The Nature of Ice Read online

  And still he loves.

  He feels a returning sense of calm by whittling this piece of precious wood, returning as he always will to timber, the steadfast companion throughout his life. He chisels the wood instinctively, keeping the pencil sketch from his journal on the bench for reference. He pares the wood to free the deepest part of himself, to create with his hands what others seem able to express so eloquently with words.

  In the time remaining he will finish the keepsake. Now he assesses the ruffle of a wing, considers how a needle of darker wood can be curved to form a beak. Once the bird is sanded and sealed, polished with beeswax and cut back to glassy smoothness, the honey-blond pine will gleam as it should. When the feathered breast of the snow petrel lustres, who but he will understand the leavings of his own heart etched through the lines?

  The Hague

  14 October 1912

  My Douglas,

  First of all I love you even more than when you left & there has not been a day—an hour almost—that you have not been in my thoughts. You will have a warm welcome on your return—my arms are open already as I think of it. Not only from your me but from our Mother and the others. I’m quite spoilt! They have tried to make up for your absence in vain but still it was & is angelic of them. But I had no idea I should miss you like this. Dearie, don’t go away again. I’m longing to hear you say you’ve wanted me often …

  We shall be very happy when you return with the separation behind us. Dear, I know you have done good work down there in the cold—you & your little hutfull of men. Things must have been hard now & then & perhaps you have not been able to do all you wish but remember that our aims must be the higher because we can never reach them, & you have done your best. We are all proud of you. Don’t be disappointed if you haven’t done all you wanted to. How often we have pictured you in your hut and sledging. I’m glad you don’t feel the cold as last trip. Of course it is my love that does it. I warm you every night …

  Oh how I hope it has done you nothing but good! You promised to come back fatter & better. It’s no use telling you to rest on the Aurora on its return voyage. Your book & reports will fill your time. But when we are married then my turn will come and Paquita is going to look after, scold and cuddle her Dougelly just as much as she pleases & as is good for him. So come back resigned my dear, I shall never let you go again &you will have me for the rest of your days. Can you stand it?We are going to do heaps of good work in all sorts of ways.

  I can’t stop yet. Is four letters too much? I have so wanted to write more but it would be all the same song. Of how we here have thought of you & how interested all my aunts & things are. And how many pretty things I have for our home, the first home in Australasia just as the head of it will be the first in the world to the other half of the head. Rather involved but perhaps you can untangle it.

  Now I shall stop. You are coming back to the warmest &lovingest heart that ever beat for its other half.

  I can almost feel your arms round me & involuntarily as I write lift my face to yours. Seventeen months without one caress! One embrace. We shall have something to make up for.

  With my hearts whole love to you my lover

  from your Paquita …

  Casket of ice

  17 January 1913

  THE SNOW BRIDGE GAVE WAY, the first hint of its existence the sound of splintering glass. He plunged feet-first, a corpse committed, his mind giddy in the vacuum of the fall. So this is the end.

  The rope jolted. A slap of shock reverberated through spine and jaw and yanked taut his canvas harness. He waited for the snap, the final letting go. In an instant sledge and belongings would follow him over the edge, plummet through the gaping mouth, crash down upon his head and send him on his way. He saw man and crevasse as if through a kaleidoscope: a discord of colour and shape, his emaciated body spinning free, prisms of turquoise changing hue, the rope that held him circling one way then the other. Below, a nothingness of black yawned in wait. He would leave this world without witness, without a trace. He reached for a memory, a reference, a feeling with which to equate the wonder of the crevasse, this casket of ice festooned with the most beautiful crystals imaginable. How else could colour and light, the last impression of life, the brink of death, be fully absorbed? Countless times in the last days he had speculated on what the end would be like. He had not counted on this: sweetness, the surrender of control, light welling from his empty gut, inflating his chest, flooding his limbs, his fingers, his feet—a bolt of white replete with warmth. Below, the abyss held the promise of release from a living hell. Beyond, the great Unknown.

  How long could his harness hold? He pictured the sledge fourteen feet above, its runners ground deep in snow. Would the slightest move on his part unbalance the load and set the sledge toppling? Or would the end be slow and cruel after all, snagged as a fish on a line?

  Bile rose in his throat for want of solid food to retch. Not lost on him was the irony, after stinting himself as close to starvation as a man could go, of the remaining provisions sitting untouched on his sledge. These last days across the glacier, sumptuous images of food had haunted him in his dreams. He had woken drooling from fantasies of confectionary splendour, until his saliva glands, as if in protest at unrewarded titillation, refused duty altogether. Inflamed membranes lining his mouth and nose had turned as parched as paper. His entire body—boils erupting on his legs and face, skin shedding, the soles of his feet still an atrocious sight—was decomposing ahead of time, impatient for his spirit to surrender. To have culminated in this— failure and waste; to think that at any moment now he would plunge into the bowel of the crevasse, having left this life without one last proper meal …

  He squinted upward into the glare of light. He could make out the overhang of ice, the rope from the sledge sawing the edge with each revolution. A deposit of snow broke from the lip and showered his face. His clothing was stuffed with snow from his plunge through the crevasse’s fragile bridge. The sensation of warmth had vanished and his skin now felt damp and cold. The chances of climbing out seemed pitifully small yet he thought of Providence, his old ally—would it offer him a second chance? When he stretched up to grasp a knot in the rope, the blackened end of a finger burst. Beads of blood—as brilliant red as the dilly bags Paquita had sewn—seeped through the threads of sisal. With a lunge he clenched the knot in the rope and pulled his body up. His lungs felt set to burst. In ten weeks on the plateau he had lost a cruel amount of weight, his flesh now sapped of strength. His mind revolved in concert with the rope, swaying between the effort it would take to continue, and the ease of simply slipping from the harness.

  He scanned the fathomless darkness below—if he fell on a ledge, he would linger in misery with broken bones. The words of Robert Service he had read in a rousing tone to his men at winter quarters (had he sounded self-righteous? a pompous ass?) mocked him. Just have one more try—it’s dead easy to die, It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard. He searched for a narrowing above where he might wedge his feet on either wall of the crevasse. He summoned the will to reach the next knot. His arms trembled as he pulled on his weight. He felt his throat bulge. He blanked out the blue above, and filled his mind with the sledge. If he made it to the top he would feast on food. If he reached the sledge he would gorge on dog and die a sated man.

  THE BIRTHPLACE

  OF BERGS

  GINGER’S FUSELAGE IS LADEN WITH a conglomeration of equipment, a skidoo strapped down, boxes shuddering beneath their cover of webbing. Earplugs dull the shriek of the Casa’s propellers, leaving Freya absorbed in the sphere of her camera. Adam Singer sits behind her in the plane’s only other row of seats.

  They leave the rocky hills of the Vestfolds for a vista of ice that runs as far along the coast as she can see.

  Adam nudges her. ‘Look.’

  An enormous edifice of white looms from the ocean, eclipsing all that surrounds it. The top of the tabular berg is riven with a patterned weave so graphic it does no
t immediately dawn on Freya that the entire surface comprises a crevasse field. Each glistening fissure threads the ice with a ribbon of steely blue.

  The plane banks to the left and leaves the coast behind, heading towards an icecap stretching south to the pole. The single interruption to the plateau is a nunatak, a mountain’s once-lofty peak reduced by a millennium of ice to a dark crown above the white.

  Adam slides an arm past Freya’s face and gestures towards the cockpit. The pilot sits in his seat absorbed in a Sudoku puzzle, the page angled to the light. Freya cranes her neck to check that someone is actually flying the plane but the co-pilot remains out of view. She prays Ginger will not share the fate of its canine namesake.

  THE CASA BEGINS A SHARP descent and Freya scans for where they could possibly land. Below lies a chaos of glacial ice. The plane veers and suddenly beneath them she can see Beaver Lake—frozen, limitless, aglitter.

  Adam picks at her shoulder with a demand for attention that’s as easy to ignore as the tap-tapping of a rock hammer.

  ‘Fifty k’s long!’ he bawls above the engine.

  ‘Huge!’ she bellows back.

  ‘… the fifties,’ he yells.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The old Beaver planes. Nineteen fifties they landed here.’

  ‘Wow.’

  Freya thinks it a mystery that a freshwater lake can exist so far inland from the coast and still be tidal. A curious linkage, that no one seems fully able to explain, binds the freshwater lake with ocean beneath the Amery Ice Shelf, two hundred and fifty kilometres away. The seal of ice keeps Beaver Lake’s upper layer of fresh water intact, while a vast distance below, an undercurrent of salty sea water ebbs and eddies in concert with the ocean’s tides. Impossible to comprehend the Amery Ice Shelf as a floating platform, seventy thousand square kilometres of ice rising and falling with each new tide.

  Antarctica, she thinks, is a place of perpetual layers where ice conceals all that it binds. An entire mountain range, all but its highest peak obscured by countless stratifications of ice, is reduced to a nunatak. Beneath an ice shelf hundreds of kilometres away, a channel of ocean runs so deep and far that it brines the base of a freshwater lake. To the west of Beaver Lake, the mountain peaks are the only glimmer of a continent locked beneath a fathomless crush of ice.

  When Freya steps from the plane onto the crystal rink, she scans the huddle of Apple field huts perched near the edge of the lake. On the opposite shore, elevated above the hills, lies the icecap. Chad told her about a mate, one of the early ANARE guys, who, in the 1950s, dog-sledged all the way from Mawson Station and arrived to see this frozen lake edged with a moat. They say the lake has not been seen as open water since. Interred within the plateau are the remains of old sledges, abandoned belongings, the jetsam of expeditions and bygone lives. Frozen relics of history, Freya thinks, that inhabit a sliver of the plateau’s overwhelming volume, the imprint of human spirit cached in one hundred years of ice.

  THEY HAVE TWO HOURS BEFORE Ginger leaves for her next port of call. The map indicates a nearby lookout with a good view, Adam says. They’ll see as far as Radok Lake, the deepest known in Antarctica.

  Adam slides the map into his pack and rubs his hands. ‘Two hours. The race is on. Sure your leg is up to it?’

  ‘Lead on.’ Freya smiles. He tries to take her pack. ‘You have your own pack, Adam. I can carry this.’

  He holds up his hands in retreat and gives her a wounded look. ‘No offence intended. Cross my heart.’

  ‘HOW ARE YOU ENJOYING DAVIS?’ Freya asks as they pace across the lake ice.

  ‘Between you and me,’ he says, ‘if it wasn’t for the money I’d shoot through at the end of summer. Rejoin the human race.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I work my heart out and hold the place together while every other bastard goes out in the field whenever they feel like it.’

  Freya wonders if he’s referring to Chad. ‘You’re out in the field now,’ she offers quietly.

  ‘Whoopie doo.’ He flaps his hands. ‘Second time in three months.’

  ‘Everyone says it’s different during winter with the smaller group. You enjoyed Macquarie Island.’

  ‘It won’t be like that here.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘A winter with fifteen men?’

  ‘And two women.’

  ‘That would be Kittie the dyke and a middle-aged doctor with a butt the size of a volkswagen who’s been stalking me half the summer.’

  Freya has to smile at the assessment. ‘I see.’

  ‘A fucking freak show,’ he says, walking on.

  FREYA COMPOSES THE RANGE OF hills they call the Devil’s Teeth, named for the flutings of snow that leave the rock face exposed in a line of Vs.

  ‘It’s fantastic. Would you like to take a look?’ She offers Adam the viewfinder of her panorama camera.

  But Adam is impatient to move on so they make their way to the edge of the gorge. Radok Lake has its own floating ice tongue but Freya can spy only a tip of ice.

  Adam beckons her closer to the edge of the ravine. ‘Come down. You can see it from here.’

  Freya treads cautiously, stones around her dislodging and tumbling towards the precipice. She is suddenly afraid.

  ‘Careful,’ he says, reaching out to help her.

  She accepts his hand but he grips it and pulls hard, feigning to send her over the edge. He steadies her and laughs, his arm fixed fast around her waist. Rocks bounce and fall and her knees threaten to buckle beneath her.

  ‘What the …’ Adam points overhead, seemingly oblivious to her distress.

  Snow petrels flutter in and out of the shadow of the gorge; tiny birds hundreds of kilometres from the coast.

  ‘What do they feed on?’ She moves away, cautious of Adam now, her heart still thudding.

  Adam shrugs. ‘How does anything survive? The place is a wasteland.’

  They find a navigable incline that takes them to the base of Pagodroma Gorge from where it’s an easy one-kilometre walk to Beaver Lake. She can see the fire-engine-red wings of the Casa parked out on the lake. An icy wind funnels through the shadowed ravine.

  ‘I’ll catch up.’ Freya slows, bemoaning the need to pee and the rigmarole involved.

  She finds a ridge of ice along the tide crack that shields her from view and begins the chore of removing layers of clothing. She strips off her ventile jacket to access her overall straps beneath. Her bare hands ache with cold as she fumbles with zips and clips and tugs at buttons and velcro tabs. She peels down windproof trousers, her yellow overalls, her woollen work trousers, her long johns and finally her underwear. She crouches on the ice in the wind, her weak leg held out at an angle, trying to bunch loose clothes in one hand, gather her shirt-tails in the other. Cold stings her bare skin.

  ‘I’ll take your camera bag,’ Adam calls from the other side of the ridge. ‘I’m heading out to the plane.’

  ‘Leave it,’ she answers. ‘I might still need it. You go on ahead.’

  To her annoyance he’s there when she emerges dishevelled, fumbling with clips. He has her camera bag propped on his shoulder.

  ‘Adam, I like to have it with me so I can use it.’

  ‘Come on,’ he pleads. ‘Let me feel useful. You might want to get used to it.’ He nods to the plane parked on the ice, its paintwork gleaming. ‘They’re off to Mawson Station tomorrow, your alter ego with them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘McGonigal’s shooting through.’

  Freya halts. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive. He surprised us all a few days ago. Said he’s had a gutful of the people and the place.’

  She feels Adam’s eyes on her and does her best to hide dismay.

  ‘These things are never easy,’ he says kindly.

  She remains silent, refusing to be coaxed into any conversation that could give herself, or Chad, away.

  ‘You can’t blame him, Freya.’ Adam speaks gently, privy,
it seems, to matters so intimate that it rocks her to think they’ve been shared. ‘It might be best for both of you this way.’

  Freya wills him to stop but he’s like a dog with a bone. ‘He was down here twelve months before you showed up. He would have been off his tree after spending a winter with twenty blokes. Twenty-one,’ he winks, ‘counting Elisia Hood.’

  She nods, her head a world away.

  ‘You probably stopped McGonigal going insane.’

  THE CASA BANKS, TIPS ITS wing abruptly as if caught unawares by something below. Through the window, Freya catches sight of a tiny dark speck—impossible to tell whether it’s a mountain or a stone. Perceptions of distance, size, perspective—a photographer’s sphere—are shot to pieces against the infinite planar of ice.

  As the plane descends, readying to land upon the ice shelf, objects on the ground sharpen and reveal themselves. Freya looks down upon a circle of tents faded to assorted shades of orange from their varying tours of duty. A larger Weatherhaven tent, its striped shell of blue and gold not yet bleached by sun or wind, looks as cheerful as a circus top. In the middle of the camp, plastic food bins sit in snow like the stones of a fire ring. At their centre, as if to mark this place, rises a cairn of ice topped with a bedraggled red star. Cairn and star hold fleeting claim upon the ice, staking a compass point, a grid reference, a name upon a map that is, for a time, the Amery Ice Shelf Summer Camp.