and intelligent, so there seems to be a touch of murder in killing these sentient beings, especially shooting and eating them to facilitate a trip to a first.
And then there is simply the question of being taken there by other beings, rather than under your own power. Scott by his inability to master dogs in effect raised the stakes to a higher level, where it was not just a matter of getting there, but how you did it. By accident Scott and his men fell in love with walking on Earth, and after that Scott asserted that doing it on your own mattered; and what has happened since tends to reinforce his values rather than Amundsen’s. The first climbers of Everest, for instance, used oxygen, and were the apex of a giant logistical pyramid; later Messner and Habler climbed the mountain without oxygen, and then Messner climbed it alone and without oxygen. Messner’s beautiful act of feng shui made the first climbs look over-reliant on aid. In Antarctica it was much the same. People drove tractors to the South Pole, then flew, and everyone recognized that this represented no great personal achievement for the people using the transport. And standing on the back of a sled pulled by dogs is not that different from sitting in the cab of a tractor, as my friend Elspeth pointed out recently. In short, we can be taken anywhere now, but going alone is still hard. When Børge Ousland walked across the continent alone and unaided, it was an amazing achievement; and it hearkened back to Scott rather than to Amundsen, even though Ousland was another Norwegian.
But Amundsen’s goal was simple; get to the Pole first. No scientific research, no scruples about dogs. He engineered a beautifully efficient trip to an idea. He was first to the axis of rotation, to a spot of planetary power in the landscape of our imagination; a gathering of all the dragon arteries into a single tight knot. Very much an act of feng shui.
Thus for me his expedition is a bundle of contradictions. As we follow their route, I feel confused about what they did, and about what we are doing. The land they crossed is superb, and the crossing of it was a work of art. But an art that included dog murder; and all for an idea of firstness that in the end I don’t find very interesting. North, south, east, west, and all the other attributes of feng shui—these are parts of the landscape of the imagination, which is a crucial part of all landscape, of course; crucial to our placement in the real world, on the Earth as we find it. But if the reality of Earth is perceived merely as material to be passed through, then it is not really there for you, and so the imagination becomes impoverished. The Earth is the imagination’s home and body. Unless you inhabit a place—not stay in one spot, but inhabit a place, as the paleolithic peoples inhabited their places, with every bush known and every rock named—then it becomes too decentered and metaphysical; you live in the imagination of an idea. True feng shui springs forth as an organic part of the landscape itself, which we perceive rather than invent, after learning the land down to each grain of sand.
So Amundsen was the first to the spin axis. But the Americans who started living in that place in 1956 were the first to be there in the full sense of being.