The Ice Lovers (4 page)

Helen knew little about sea ice, or the continent itself. She learned that for a long time, before anyone had known for sure it existed, the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego had called Antarctica ‘the place where the wind is born'. The winds of the Antarctic were unlike anywhere else on earth, the katabatic winds driven neither by the earth's rotation nor by the Coriolis effect. These were the winds that made the frozen karst of the Antarctic plateau, fractured by fissures and sudden sinks called crevasses. These were the winds that, along with the ocean currents, made sea ice fractured and unstable, ramming it together with the violence of tectonic plates, piling mountain ridges of ice where they collide.

She never imagined that she would spend years thinking about the properties of ice, both physical and emotional; that she would see the light move along the 80th parallel, that low, sullen steely light. Hawk sky, black water. All this began as an idea, which was itself an escape, she understood – a detour, a distraction from a life which had become excessively real. For Helen, the Antarctic started as a single crystal which then grew, adding mass and complexity to itself, until it became a gigantic ice palace which would stalk her dreams for the rest of her life.

The crystal river woman had told Helen that the planet's life was changing. It was like a quickening, she said. ‘Everything will happen faster and faster.' Helen listened, unusually patient with this kind of drivel – what, she thought, was everything?

‘It's like the planet has a heart, and a mind, and they have just started to work faster. We will know who we are, soon,' the crystal river woman said, her voice unconcerned, bright with educated vowels, not at all baleful or spooky. ‘We will finally understand.' The revelation would be about the reason why people were here at all, about the planet itself, although she couldn't say what, or when ‘soon' was.

Helen was unimpressed by lazy apocalyptic pronouncements. This was one of the reasons she stopped going to see the crystal river woman – deciding she was over Eric, over death, over shock, over everything. From now on, she would bury herself in her research. She would give herself over to the facts, to the ice.

The Polar Research Council library has remained the same since the 1870s. In good Victorian style the bathrooms are always cold, the chairs straightbacked. Helen has joined the tribe of too-skinny men and young women with frizzed hair pursuing obscure PhDs who frequent it. They scribble their doctorate titles in the signing-in book: cryospheric-meteorite interactions in the paleozoic shadows of the last glacial maximum.

The ice scholars arrive, say hello to the librarians, put their belongings in metal lockers, turn the key, and keep the little number in their pocket. The lockers are not to stop belongings from being stolen, but to guard against people thieving books. There are many treasures in the library, thousands of volumes of explorer diaries, originals, photographs, the first cartographically correct maps of the Arctic and the Antarctic.

From time to time Helen takes breaks and goes to stand in front of a full-sized model of an explorer (Nansen, in this case, in Greenland) downstairs, inspects his moleskin trousers, reindeer jacket – its fur patches frayed, the white fur sallow, tattered deerskin mittens and disintegrating caribou sinews. Nansen was a poet as well as a man of the ice, Helen learns, he kept his sense of wonder fresh throughout his polar career. She reads The Winter Night, Nansen's account of a winter spent voluntarily iced in, his ship drifting with the Arctic pack ice:

Nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist than the Arctic night. It is dreamland, painted in the imagination's most delicate tints; it is colour etherealised. One shade melts into the other, so that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms – it is all faint, dreamy colour music … the sky is like an enormous cupola, blue at the zenith, shading down into green, and then into lilac and violet at the edges. Presently the aurora borealis shakes over the vault of heaven its veil of littering silver. Presently it shimmers in tongues of flame over the very zenith, and then again it shoots a bright ray right up from the horizon, until the whole melts away in the moonlight, and it is as though one heard the sigh of a departing spirit. And all the time this utter stillness.

Before she took an interest in Nara's story, polar explorers seemed to Helen only rash self-abusers, dancing a dangerous pas de deux with death. But now she is transfixed by the mystery of why so many of these explorers were such superlative writers. In the library Helen reads everything she can about oceanography, marine biology in high latitudes, atmospheric science, meteorology, geophysics, glaciology and glacial chemistry.

Nara was a marine biologist, but she had trained as an oceanographer first. So Helen sets herself to read about the great ocean currents, the Antarctic Circumpolar current, an orbital highway of fast-flowing water, encircling the continent. She reads about Antarctic cyclones, how these can persist for days or even weeks – a week-long blizzard, the wind never abating from hurricane force. She reads about the properties of water: salinity, fronts and mixing, ice volume, temperature, alkalinity, carbonate cycle, CCD and Lysocline. Everything, it turns out, even water, is much more complex than you would think.

Only slowly did Helen come to understand that in order to write her story – if there was any story to write – she needed to go there. Access to the Antarctic had become even more restricted since the Treaty had been violated, first by Russia, then by the United States, and tensions between Argentina and Britain were running at an all-time high since the Falklands War 35 years ago and it took her many months to get permission to travel there. In fact, in all her career, she'd never had to jump through as many hoops in pursuit of a story: permission was required from the Foreign Office, the National Science Council, the Antarctic Research Fund, the Polar Research Council, the Falkland Islands Government, and finally, the Royal Navy, via the Ministry of Defence. It took weeks of emails, telephone calls, even an old-fashioned letter or two to confirm her character, professional particulars. I am an historian – this is how she began her beseeching letters; historian sounded less slippery than journalist, she judged, and less of a threat. What has happened in the past is never as controversial as what is happening in the now.

Then national security clearance, criminal records checks, and a renewal of her passport so that it would be valid for two years from her date of departure. No one would give her a straight answer as to why, apart from saying that her passport had to be valid when she returned. ‘But I'm only going for six weeks, not six years,' she'd said, when faced with the Foreign Office official (one of David's underlings – later she would realise, what if it had been him? What if they had met that way?).

In late November of that year Helen turned up at Heathrow and joined a group organised by the Polar Council. They would fly to the Antarctic via Madrid, Santiago de Chile, and finally the Falklands, where they would join the supply ship. An old friend, a Spanish colleague, came to see her off. At the gate they said their goodbyes. Then, at the last moment, he turned to her and said, el amor siempre es bueno entre seres humanos. Much later that night, as she flew over the Brazilian Amazon, his phrase would reverberate in her mind: Love between people is always a good thing.

PART II
Land of Ice and Fire

1

In the austral summer of 2011 a Twin Otter flew through the lonely Antarctic skies. The plane's shadow flickered across the ice sheet below, projected by the white sun. The plane flew over muscles of ice driven by a vital current. The ice sheet undulated with these ice streams, high-velocity frozen rivers forced by friction melt from the ice cap into the sea.

Cloud Types for Observers, the cloud atlas Nara had brought along, lay open on her lap. On the way down she tried out the names: lenticular, nimbostratus, altostratus, stratocumulus; nacreous, virga, corona. On the intercom the pilot said, ‘You see clouds down here like nowhere else on earth. Those are my favourite,' he pointed out the cockpit window, in the direction of a spaceship. Nara had seen one or two of these clouds over the mountains on base; they hovered, static, their edges whipped by wind into saucer-like rims. ‘Lenticulars. You only ever see them near mountains. We try to avoid them, they have rotor systems that cause terrible turbulence.'

She stole a look at him then, from her position in the copilot's seat: a pleasant face, not handsome. A man in his fifties perhaps, his hair still dark. He must feel so capable, she thought. He can fly a machine across the world, he can fly it anywhere into this empty continent, armed only with a GPS coordinate. Now they were heading to such a place, only a collection of numbers on a still-unmapped part of the continent near Mount Vinson and Mount Gardner in the Ellsworth range, an area even now seen by few human eyes.

They had met for the first time that morning at the weather briefing on base. He was poring over satellite maps and weather charts. ‘Looks like a dingle day,' he'd said. ‘Dingle' was an authentic Antarctic word, it meant clear, and fine – much as it sounded, she supposed – a little bell ringing.

Then, as if he remembered she were there at all, the pilot looked at her and smiled. ‘It's your first time out in the field?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, you'll love it.' The pilot gathered up his charts. ‘I'll see you in the hangar in half an hour.'

She realised, watching him walk away, that she hadn't asked his name. He would know hers, of course, at least her first name, and would have a vague idea of what she was doing in the Antarctic. Nobody wants to know about us. We're just the bus drivers down here – she had overheard another pilot say this in the bar one night soon after she arrived. She resolved that at the right moment she would ask the pilot about his life. She would ask him his name.

When they landed, the snowfield was a regal stunned sheet of white rising up to meet them. The skis touched down and a curtain of snow crystals flew up and covered the windscreen. The sky was an insolent, lordly blue.

Before Nara had a chance to register the cold, the wind, the stinging sun, she was out the door and helping the pilot shift boxes. They were there to set up camp and then fly back to the fuel depot. The scientists were being ferried down in the larger plane, along with the skidoos, the sledges, and the rest of the tents. All this had been decided in the same logistical haze she had barely become accustomed to. Everything in this new life was governed by the Field Operations Manager, or the weather, or a cunning hybrid of the two. Everything was beyond her control. She was expected to do as she was told. When did she join the Army, she wondered.

Amidst the dead weight of boxes, some far too heavy for her; squeak of snow; the zinc smell of Factor 60, its metallic taste hovering on the edge of her lips, she was overtaken suddenly by a powerful feeling she could not name. She could only say she felt forsaken, not by anyone she knew, any human being, but by a much larger entity that had suddenly appeared and expanded to fill the brass sky, the cold zeal of the air. Some brutal censor was looking at her, it had her snared in its gaze. She registered this with a thin, skating alarm. She was not religious, she had never had such thoughts in her life.

She looked up to see herself staring back at her – a reflection in the pilot's polarised sunglasses. These sunglasses, which were official issue, had the effect of thinning out people's faces and drawing up the corners of their mouths, making them look like a troupe of black-eyed aliens.

‘We'd better get a move on,' he said. ‘The Met said the weather could close in today. There's a low pressure system over the Bellingshausen. I reckon we should make tracks back to Ice Blue.'

They worked quickly, then, erecting pyramid tents in minutes, weighing them down with snow on the skirts, tying off valances. Then they rolled the skidoo from the back of the fuselage to where it would stay parked beside one of the tents, covered in a green tarpaulin.

She stole a moment to look at the landscape around her. The mountains were the colour of cinders. White cascades of ice streaked their flanks. The peaks were twenty miles away, but they towered right above, and she felt as if she could touch them. Then another fleeting impression, so strange she stopped in her tracks and stared: it was as if the mountains were moving, very slowly, toward them.

‘We might be the first human beings to set foot here,' the pilot said. ‘I'll plot the GPS and look at the data when we get back to base. Then we'll know for sure. How many people in the world can say: I am the first human to ever stand on this spot.'

The scientist within her said, ‘Is it possible to know for sure?'

‘Of course it is, this is the Antarctic. It's like nowhere on earth. In fact, we're not actually on earth, here, that's how I think about it. It's like outer space. A new planet, a new life.' His laugh then was strange and private. She could not see his eyes.

Seven hours later, the pilot was in the cockpit talking to base on the HF about a minor mechanical problem, discovered when he had revved the engines to fly them out. To the comms manager on base he spoke in a language she did not understand: aft boost, oil press, carb heat, hung start, shutdown. He still wore his sunglasses, so she had to look at his mouth for clues to the seriousness of their problem. The edges of his lips dipped, a slightly sour, masculine expression of disappointment.

The weather was closing in. The weather changed so quickly; she only had time to perceive a gleam of albedo before the sun was shuttered by cloud, then a gathering dark, unnaturally fast, as in an eclipse. This was the chrome edge of a blizzard bearing down on them from the mountains.

Her watch read 2, but it could have been 2am or 2pm; in the twenty-four-hour daylight they looked exactly the same.