Terra Incognita Read Free Page B

want to do now is take you there. As Shackleton said, ‘We all have our own White South,’ and I believe that the reach of the imagination extends far beyond the snowfields.



PART ONE
    Antarctica left a restless longing in my heart beckoning towards an incomprehensible perfection for ever beyond the reach of mortal man. Its overwhelming beauty touches one so deeply that it is like a wound.
    Edwin Mickleburgh, Beyond the Frozen Sea

THE ANTARCTIC CONTINENT

    Temperature
    To convert the Celsius Scale (that which we used to call Centigrade) to Fahrenheit, multiply the temperature by nine fifths and add 32. In reverse, take 32 from the Fahrenheit temperature and multiply by five ninths. Taking 0°C as equivalent of 32°F, thus we obtain:
−50°C = −58°F
5°C = 41°F
−30°C = −22°F
10°C = 50° F
−20°C =   −4°F
20°C = 68°F
−10°C =   14°F
30°C = 86°F
−  5°C =   23°F
50°C = 122°F
    The absolute zero temperature (the lowest possible) is −273.15°C. A temperature of −40°C = −40°F.

CHAPTER ONE
    The Big White
    Come, my friends,
    â€™Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
    Push off, and sitting well in order smite
    The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
    To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
    Of all the western stars, until I die.
    Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from Ulysses
    E ACH DAY was hotter than the last, and I soaked up the November sunshine like a lizard. Two Sundays after landing in New Zealand I had to present myself at nine in the morning at the headquarters of the U.S. Antarctic Program in Christchurch in order to be issued my Extreme Cold Weather clothing. I borrowed a mountain bike and cycled along deserted roads tasselled with silent shopping malls to the snoozing outskirts of the city where the sun had already burnt the blue from the sky. The bike had a matching helmet with a tiny rear-view mirror protruding from the side. I swung up to the entrance of the institutional snow-white building where a sprinkling of fellow travellers had settled on the low walls and warm grass. I couldn’t unstrap the helmet and was obliged to solicit the help of a vulpine Russian glaciologist.
    At nine sharp we were ushered inside to take our places in a windowless room festooned with posters of icescapes, and there we waited for the last arrivals in the silence of strangers while a man ticked off our names on a clipboard and scowled like Beethoven. I felt very alone at that moment, in a strange country bound for a stranger continent. I had come right up to the pane of the looking-glass, after so long.
    The safety video began, optimistically, with Scott’s ‘Great God, this is an awful place’ delivered in a sonorous thespian voice and accompanying footage of well-clad individuals crashing into crevasses. When it was over we trooped through to the changing rooms. There were three other women, and our room was bare except for four pairs of tagged, overstuffed orange fabric bag the size of medium suitcases.
    The bags yielded a bewildering array of footwear, underwear, headwear, handwear, eyewear and unidentifiable items which didn’t look as if they would fit comfortably over any part of my body. At the bottom of one of my bags, underneath an enormous vermilion parka, lay a coiled chain and a pair of metal dog tags engraved with my name and a long number. I arranged my clothes in neat piles on the carpet and eyed the others. They were beginning to try things on, so I tackled a pair of thermal longiohns with a willy-slit at the front. At one end of the room a curtain shielded us from a long counter to which we returned ill-fitting items to a blue-overalled clothing assistant who would scuttle away to pluck a different size pair of windpants or polypropylene glove liners from unseen mountain ranges of gear lurking in the hinterland.
    As we pulled, zipped, laced and