Time Warped by Claudia Hammond Page A

to keep a record of the precise hour at which he phoned, but not to reveal it to him. By the second morning Michel was already two hours off-kilter. Within a week he was two days behind reality. Within 10 days he thought night was day and even noted in his diary that with their cheery ‘Hellos’ the team sounded as though they’d been up for hours. In fact he had woken them yet again in the middle of night.
    During each phone call he took his pulse and counted from 1 to 120 at the rate of one digit per second. But here something extraordinary happened. He thought the count took the two minutes that it should, but his colleagues withthe stopwatch knew it was taking five minutes. Life without day or night had skewed his mind time. He had lost any accurate sense of the passage of hours or minutes and found he couldn’t even guess how long his phone call to the surface had lasted. Initially he used his Mario Lanza records to judge short periods of time, but soon, ‘The beginning and the end of a record blend and become integrated in the flood of time . . . Time no longer has any meaning for me. I am detached from it, I live outside time.’ Time had become something he could no longer judge, something he found strange. 37 He was undoubtedly bored and lonely, yet found that although each day felt endless, when he looked back he thought it had lasted far fewer hours than it really had. This is a common paradox of time. Yet it was passing even faster than he realised. He eked out his cheese rations to make it last the whole two months, but he was so wrong about time that in fact he needn’t have deprived himself.
    He did have a suspicion that he might not have the right date, that he might be a few days ahead, but insisted he couldn’t possibly be behind. Then the team suddenly announced that the experiment had come to an end and that it was already 14 September. He was astonished. He thought he had 25 days to go. But the discovery that he could now leave the damp cave behind and emerge into the sunlight did not bring him joy. Instead he was confused. He felt he had lost his sense of reality and as a result had lost 25 days. Where had that time gone? He felt cheated of his memories.
    Then time warped once again. Although he was expecting to stay for almost another month, as soon as he discovered that the team were on their way down to fetch him, timefelt unbearably slow. Even in the last few minutes before their arrival he wondered how they could be taking so long. He had always known that once the team arrived they would have to spend one more night underground getting everything ready for the ascent, but now he felt too impatient to wait. And he was afraid. He found himself overcome with the fear that having survived this long, he might die right at the last moment. The sound of every tiny rock fall or crack in the ice made him flinch. Finally his friends reached him and he felt calmer. They were disgusted by his rubbish tip, which was by now waist-high, but relieved to see that he was okay. At the last moment he delayed leaving. He knew the press was camped out on the surface waiting for his glorious arrival, but he continued collecting samples from inside the cave until his colleagues told him he really must stop.
    The journey back to the top was tough. In his weakened state he had to be winched up on a platform, but even so he blacked out and almost gave up when he had to climb using his own strength through what they called the cat hole. They covered his eyes to shield him from the daylight. He blacked out again and was rushed to a helicopter, but not before his friend Anne-Marie had held some fresh violets to his nose for him to smell. This was to become a very strong memory for him; the first nice smell he had experienced in two months.
    Some claimed the whole operation had been nothing more than a publicity stunt and that the phone contact meant he wasn’t truly living in isolation, but most accepted that at the age