Ahead of us the headwall of the glacier, the crux of our climb, the heart knot of our pilgrimage. A most serious case of kao-yuan perspective. I’ll practice silence now, and keep the cameras on and let you see it newly. We’ll talk again at the top, on the ice cap.
glittering white
shining blue
raven black
(in Amundsen’s journal, December 1911)
Once they had gotten down onto it, the lower stretch of the Axel Heiberg Glacier turned out to be such a broad river of ice that Val’s group ascended long stretches where the ice was bare and crevasse-free. It was like walking on the surface of a pour of unbroken water, the flush surface of a smooth torrent, everything frozen in an instant, even the ripples. Hard work cramponing up this smooth slope, and they traded off the sledge-pulling every half hour, first Val and Ta Shu, then Jack and Jim, then Jorge and Elspeth; but it was quite straightforward compared to the steep broken ice of the mistaken traverse, and they made good time. It would have been a lark, in fact, except that every time they looked forward and up they saw the glacier rising ever more steeply before them, until it leaped right up in a gigantic headwall, the section of the glacier now called the Amundsen Icefalls, towering over them in a broad curve from black sidewall to black sidewall, the great broken crackle of the glacier’s ice gleaming like shattered mirrors in the sun. A thousand vertical meters in less than five kilometers. And they were going to have to get up that, if they wanted to continue.
As they hiked on toward it, hour after hour, crevasse fields began to appear on the ice, like rapids in the current. Here the GPS system helped tremendously, because when they looked up the great white flow the steeper sections beetled down at them, but the flatter sections were telescoped to near nothing, making their way seem steeper (but also shorter) than it really was; and making it hard to see enough to choose a way. One of Amundsen’s many talents had been an ability to read the unseen glacier above well enough to avoid impassable crevasse fields, and the shear zones where the ice was not so much fissured as pulverized.
For Val, whose wrist screen was giving her information from satellite visuals, radar, and a GPS location to within two centimeters, not to mention the pulse radar on her shoulder constantly searching for crevasses ahead, the skill consisted in correlating all that data to the actual icescape facing them, and then choosing from the alternative routes it suggested, where there were alternatives. Usually there were; it was a kind of multiple-path maze they were threading, and at no point in this lower stretch did they run into a set of crevasses and shear zones that was continuous across the front of the glacier. Although once or twice it was close; they had to twist and wind their way, and walked perhaps two or three kilometers for every kilometer of the glacier climbed; so that it was slow, slow work. But they made progress.
And the hours passed. Val looked at the dim little TV screen strapped to her right wrist, and then up at the blazing white jumble, and pointed out the way to the string of clients behind. Off they would go again. She had begun to haul the sledge by herself most of the time, and no one objected. Sometimes the glacier was covered with the hardpacked white snow called firn, and they could tromp along at a good clip. Their sunglasses were all at max power, polarizing so heavily that the cobalt sky had a blackish tint to it.
In some sections the glacier was clean blue ice, pitted or smooth, so that they had to stop and put on crampons, and chip-chip-chip on up. Often the blue ice was pitted with regular cusps that resembled suncups in snow, though not so deep; it was like walking across the surface of an enormous golf ball, their ankles twisted to a different resting angle with every step. It was very hard not to sweat, even with the smartfabrics open wide and the ambient temperature well below zero. The sledge clitter-clattered behind Val, tugging hard on her, as if trying to escape and shoot back down the length of the glacier, on a mad luge run into the Ross Sea. Looking around during rest breaks, it was so obvious that the glacier was a stupendous flood streaming down an enormous break in the mountain wall; the curve of the fluid obvious in the many rubble lines marking the surface, or just in the creasing of the ice itself, parallel creases like the lines in a whale’s white belly, all turning together with each sweep down the valley. The trench the glacier had carved was deep; the ranges walling it in were both nearly four thousand meters above sea level, and ten thousand feet above where they were now, so that it felt like being in the bottom of an enormous slot. Sometimes it seemed it would take weeks to climb out of a box canyon as huge as this one. In their rest stops they exclaimed over it:
“Stupendous!”
“Awesome!”
“Gnarly.”
“Sublime.”
“Big.”
That was Ta Shu. He spent the rests standing off to one side, rotating like a whirling dervish in extreme slow motion, either to give his distant audience a complete three-sixty or simply because he could not take enough in. His low Chinese commentary was like the chirping of invisible birds.
Val kept the rests short, and the hours passed, hour after hour, each one full of effort. They made progress. It was surprising how hot you could get in Antarctica—walking on a kind of mirror, sunblasted from above and below, working very hard. And yet still the potential for chill was always tangible, in the tip of the nose and the ears, and sometimes, if the going was easy, in the fingertips and toes. At one point she checked; it was fifteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and most of the group were still wearing ear bands, so that they could keep their ears from frostbite while still exposing the rest of their heads, which meant they would not sweat profusely in their suits. The head was the key to ther mostatting. Most of them on this day were down to shirts and windpants over the smartfabric longjohns, with the heating elements in their photovoltaic windpants turned all the way off. The gleaming blue-purple fabric complemented nicely the glary turquoise of the ice and the dark cobalt of the cloudless sky. The sky appeared to pulse over the blaze of ice and snow, as if breathing lightly—a phenomenon that Val had long ago learned to attribute to her own pulse, pounding in her vision somehow. She was working hard, and her clients even harder, but still keeping up. This was the kind of hour she loved; little to worry about with the clients, taxing basic work to do, the mind absorbed in the work and the feelings in her feet and legs and the rest of her body, and in the landscape towering around her as they slowly got higher and higher, with the views correspondingly larger. Sweating, breathing hard, mouth dry; thoughts ricocheting all over the canyon, flying out of it all over the cosmos; but also, for long stretches of time, merged with the ice underfoot and in the ten meters ahead of her, and so happy. The dromomaniac at full stretch.
Her screen data and the view above made it clear they were reaching the foot of the icefall proper. Up there out of sight, sixteen hundred meters higher than they now stood, the ice fell off the polar cap, down a funnel-like head section, channeled between the triangular mass of Mount Don Pedro Christophersen—Amundsen’s financial savior—and the high southern end of the Herbert Range, called Mount Fridtjof Nansen—Amundsen’s patron and friend. With a rock bump in the middle of the funnel, which Amundsen’s group had christened Mount Ole Engelstad, after the Norwegian naval officer who had been Amundsen’s second-in-command until killed by lightning while still back in Norway. Being in good with Amundsen had meant getting some quite amazing peaks named after you, Val thought as she studied the map on the screen.