Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler Page A

finished the book in my office late one night, and the light from the Anglepoise lamp spilled into the dark corridor. Hans, a Danish fish biologist on Art’s project, came in and installed himself on the spare chair. We must have been the only people in the building, and it was as silent as a mausoleum. He made small talk for a few minutes, but he was fidgeting, as if he were trying to release an object that had got stuck between the layers of his garments. When he started saying what he had come to say all along, it spewed out like a torrent of coins from a slot machine.
    He had fallen in love five weeks before coming south.
    â€˜Britta is fifteen years younger than I, but one day after I met her, I was in love,’ he said in his musical Danish accent. ‘The next five weeks were like rushing towards a waterfall, becoming faster all the time. I find a branch to cling to and everything would be OK for a while, but then I would be swept away again. Then comes the day when no branches are left.’
    He wrote every day, and once a week he sent a present, too, a commitment which must have tested his imagination as there weren’t any shops except the navy store, and that offered a limited range of out-of-date film, tampax and Y-fronts.
    â€˜I am an all or nothing man,’ he said seriously, zipping himself into his vermilion parka and setting off to write another instalment.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The Other Side of Silence
    . . . A thousand visages
    Then mark’d I, which the keen and eager cold
    Had shaped into a doggish grin; whence creeps
    A shivering horror o’er me, at the thought
    Of those frore shallows. While we journey’d on
    Toward the middle, at whose point unites
    All heavy substance, and I trembling went
    Through that eternal chillness . . .
    Dante, from The Divine Comedy
    A SERIES of arid valleys run off the Antarctic continent opposite Ross Island, created by the advances and retreats of glaciers through the Transantarctic mountains. These dry valleys, free of ice for about four million years, are dotted with partially frozen saltwater basins and form one of the most extreme deserts in the world. NASA wanted to test robotic probes there before sending them on interplanetary missions.
    â€˜It’s as close to Mars as we can get,’ one of the engineers said.
    At the orientation conference in Virginia I had met Brian Howes and Dale Goehringer, coastal ecologists working at Lake Fryxell, the first of the three frozen lakes in the Taylor Valley. They had invited me to stay at their camp, so three weeks after I arrived in Antarctica I checked out a set of equipment at the Berg Field Center, sorting through tents, thermarests and crampons and painting my initials on a shiny blue ice axe, and one morning I hitched a lift in a helicopter resupplying a camp farther up the valley.
    Less than an hour after leaving McMurdo, the pilot put down on a rocky strip of land between a parched mountain and a large frozen lake. He signalled for me to get out. It had not rained here for two million years.
    A hundred yards from the edge of the lake a figure darted out of an arched rigid-frame tent known as a Jamesway. I had heard a good deal about Jamesways. They were ubiquitous in long-term American field camps and constituted the heart of camp, too, like the kitchen in a farmhouse. An invention of the military, Jamesways are portable insulated tents of standard width and height but variable length – to make them longer, you add more arches. They have board floors and a proper door, and in Antarctica are heated by drip-oil Preway burners.
    The figure trotting towards me from the Fryxell Jamesway had long straight hair the colour of cinnamon sticks, and she was waving. It was Dale. At home she ran a lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.
    â€˜Welcome to Fryxell!’ she said. ‘We’ve been looking forward to seeing you. I washed my hair specially.’