The Ice Lovers (7 page)

The following day the sun came out. Nara had not seen it for days and now its lordly beam seemed excessively intelligent, even malignant in its intentions.

She stepped out of the Otter and saw their world transformed. There was camp, more or less as they had left it, but with new snow cornices wrapped around the gear in sweeping parabolas, as in dreamy modernist architecture. The green tarp which covered the skidoo had disappeared beneath a drift. A line of green and red flags attached to an emaciated chorus of bamboo sticks led to the tents. Under the glare of the sun the snow burned the white-blue of phosphorous.

The spine of the Ellsworths soared above her; she had the impression the mountains were rising like loaves of bread, expanding, growing taller. The sun cast two black haloes above their peaks and she saw a black sky with white rings of powdered sunlight drawn in it. She had heard about these false suns, seen only in the highest latitudes of the polar regions. A single throbbing sun had parked itself over the tent, and to the right and the left, equidistant, two acolytes shimmered as if from behind a curtain of ice.

Later, back in the plane she told the pilot.

‘We call them Sun Dogs. Ice crystals in the sky, they refract the light. At times I get so used to seeing two or three suns, when I see the single one I think, where have the others gone? Wouldn't it be wonderful, if we had multiple suns?'

‘I think the planet would burn to a crisp, if we did,' she said.

‘I suppose. But it would be so beautiful.'

‘You see so much flying down here.'

‘I see it, but I don't always understand it. I wish I had a better education, sometimes. Maybe if I didn't spend so much time with scientists – with you –' he said it hastily, an awkward gesture of inclusion, ‘I'd be more content with the education I had.'

‘I'm not sure we're so well-educated, just specialised, more and more in fact, until you can only look at your little corner of the universe. You've seen more with your own eyes in a month than many Antarctic scientists would see in their entire working lives.'

‘I suppose,' he said. But this time the hesitant note had been evicted from his voice, and he sounded pleased, even vindicated.

The comms manager's voice stuttered into the cockpit on the radio. ‘Bravo Bravo, this is Adelaide calling. You can expect company this afternoon. Over.'

The pilot went to the microphone. ‘Roger that. Over.'

‘Who will come?'

He shrugged. ‘A mech, some scientists.' He no longer seemed to care whether they were rescued. And suddenly there it was, another plane, taxiing to a stop in front of them. They heard no buzz, no sounds of arrival. The other Otter opened its hatch and out spilled a mechanic, the spare part, some fuel drums, and two scientists.

The shock of other people made her euphorically friendly. She threw her arms around the pilot and the mechanic, although she had met them both only once on base. But she was also cagey, territorial about the Otter, the tent, the lifeline, their nightly talks about fear and survival. Only now, with the arrival of outsiders, did she realise how quickly had they built a universe between them, how complete it had been.

In an instant they tilted from a surfeit of time to a dangerous absence of it. Again her life became a haze of urgent actions: boxes; secure straps; blank down; valance; dig; snow. The mech was perched on the wing of the Otter, of her Otter, the pilot busy with dials. The other two scientists, whom she had never before met, would spend a month down in the camp she had painstakingly erected. They were geologists. We heard you had to lay up, they said. Back on base the field operations manager had been tearing his hair out – would have, had he any left, they said, and laughed.

Within an hour their plane was fixed. The pilot let her help unblank it. The plan was to get the plane going, fly to the fuel depot, then grab a couple of hours sleep and start back to Adelaide base. They would be flying all night, the pilot said. It would take them six hours, ‘at least', he said, to get back home.

They accelerated, skis sliding down the ramp of pristine snow. The wind snagged the Otter's wings from above and threw them into the air in a violent, shuddering ascent. ‘Thermals', the pilot said through the radio microphone, to reassure her.

The sun was a burnished white ellipsis in the sky. Fields of snow corrugated with sastrugi appeared beneath them, chromium in the glinting sun, raw mirrors from which they had to avert their eyes. As they rose, open meltpools appeared, then outlet glaciers, streaming toward the Bellingshausen Sea.

She looked back, over her shoulder, out the window.

‘Don't look back.' The sharpness of his tone startled her. She hauled her gaze forward.

‘Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you. But I never look back. It's a superstition, I guess,' he said.

The altimeter clicked, rolling its numbers higher and higher: four, five, eight thousand feet. They cleared the mountains and levelled out, heading east, toward the fuel depot. For a while they flew straight, interrupted only by radio contact with Ice Blue, and base. Suddenly, the pilot said, here.

She understood immediately what he meant. She shook her head.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘You can do it. Just keep your eyes on the artificial horizon, then look out the window. Take your cue from the land. Try to feel you're flying steady, then look back to the instrument panel to check. Keep your altitude, don't vary more than a hundred metres. If I ask you to take it down, dip your wrists very slightly. Watch your trim. Here, I'll show you.'

She put her hands on the controls and the pilot removed his. In her wrists lay the heaviness of the aircraft. It vibrated. Like an animal, she thought – the trembling, the indecision, the willingness to respond. As when she had ridden horses and directed their tonne of flesh with a flick of her wrist.

She flew it under his watchful eye, for how long she didn't know – it might have been half an hour, or several hours. Time ceased to flow as it normally did, because everything she was doing was so new. She was coming into the world, all over again.

She flew until they were over the nunataks which ran in waves from the Ice Blue runway toward the interior. The pilot said, ‘Here, I'll take her back.' They dropped altitude and she watched the arrow on the altimeter swing round and round: 9,000, 8,000, down to 500 and then suddenly they were on the ground and skiing to a stop.

The two field assistants in the melon hut gave them the same euphoric welcome she had given the stranger geologists. The pilot took a skidoo to do a radio check with base. She could imagine the field operations manager, the chief pilot, ordering him to stay the night rather than risk flying on no sleep and him saying, I'll tell you what I'm not going to risk, I've got one generator down and an indicator, the aft fuel pump...

At two in the morning they took off. When they had reached altitude he said here and again she took the plane in her hands. She had never concentrated so hard in her life. Her head throbbed with the effort.

The pilot might have noticed this because he said, ‘Here, give her back to me. I'll take us down lower. You'll be able to see – can't sightsee much when you're learning to fly.'

He dropped low to the ground, well underneath the mountains of Alexander Island to the west, a hundred miles away, over sliding serpentines of turquoise, glacial meltpools, minor freshwater lakes forming temporarily at the foot of a glacier. Some had amoebic, formless shapes, others drew sharp calligraphy with sudden upright characters.

Then the plane whipped over the cold white river of an ice stream. There were long blank periods when they did not talk, only looked down at the icefields, so void-like that her mind – whether through fatigue or some ordinary hallucination – began to produce a prairie and she saw wheat, trees, a floor of flowers; faint things becoming visible, then melting back into the whiteness. She thought she saw wolves loping over the ice, but this was only the light, grey and feral, and the shadow of the Otter with the sun behind it.

She wanted to imprint all this on her memory: the sheets of sea ice beneath them, the cold gold light of the early morning sun on the snow, the pilot beside her, an exhausted vigilance in his eyes. But just as quickly as impressions formed, they slid from whatever had produced them, neurons or synapses, before she could capture them, and she understood that these moments were meant to be lived, not thought, not remembered or savoured. Any real joy and thrill contained within it this elusiveness, and she would have to learn to be still, to observe, not to grasp at these things, even as they slid away.

The evening light wanted to condense into dusk. Her body waited for it to happen, an unnameable force tugging from within her, at the strings of the universe, asking for night. But it remained stalled, just as the sun was anchored in the sky, low over the horizon but not set, emitting two flutes of violent mauve and gold. She had never seen a sky so phenomenal. It was like looking out to space from another planet, the heavens familiar but subtly rearranged.

Suddenly they were levelling out in front of a gravel airstrip. ‘Keep your hands on the controls, but don't do anything,' he instructed. ‘I want you to feel it.'

She felt the power then of what he could do. It was immense, it encircled her but was inside her, too, it emanated from the empty land below them and their aloneness and the clouds.

He powered the engines down and they opened the cockpit doors. The light that greeted them was of a perpetual dawn. The hangar doors were shut, base was quiet; only the Met man would be up at this hour. A gang of skuas circled lazily at the north end of the runway. The engines off, the only sounds were of the plane creaking from the effort of what it had been through, the hangar doors rattling in the wind, the distant hum of the generator, the skuas' raw squawk.

It was five o'clock in the morning on December 23rd, 2011.

‘Well,' Luke turned to her, ‘home for tea and medals.'

2

Time is circular. The sun goes round and round in the sky. There is no end to the light, and no beginning. Yesterday and tomorrow are as one, artificial delegations, unruled by daylight. Nara has had no shadow for weeks and finds that she does not need it, this ghostly chaperone which has accompanied her all her life one way or another, in all other places. In the Antarctic something is falling away, falling off her, this nameless weight she has been carrying around.

They go skiing on the glacier. There was snow overnight, not the usual snow of the Antarctic: fine, crystalline, bone-dry, no this snow was soft. Although not too soft; just the right snow, said the field assistants, neither powdery nor slushy. There were so many types of snow, she was learning: grainy, soft, slushy, hard crusts, the brutal sastrugi, useless for skis, the hard meniscus cracking through to loafy snow, like wading through wet Styrofoam.

Eleven pm, midnight, two in the morning, and they are skiing on the glacier. This was what you could do in the Antarctic: ski at four in the morning, lie down and make snow angels, like children. She is only too happy to participate, but it strikes her that there is only one kind of fun permitted in the Antarctic, an obligatory recklessness.

Only now, very late in the evening, could she look at the icefield without the protection of her polarising glasses. It seared a pain through the mind, which was not about colour or reflection but an overdose of blankness. There was no enchantment in the polar day, only a solar floodlit glare, ruthlessly simplified, dragging all energy into itself. The light fed and exhausted her at once.

She skis, breathless, down the V-shaped slope, rising stiffly against jagged exposed rock. The Bergschrund at the top, sagging where the rock and the icefield parted, a light turquoise congealed abyss. The moon is mute in the nightless sky, a gauzy white shadow.

Skiers hurtle down the ice sheet with the most gargantuan landscape they have ever encountered in front of them. The ordinary mountains of the pensinsula are as large as those of the Rockies, or the lesser Himalayas. Up and down they shuttle, skiing to the bottom, then hauled back to the top on the end of ropes by skidoos, the snow angels flapping in the snowfield – that was the original task of the angels, Nara remembers: they were messengers, transmitters from God to man.

She is a terrible skier. She is starving and her cheeks burn from the cold. The drynesss of the air sears her throat. Her mouth is bleeding at the corners. Two little open, messy wounds where spit accumulates, then dries, forming a thin milk crust. She is living so fast, here, everything refuses to stop and be understood. It feels like being out of breath.

At the same time she feels herself growing physically, her chest expanding, becoming man-sized, until she might explode. This intermittent feeling of power arrives accompanied by an indefinite hunger, she does not know for what: it passes through her with the force of one of those gravity-driven winds they called katabatic: not so much an explosion as a dream.

There must be somewhere beyond sentinel mountains, beyond the horizon. It seems too incredible that she is out of the world, she has escaped. She has been lifted out of her life and deposited on an Antarctic glacier by an unseen hand, among these people. Angels fallen to earth.

A week after her return from the Ellsworths Nara went for her first dive in the bay to collect samples. She would place these creatures in her acquaria with their warming waters.

She slipped through a thin broken cover of sea ice, into the darkness guided only by her torch. Sea-sponges, gigantic, overfed on the cold nutrients of the water, sprouted on the seabed; she saw sea-squirts with their sodden turnip flesh, which attached themselves to the smooth basalt sides of an underwater cleft. Also sea-spiders, nematode worms, starfish the colours of bruises. The ice above her acted as a lid. No light, apart from a weak gleam, penetrated. On the surface the boatman awaited her signal.