Antarctica

3 In the Antarctic Grain

Within hours of his arrival at the South Pole, X was on a Herc back to McMurdo. His welcome at the Pole was wary at best; no doubt he was regarded as some kind of Jonah; and as there was a plane on the skiway waiting to take off, he was whisked onto it without seeing a thing of the celebrated new station. Ninety degrees south, bye-bye.

Back in McMurdo he was taken directly from the Herc to the Chalet, where he was questioned intensively by his ASL bosses and many NSF people, as well as investigators brought down especially from the north; a big meeting, to which X was able to contribute very little, and indeed after telling his story he was soon ignored by the others while they discussed a number of other odd incidents of which he had been heretofore unaware. The nature of some of these incidents made it clear that his trip as conductor of the SPOT train had not been anywhere near as straightforward as he had been led to believe, a fact which no one at the meeting noticed, of course. He was just part of the train’s software, in an oversized package. A kind of organic robot.

In fact, he thought as he watched the others talk things over, his entire job as General Field Assistant was in effect to be doing the robot work that robots could not yet do. He had come to Antarctica to seek adventure and here he was stuck in Mac Town, shoveling snow, cleaning bathrooms, washing galley ovens, humping loads, yes, even peeling potatoes. Every day a different mindless labor. Good For Anything indeed.

As if to illustrate this thought, he was excused from the meeting to answer a call from Ron to report to the heavy shop. There he found that a forklift operator had accidentally forked through a wall and struck the frame of some shelving in the next room, knocking it onto the floor along with all its bins and cups and drawers full of nuts, bolts, screws, nails, clips, cotter pins, washers, and other assorted small hardware, now all strewn on the floor in a big heap.

Ron came in and smiled cruelly. “Clean this up, X.”

As head of Mac Town maintenance Ron was often X’s boss; also president of the local chapter of the Why Be Normal Club, which in McMurdo was saying a lot. He was one of several old iceheads who had been around so long they thought they were secret masters of McMurdo, and Ron was more correct in this opinion than most. But his charm for X, such as it was, had long since worn off.

“Yes, boss,” X said to the now-empty doorway. Clearly it was robot work of the worst sort, except that robots were still too stupid to distinguish between a nut and a bolt. So X sat down heavily on the chilled concrete floor and started sorting, trying to treat it like some kind of Zen exercise, but fuming more and more as the hours passed: it was not human work. And it did not help that at every meal break he shambled into the galley black-fingered and smelling of motor grease and concrete floors, to contemplate over his meal the beakers at their round tables chatting away, completely oblivious to him. Of course there was no such thing as class in America, which was why the beakers here could be outfitted in red parkas with their names on their lapels, while the ASL folks generally wore tan Carhartt overalls with labels on the lapels that said Small, Medium, Large or Extra Large—pick your size!—and yet no one noticed this distinction or commented on it. The beakers wandered over to the galley from the Crary Lab, on their own schedules, clearly having the time of their lives; they were on fast career tracks by being down here doing whatever they were doing, mostly wandering the landscape and knocking off bits of it, as far as X could see, and then dating the bits. And this was their work; people paid them money for this; they had nice upper-middle-class homes and families and lives and careers, all from doing this kind of thing. This was how they earned their paychecks! While fraternizing with them in the same galley were people working for hourly wages, on seasonal contracts—lifting loads, freezing their butts, losing fingernails crushed under metal objects, running machinery, crawling in utilidors, gaining no career credits to speak of—all to keep the infrastructure and services going which allowed the beakers to gallivant about fishing or watching penguins, or deciding whether their bits of rock were old or real old.

So X fumed as he returned from the galley to his concrete floor and resumed sorting ironmongery. No, it was a class system, no doubt about it. Watching the scene in Mac Town, X’s reading was finally beginning to coalesce for him; it was all beginning to fall into place. Back in the world the overwhelming flood of information clouded the certainty of any analysis, there was just so much of everything that any description of it might be true. But here they were living in a stripped-down microcosm, “Little America” as one precursor base had been named; and X saw that it was the global class system in miniature, everything clearly laid out, and shockingly similar to accounts he had read of Tsarist Russia, not to mention pharaonic Egypt: a ruling caste and an underclass, aristocrats and serfs, with a few middlemen thrown in. The red parkas and tan Carhartts only color-coded it, as if ASL and NSF knew all about it and knew also that they could shove it in people’s faces and no one would protest, not in this the globally downsized postrevolutionary massively fortified stage of very late capitalism. The in-your-face effrontery of it made X even angrier, and as he continued to pluck up nuts and washers from the concrete and drop them in their proper bins, he fantasized images of slave revolts, Spartacus, general strikes—in short, revolution. Guillotines on Beeker Street!

Except with a little more thought—and sitting on that cold concrete, he had a lot of time for thought—the image of the guillotine made it clear how impossible these fantasies were. Not in the practical logistical sense, as the heavy shop could probably bang together a guillotine in a day—but in the problem of all the fraternizing, the small numbers, the close quarters, the common galley. The common workout on the ice. All that meant that he and the rest of the Carhartts met a lot of beakers at least briefly, and 90% of them were very nice people—or say 80%—or at least 75%—but wait, there he was going into beaker mode himself, got to watch out for that, it was catching—anyway, they were just people. Lucky to have good jobs, and often kind of eccentric, but nice—the young women very nice, in fact, and seldom at all standoffish, nicer often than the ASL women in fact, counting on the red parka to protect them perhaps—but nice smiles, very friendly, and often very smart. But also quite often deeply spaced, in classic beaker absent-minded-professor mode; all the ASL folks cherished their various stories of beaker spaciness, the latest going the rounds being the one about a beaker who had decided to end thumb fatigue on snowmobiles by tying the throttle lever tight to the handlebar and then starting the engine with a pull start while standing beside it, so that the snowmobile had taken off solo across the sea ice never to be seen again, no doubt ending up down on the bottom of the bay next to the motor tractor the Scott party had mishandled over the side of their ship, an early example of beaker incompetence—

Ron appeared in the door, breaking this train of thought with a rude snort. “Still picking this shit up, X? You’ve been at it for three days now!”

“Yes.” Through clenched teeth.

“Well now you’re needed elsewhere. Get down to the helo pad real quick, you needed to be there ten minutes ago, and finish this off soon as you get back. Du musst schon gegangen sein!”

“Jawohl, Herr Commandant.”

And suddenly he was down at the helo pad, earplugs in, then wedged in the back of a helo with a bunch of equipment, no view, no headset, feeling the thing chuntering over the Sea ice to somewhere in the Dry Valleys, he didn’t even know where. He was dropped with some equipment in brilliant low sunshine and frigid cold, in a brown shadow-crossed windy valley like a freeze-dried Nevada.

After the helo had dragonflied away and the vast windy silence had descended on him, a group of beakers hiked over to the pile of dropped gear and shook gloved hands with him, and introduced themselves: an older man, Geoffrey Michelson, no doubt the principal investigator; and three somewhat younger men, one the group’s mountaineer. X’s boss for the day was a Kiwi named Graham Forbes. A grad student had gotten sick and been medevacked out, and so on this day Forbes needed some help writing down figures he would be reading off the landscape. It would make the work go a lot faster. He looked to the side as he told X about this, almost as if embarrassed, although otherwise he showed no sign of any emotion at all; on the contrary he exhibited what X had come to think of as the pure beaker style, consisting of a Spocklike objectivity and deadened affect so severe that it was an open question whether he would have been able to pass a Turing test.

So: writing down numbers. “Fine,” X said. It had to beat picking nails off the floor.

And at first it did. Forbes wandered away from the other beakers, and X followed, and they got right to work. But it was a windy day, the katabatic wind falling off the polar ice cap and whistling down the dry valleys, making all outdoor work miserable indeed, especially if you were just sitting on the ground writing figures in a notebook. Forbes was doing fabric samples, he explained as he wandered around looking at the ground through a box. That meant measuring the compass orientation of fifty random elongated pebbles in a particular area. So he was looking at pebbles through the compass box and calling out “351 … 157 … 18 … 42,” and so on endlessly, and X was writing the numbers down in columns of ten. Fine.

Over and over they did this. As they worked and the day passed it got windier, and the chill factor went plummeting far below zero—down, down, down—into the minus 40s, X reckoned, even perhaps the 50s. Between samples he tried first all the gloves in his daypack, then all the mittens, then all the mittens over the gloves, his cold hands so numbed inside the thick masses of cloth that he could scarcely grip a pencil, much less write legibly—nose and eyes running—his face getting so numb that he could barely answer the group’s mountaineer’s questions when the mountaineer came by, barely even remember to conform to the mountaineer’s protocol, which consisted of answering him by putting both hands on one’s head and exclaiming “I AM FINE SIR!” The mountaineer had instituted this regime because in situations of severe cold, common sense was one of the first things to go, causing many a deeply hypothermic person to mutter “I’m okay” and soon after fall like a block of ice and die. So they were supposed to remember something slightly out of the ordinary to show they had not done a Paul Revere (and gone a little light in the belfry), and thus when the mountaineer came by, grinning crazily and inquiring how they were, X and Forbes lifted their mittens onto their heads and replied “I AM FINE SIR,” when obviously any group that had to institute such a system was not fine at all, and needed to get to shelter as fast as possible. Not that there was any shelter. They were many miles from shelter of any kind, the beakers’ camp being over in the next valley, and X’s helo pickup not scheduled for hours and hours. Of course they could have huddled in the sunny lee of a boulder and eaten chocolate bars for the caloric infusion of warmth; but no. This Forbes compassed pebble after pebble, section after section, doggedly oblivious to the frigid chill. Of course X had been out in bad cold before, exposed to the bitter winds through the gap just behind the cold workyards of Mac Town. He had been teamed there with old iceheads who sometimes worked on in the teeth of the coldest windy colds, as a kind of icehead rite or contest, punishing themselves to the limit and carrying on anyway, cursing brutally and muscling through everything with a tight hunched savage cold efficiency, so that they could finally finish whatever it was they were doing and stagger down into the galley near dead, take their temperatures and get readings like 93 or 92 and say “Yar” and “Fuck” and thaw themselves out over giant hot meals, and mug after mug of hot coffee and hot chocolate, growling at the beaker girls and their icy hearts, or at friends who passed by, “Grrrrrrrr, grrrrrrrr,” knowing that they were the iciest of iceheads, the hardest Antarcticans of all. Just growl and go, as the old Brit seamen had said. Grin and bear it. It was a real cold macho thing.

But this guy Forbes wasn’t like that. He seemed oblivious to the cold, and was certainly ignoring it; hunkering down a bit perhaps, pinched, focused on the work to the exclusion of all else; so focused that he might not notice if he precipitated and flashfroze in position, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz: the Ice Beaker, still creaking his numbers through frozen jaws, intent on the rock under him to the point of crystallization and beyond. It was a scary thing to witness. X’s hands were now so cold they felt like insufficiently microwaved steak from the freezer, soft at the edges but stiff underneath. His butt was cold and the ground was cold and the light slanting down the valley was cold in his eyes. The cold air rushed over him, each gust a bitter chill slap pushing into his cold lungs, and though X had to admit that the passage down his cold throat appeared to thaw the air to the point that his chest did not actually freeze from inside, still, as the cold had been filtered on its cold way down, his cold nose had frozen and his cold brain was a frigid white block of hard cold clay, plunging further down the scale of coldness with every cold breath, colder and colder, down toward absolute zero, his cold thoughts numbly syruping from crystallizing synapse to frozen axon, every molecule of mind freezing slowly as it chilled in sad cold viscous thrall to helpless memories of his ice maiden’s cold treatment of him, terrible freezer burn from her brutal cold treatment that had frozen his heart forever. A bronze man in a bronze land. Absolute zero cold. Total frozen immobility. End of timespace. Very cold. Cold cold cold.

Finally the mountaineer came by and rescued X from his insane master for the day. “His helo’s coming soon,” he told Forbes, “and we need to get back to camp.”

“All right.”

X got to his feet, a ten-part movement with lots of care necessary to balance all the frozen components. As they creaked back to the helo rendezvous he tried to concentrate on the figures he had written rather than his painful fingers. “Looks like the average of this last fifty will be about a hundred or so,” he noted.

Forbes looked up from the ground which he was still inspecting, hunched forward as they walked. “That’s not what we do.”

He explained that the figures had to be run through a sophisticated analysis, which only then would tell one how randomly the pebbles had fallen. If there were patterns of a certain kind, then a stream had probably run over them and sorted them lengthwise to the flow, while a completely random orientation indicated deposit through the still water of a lake or pond.

“Ah,” X said, amazed at what beakers came up with. It was really quite beautiful. Not so beautiful as to justify freezing to death, of course—not unless you were very obsessive-compulsive—but then again so many beakers were obsessive-compulsive. It was practically the definition of the type. So it could be said that Antarctica was an entire continent ruled by obsessive-compulsives—just like all the rest of them, now that he thought of it, but elsewhere not so cold-hardened by their obsessions. This Forbes was almost as bad as the mountaineers, who ran around the ice as ecstatic as dogs all the time, because these were just the kinds of dreadful conditions they craved and sought out all over the world; Antarctica gave them a continuous supply, so they loved Antarctica and were happy all the time, like Val. No, the beakers were more normal than that, even the cold-hardened ones like this guy. Just as normal and friendly and hard-working as anyone else. And the occasional high-handed snob—well, there were jerks in every job. Like Ron, for instance. No, jerks were scattered at every level up and down the hierarchy; but most people were not like that.

And so, no guillotines. No revolution; no strike. Obviously. X shook his head, trying to rid it of that whole train of thought, and said, “What’s your field? What are you guys studying?”

Forbes glanced at him, trying to judge the level of answer he should make. “I’m a glaciologist. A glacial sedimentologist.”

This struck X as a bit fine; next he’d be saying that he was actually a lateral morainologist. But X let it pass.

“We’re looking at sandstones in the Sirius group. They’re at the center of a controversy concerning the age of the big polar cap. The standard view had the polar cap being a stable feature about fourteen million years old, or older. But this group thinks the ice was mostly gone three million years ago, during a warm period in the Pliocene.”

“You don’t agree?”

“No no, I think they have a good case. They’ve identified marine microfossils in Sirius rock that date from the Pliocene, and biostratification is a well-established dating method. So there had to be liquid water, in places where now there’s only ice. Now they’re looking for other confirmation of this view, and so they’ve invited me to join them.”

“And as a glaciologist, you …”

“The Sirius group is fossil glacial till, that much is clear. So I’m looking for things that glacial sediment can tell us. How the sediment was laid, in what conditions—disconformities to show where things changed—that kind of thing.”

In cold slow motion, X considered it. “Liquid water? Like sea level?”

“Possibly. The dry valleys that open onto the sea are paleofjords, that much is clear.”

“But aren’t we really high here? You aren’t saying that sea level was this high, are you?”

Forbes glanced at him again. “No. The idea would be that these deposits were made when the land was much lower, and then the Transantarctics rose substantially.”

“This far up in the last three million years?” X asked. “Isn’t that kind of fast for mountain uplift?”

He had no idea, actually, but again Forbes glanced at him, eyebrows raised. “I’m not a geomorphologist,” he said at last.

Now that was the pure beaker style. And the other scientists were closing on them as they all approached the helo rendezvous from different directions, converging at a flat spot on the empty brown valley floor. This guy would not want to talk about the group’s project to an amateur with the other members of the group there to hear; none of them liked to do that. So X shrugged and slouched down heavily in the lee of a rock. “Neither am I,” he said to Forbes, sharply enough to get yet another surprised look.

Then the red dragon choppered out of the pale sky, and X was heloed back to Mac Town like a big side of frozen beef. And the next morning, still cold even after huddling all night in his thick blankets, he was back in the heavy shop on the floor, picking up nuts and bolts as if the Nevada freeze-drying had never happened. The pile of metal parts on the floor did not look any smaller than when he had started. It began to seem a kind of Sisyphean labor, and X wondered if Ron might be dumping new junk on the pile at night, in one of his awful practical jokes. The pile would never end. It was the Good For Anything’s nightmare job. He was Sisyphus; he was the Golem, made for dead work; he was Frankenstein’s monster, big and misshapen and clumsy. Call me X. It was interesting how many flaws there were in screw threading, and how few washers were truly flat. But not really.

The heavy shop was nowhere near as bad, however, as running into Val. This painful event was unfortunately unavoidable, and happened time after time; Mac Town was just too small to avoid people. Even if he spent his off-hours skulking in the few spots where he knew Val did not go, he still ran into her; and each time it was as traumatic as ever, so that he would spend the rest of the day fulminating, sweating as he fantasized stinging denunciations arid/or revenge scenarios, which often involved saving her from death and then walking disdainfully away—sad wastes of his mental time, as he knew even while he was in the midst of them. But he couldn’t help it.

And he kept running into her. Usually it happened in the galley; he would go in feeling perfectly equable, empty as a gourd, and then there would be Val, sitting at one of the big round tables with her women friends, the usual gang, a group of gals that was loud, boisterous, confident, a bit intimidating to walk past, giving off the faint whiff of xenophobia that all groups exude when their esprit de corps is pitched just a bit too high—but a good crowd nevertheless, in fact admirable in X’s view, given the situation in America—no shopping anorexics here, but skilled and tough people, just the kind of women he was attracted to in fact, and among them a fair number of his best friends in town—but with Val smack in the middle of them, the queen of the amazons, laughing at something and ignoring him. And another meal would turn to lead in his gut. He even tried spending the extra money to eat in the Erebus View, the private restaurant over the minimall on the docks (which did not have a view of Erebus, of course); but then she would appear there too, and it would be expensive lead in his gut. They seemed to be on the same eating wavelength, as they had been when they first started talking. It got to the point where X would rather go hungry than risk running into her. But of course he had to eat; he had a big appetite, and skipping meals only made him feel faint and irritable, so that he would rush down at midnight the moment the galley opened for mid rats, starving, and there she would be coming in from a late survival class at Happy Camper Camp, or an expedition or something, and he would go faint and feel like screaming Leave Me Alone! But of course it was just Oh hi, oh hi, and he would be doomed to another desperate gulping meal, hands shaking from hunger, followed by a sweat-chilled gut-twisted revenge fantasia, in his room or up on the peak of Ob Hill or on the floor of the heavy shop picking up nails.

And no one to talk to about it. This after all was the group of acquaintances who had just recently been calling him the Earl of Sandwich. And even when he ventured to say something about it to Joyce, the sole friend he trusted enough to talk to about such matters, she only gave him a look from across the great crevasse of gender, a very complicated look, which seemed to be saying among other things that he was a fool to get so involved with a beauty like Val in the first place.

Then, after more complicated looks, and some indirect mutterings, she finally said, “Oh come on, X. Just grow up and get over it. Men have been dumping women just like this for generations, I’ve got no patience with guys who come down here and find the situation is somewhat altered and start moaning about it. So there’s some buyer’s market behavior from some of the women, surprise surprise, but it’s no excuse for all the whining I hear, all the accusations and remonstrations concerning us terrible trolling ice women, and all from men who were doing the same kind of shit all their lives right up to the very moment they arrived in Mac Town.” She shook her head. “Come on, X. Get real. If you wanted a relationship to go well,” stressing the word like it was an archaic silly concept to begin with, “then why did you come to Antarctica?”

“Yeah yeah,” X said, and wandered back to the heavy shop, discouraged. Why indeed? Fingers picking up iron, without need for any help from the brain whatsoever: why indeed?

At this point he could barely remember. He could not recall what his pre-arrival image of Antarctica had been. A place of adventure, surely. A place where even the humble jobs that a GFA could expect would be transformed. But even that quick disillusionment had been as nothing compared to the experience with Val. Even if love were nothing more than a bourgeois fabrication, outdated in Mac Town along with everywhere else, it was strange how much it could still hurt; and strange how many men in McMurdo were wandering around even more bitter than he was, burned by trolling ice women and swearing never to have anything to do with them ever again. Which would last right until the next time.

But even structures of feeling were a social construct, as Raymond Williams had made clear. And the structure of feeling down here was clearly skewed by the disparity in number between men and women; there were about nine hundred men in town, and three hundred women; and that was the explanation right there, along with the fact that everyone in town had tested negative for sexual diseases. No doubt X had been lucky to have gotten even an extra word from Val, him a lowly GFA and a fingie to boot when he had first met her, and her the beauty of the town and one of the best known of the mountaineers, veteran of expeditions that people talked about in tones of amazement. And even though the mountaineers were ASL employees too, and caught in the same seasonal contract trap as the Carhartts, their job was one of the glamour jobs for sure, with about the same social status as the beakers.

So it had been a mismatch from the start. She was the hotshot mountaineer who had climbed many of the world’s highest peaks, and repeated Shackleton’s impossible crossing of South Georgia Island; he was just a—he didn’t know what. A gypsy scholar. An overage college student, finished with college. He didn’t even know why she had paid attention to him at all; except for his size, no doubt. As she was six foot four inches tall, and therefore considerably taller than most men, he would have stood out in that sense. Someone she had to look up to, ha. And then he could talk, a little; he was a reader of books; and she had known an awful lot about the history of Antarctic exploration, and had been an interesting talker herself. No, they had had some good conversations! So good that it was painful to remember that period, when he had gone down to the galley three times every day hoping to run into her, timing his meals to match what seemed to be the likeliest times to meet her. And then eating big meals together, with big appetites both, and talking at length about all manner of things. She had told him about some of her climbs, and her admiration for Ernest Shackleton, and her grandmother who had died a couple years before; and he had told her about his reading, which in the absence of other leisure activities in McMurdo had become more voluminous than at any time of his life, even in college. He read mostly political philosophy and culture theory; that was what he liked; it was interesting, as he explained to her, to try to understand why the world was the way it was. And now in Antarctica, he said, he had begun to put together his reading and his life in a way that made sense; he was beginning to see patterns. In all the evenings he had with nothing else to do, he had begun to travel backward in the history of philosophy, trying to track his analysis to its source. Everything that impressed him turned out to be based on something that had come earlier. So that he had read The Götterdämmerung and become a devotee of Frank Bailey, like any number of grad students around the world; then he had sought out Bailey’s roots in prepostcapitalist theory, and so had read Deleuze and Speier, and become a neoleftist; then gone further back and read Jameson and Williams and then Sartre, and found it had all come from Sartre, and so become a Sartrean; then a Nietzschean, for really it all came from Nietzsche; and then he had read Marx and Engels, and become a Marxist. At that point he had recognized the retrograde pattern of his intellectual movement, and rather than go to the trouble of traveling further backward in the history of Western philosophy, which was soon going to lead him into the monstrosities of Kant and Hegel, he had simply skipped them all and gone right back to Heraclitus, becoming a confirmed student of that most Zenlike of the Greeks, a man whose extant body of work could be read in ten minutes, but then pondered over for the rest of one’s life. Yes, now he planned to meditate on fragments of Heraclitus and never read philosophy again, but start paying attention to the world instead!

And Val had laughed at his foolery. It had seemed to entertain her, at the time. But if you could never step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus had famously said, then why did he keep on running into Val in the galley? And why was he stuck in this same moment of pain? And how could he get to his food without going through that pain? And why had she inflicted that pain on him in the first place?

He had thought they had been having a good time. That was what hurt. They had talked in the galley, and laughed; they had hiked up to Ob Hill together, and snuck into the greenhouse; they had made out; they had made love; they had even gone to New Zealand together on vacation, which in the Mac Town structure of feeling was serious stuff indeed, a kind of commitment. And X had thought they had had a good time there, a really good time. Of course he had not been able to climb mountains at Val’s level, that was impossible and scary even to contemplate, her casually pointing up at routes she had done that looked completely vertical or even distinctly overhung; when they had driven up to Mount Cook, for example, past the biggest most turquoise lake imaginable, she had mentioned climbing Cook the last time she was there, and X had gazed up at that distant white spire, like something out of a dream, and stared at her open-mouthed until she had laughed. It’s not that hard, she said, although it is crappy rock, wheatabix the Kiwis call it, which is a breakfast cereal; it cuts your hands all up and yet crumbles under your weight, actually last time we got avalanched up there, it was great….

X had listened and nodded, trying not to look frightened. And after many climbing stories from her, all terrifying, recounted as they hiked the steep trails in the area, he had confessed in turn that he had been pretty bad at sports, and at physical activity in general. Always a disappointment to his school’s coaches, naturally, as he had always been big, and therefore looked promising. But after his last spurt of growth he had lumbered around “like Frankenstein’s monster,” as he put it, which caused Val to look at him oddly; and she didn’t offer any similar stories about herself. Apparently she had been quite a jock in school, when she had bothered. Good at volleyball in particular.

But X had been plagued by sports as by a curse in a fairy tale. In high school he had taken a swing at a pitch while the baseball coach was watching, and accidentally hit the ball 548 feet as later tape-measured by the coach; it had taken two years of baseball after that without X ever even hitting the ball again to convince the coach that that one shot had been a fluke. Then in the winters X had been talked onto the wrestling team, and had wrestled in the heavyweight division, and lost every match for three years, all by pin; and was also perhaps the only wrestler ever to be pinned by an opponent weighing a hundred pounds less than he did; no doubt also the only wrestler ever stupid enough to agree to such a no-win contest in the first place.

But worst of all had been basketball. He had caught the attention of the UCSD coach, who had talked him into joining the team, and trained him intensively for two years in hopes of making him their center. But it hadn’t worked. Everything about it had been against the grain, and although eventually X mastered some aspects of the game, he never could make the ball go through the hoop, despite hours of training by a coach who in every game chewed a white towel to ribbons. All that frustrated effort culminated somehow in a crucial grudge match against their archrivals the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, a nightmarish affair in which everything X tried went wrong and everything the Banana Slug center tried went perfectly, until there came a moment when X was fed a pass in the key and all his baffled frustration with sports surged into a single moment of rage, and he whirled around and leaped by his opponent intending to slam dunk the ball right through the floorboards, but missed by a fraction and hammered the ball onto the back rim so that it shot up into the rafters of the building, lost to sight for seconds, and X’s wrist hit the front rim wrong, and he came down on his ankle wrong, and in the agony of a double sprain he twisted and fell, not quickly but like some immense tree cut at ground level, turning and crashing to the floor with his whole body at once, a perfect faceplant, afterward watching stunned as his teammates and opponents gazelled over him in pursuit of the ball on its return from orbit. The college paper’s sportswriter had called it the greatest missed shot in the history of basketball. And an existential moment for X, a bifurcation point in his life; for after that he had given up sports for good.

And Val had laughed at that story too. And instead of trying to take him up Mount Cook, or anything like it, she had driven him into the Southern Alps on the road from Christchurch over Arthur’s Pass, and just short of Arthur’s Pass she had parked the car at a Bealey Hotel, overlooking a wide gray gravel riverbed seamed by the many intertwining braids of a silvery river; and she had led him on a hike up the Bealey Spur, a green ridge rising over the braided riverbed, giving them a more and more spectacular view of it, and of the snow-capped mountains standing in all directions around them. A glorious walk it had been, with the whole world seemingly to themselves, no one else in it at all.

And then after lunch, on a kind of rock battlement near the high point of the spur, Val had leaned over and started unlacing a boot. And when X had understood why she was doing that, his heart had leaped in his chest. And though their lovemaking out in the sun on the mountaintop was wonderful, and though it was wonderful again to lie on yellow tufts of grass and watch Val walking around naked on the rock outcropping—just an animal checking things out, big and graceful, like an ibex become a woman in order to ravish him with her mountain glory—still, that moment when he saw her untying her boot, and understood why—that was the moment which later made his hands shake, which made him moan in his bed at the magnitude of his loss. Because after their vacation was done she had gone back to the States to take care of some business concerning her grandmother’s empty place, and X had traveled some more, and visited home himself, and not seen her for the three months of the Antarctic off-season; and when they had both gotten back to Mac Town the following Winfly, she had dumped him. And without ever saying why. She had arrived two days before him and started up something immediately with one of the other mountaineers, he heard later; but obviously that wasn’t the whole story. No—she hadn’t had the same kind of time in New Zealand that he had had, that was clear, or else she wouldn’t have done it. He had racked his brains trying to remember anything he might have done wrong, in the wan hope of somehow making up for it.

And as he sat on the heavy shop floor, picking up nuts and bolts on automatic pilot, he racked his brains again, and cursed himself for talking to her about political philosophy, of all things. He cursed himself for making fun of his athletic career, what had he been thinking? To an obvious jock? And yet she had laughed at all that, she seemed to have been enjoying it. And the hike up Bealey Spur, looking around at those magnificent peaks, and the braided silver of the river below; he had done fine, he had enjoyed the climb and they had had a lot of fun. Of course at one particularly steep point in the trail, huffing and puffing, he had made some joke about being driven by such a hard taskmaster of a pro mountaineer, and her response had made it instantly clear that she didn’t think that line of humor was funny at all; which made sense, and he had immediately apologized and backed off. So that couldn’t have been it, could it? Just one little bad joke? And if that had been it, and getting dumped was the penalty for one misbegotten remark, what then did that say about her? It didn’t make sense. She was a very easygoing person, she was always so cheerful, so casual. She never seemed worried about anything. Such fun, ah, God … he couldn’t think of it, it hurt too much. And yet he thought of it all the time. Like pushing a sore tooth with your tongue. Yes, it still hurts, you fool. You idiot. But what, what, what had he done?

So his poor racked brain spun, and his fingers picked up screws, nails, nuts, bolts, washers, and cotter pins, and put them in their bins. And slowly, slowly, he gave up all hope of getting back with Val; and, returning to his other unhappy track of thought, he gave up all hope of revolution bringing down the heartless aristocracy of the world; and when he slunk into the galley, starving and cold, Val’s gang laughed at their table, and the beaker girls smiled and passed him by, on the other side of an invisible spacetime discontinuity which was class.

After which, back to the heavy shop. The Sisyphean pile was of course as high as ever. This is work, X thought; this is what work is.

Ron appeared in the door. “Shit, X, are you still doing this?”

X glared at him.

“Tell you what, X. I got a proposal for you. Something completely different. It’ll still be work, hard work. But compared to this good-for-anything stuff you’re doing, it’ll be pure shits and giggles.”

Dulles to LAX, LAX to Auckland on the overnight, half watching two half movies, half eating two half meals; watching the face of a sleeping English nurse who worked in Australia, who had been very cheery until Wade had asked her about her job; three patients had died recently of melanoma; she slept dreaming of them, looking troubled. Wade wanted her for his nurse.

Later he woke to the insistent beep of his wrist phone. “Wade Norton,” he said blurrily into it.

“Wade it’s Phil. Where are you now?”

“Somewhere over the Pacific,” Wade said, trying not to wake up fully.

“What, you’re not there yet?”

“You just told me about this what, I don’t know.” Wade checked his watch, but could not remember what time zone it was keeping.

“Have you made it past the international date line? Or am I still calling you from tomorrow.”

“I don’t know. I was asleep.”

“So was I, Wade. But then I woke up and turned on CNN, and saw Winston being interviewed, and I was so pissed off that I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

“So you called me.”

“As always.”

Wade pulled his phone headset from his briefcase and put it on, then plugged it into his wrist.

“—he did today? It’s not enough to block your Antarctic Treaty, and my debt-for-population reduction package—now he’s making noises about the CO₂ joint implementation deal, knowing that any noise and the Chinese will throw a tantrum and run. Invasion of national sovereignty, he called it. We can’t be paying for their trouble! As if global warming was their trouble! Didn’t he notice Hurricane Velma? His own damn state about a hundred miles skinnier than it used to be, and him on CNN saying it’s a Chinese problem? Where do they find these guys? They must be breaking the cloning laws down there, they keep electing the same guy over and over.”

“He’s popular,” Wade said, leaning his head against the cool smooth jet window.

“Yes but why, Wade, why? How do these people win elections? I have never understood why so many decent hardworking Americans will loyally and you have to say even pigheadedly continue to vote for people whose explicit declared project is to rip them off.”

“People don’t see it that way,” Wade said, beginning to doze again.

“But it’s so obvious! Cutting jobs, reducing wages, increasing hours, shaving benefits and retirements—all this downsizing is the downsizing of labor costs, meaning less of what companies make is given to the employees and more to the owners and shareholders. And this is the Republican program! They advocate this transfer of profits! They write and pass the laws that allow it, and oppose the laws that try to stop it! So why do people vote for them, why? Nobody making less than about seventy grand a year should ever even think of voting for them! And even the people who make more should reconsider their priorities.”

“You’re a true Democrat, Phil.” Though he had been a Green in his first term, and an independent in his second.

“That’s true, but still, how do they do it?”

“They tell people it’s Democrats ripping them off, with taxes. People see business paying them and government taking it away.”

“But business takes it away too! They take it first and they take more and then they run off with it! People are just squeaking by while their employers are zillionaires! At least if the government rips you off then they use the money to build roads and schools and airports and jails and all, they build the whole damn infrastructure! No, taxing and spending is good, that’s what I say—tax big and spend big, I say that right on the floor of the Senate.”

“We know, Phil. We watch in the office and we weep.”

“Yes you do, because government is the people! The owners just take the money and build castles in Barbados. How can they justify that, how can they sell that program?”

“Ideology is powerful.”

“I guess so. You must be right. Although I’ve never understood why you can’t just look the situation in the face and see what’s going on.”

“An imaginary relationship to a real situation.”

“Very imaginary. But we’ve got to be even more imaginative than they are, Phil. Our imaginations are stronger than theirs!”

“Maybe. They seem to have the upper hand right now.”

“Do you think so? Don’t you think we’re gaining on them?”

“Do you?”

“Sure I do! I know it looks slow. But there are lots of people out there sick of being downsized. Give them half a chance and they’ll go for it. They don’t want revolution, but if they see a reform process leading to a desirable goal then they’ll walk away from these Götterdämmerung cowboys and they’ll all start up their own co-ops.”

“Capitalization trouble.”

“Yeah, but it’s legal, that’s the thing. It’s like a kind of progressive’s loophole in the law. And there’s so much of it happening already, under the radar. It’s like there are two sides battling for which fork of the path history is gonna take.”

“Your teeter-totter teleology.”

“What’s that? Sure, ecology’s on our side. It’s a good angel bad angel kind of thing. Co-opification versus the Götterdämmerung. But you know, everything’s going down in flames—ordinary people with kids can’t possibly like that, can they Wade? They’ll have to choose co-opification.”

“You would think so.”

“We have to make sure. Oh, man. I’m getting tired. I think the nightcap has finally done its thing, Wade. I’m gonna crash I think. I’m in Kashmir, try not to call me in the middle of the night, okay? But give me another report when you get there.”

“I will. Good night, Phil.”

“Night night.”

Then he was waking up again under the light touch of a stewardess, and an hour later off the plane and through the airport and onto a smaller plane, and flying south to Christchurch, over the green hills of New Zealand’s two islands. Then down onto a small-town airport, and out waiting for luggage, in the late afternoon. His wrist phone told him it was three days after Phil’s call about Antarctica; but he had lost a day crossing the international date line. His internal clock appeared to be at about 4 A.M.

He pushed his luggage on a cart through the parking lot, out to the roundabout at the airport entrance, where his hotel was located. Just around the corner, he was told, was the U.S. Antarctic Centre. So after checking in and taking his luggage to his room, he walked around to the Centre in a dreamlike state, to make his appointment for clothing issue.

Inside a big low building he sat on a long wooden bench with some other men checking in, and tried on an entire L.L. Bean catalog of winter clothing, pouring cornucopiastically out of two big orange canvas bags packed specifically for him. The array of solar and piezoelectric gloves and mittens was particularly impressive, and he commented on it to one of the Kiwi helpers in the room. The man looked at his manifest and shrugged: “You’re going a lot of places.”

“Am I?”

“That’s what it says.”

So Wade hefted his bags and shambled back to the hotel, then had dinner in the hotel restaurant. Every face there came straight out of Masterpiece Theatre, New Zealand now being considerably more British than the British. Back in his room he slept deeply, barely woke to his alarm; stared at his face in the bathroom mirror; good-bye to that world. He lugged his bags back to the Centre. It was dawn, and he and several other men changed into their extreme weather clothing. “We’ll cook in the plane,” an American commented, “and if we go down this stuff won’t keep us alive a single second longer.”

“Propitiating the gods,” a Kiwi official suggested.

The official herded them into a larger room, like an ultrafunctional airport lounge, where they and their orange bags were sniffed eagerly by a big black dog on a leash. Then they were led out to an old bus, and driven across the airport tarmac to the side of a big green four-engined prop plane with the number “04” painted in white behind its nose. Wade followed the other passengers up tall steps and through a small oval door, into a dim interior.

He shuffled back into a big poorly lit cylindrical space, which was almost filled by the bladeless fuselage of a khaki helicopter. The walls were covered with things; on the floor against the walls, aluminum tubing supported red nylon webbing seats. The other passengers sat here and there, and Wade realized there were only going to be a dozen of them—half in black overalls and big red parkas, half in khaki pants and leather flyers’ jackets. These latter were the Kiwi crew of the helicopter. Wade sat down next to them.

Overhead the space was filled by scores of pipes, lines, struts and cannisters, many of them encased in gray canvas-covered insulation tubing, laced into place with what looked like very long shoelaces, and marked everywhere by stencilled numbers, acronyms, cryptic instructions and so forth; and all covered with a layer of dust. If it had been a movie set the art director would have been accused of shamelessly camping it up: a flying machine of the previous century, how quaint! Except this one had to fly them for eight hours across an islandless stormy sea.

Uneasily Wade jammed the foam earplugs he had been given into his ears, and got his webbing seatbelt fastened. Then the engines started, and even with the earplugs the roar was deafening. The dozen passengers were cast into a speechless world, a world of sign language, smiles, nods, thumbs-up, and so on. A crew member wearing a jacket that proclaimed him part of the New York Air Guard checked them over, then climbed up a hatchway to the cockpit. They were moving; perhaps they were taking off. The other red-parkaed passengers drifted into books, or reverie; the Kiwi helicopter crew members got up and wandered about, finding flat places to lie down and go to sleep. This left the webbing seats around Wade empty, and he lay down as well. Hot air alternated with frigid blasts.

He managed to sleep for a while. When he woke up he stood and made his way forward, and established by hand signals with one of the crew that it was okay to go up the steps and into the cockpit. Up there it was a scene out of a World War II movie; two pilots up front, under a bank of small windows, in bright light; two officers behind them; a flight engineer to one side. Here it was just quiet enough to talk, and they chatted over the dull wash of the engines as they ate lunches out of brown paper bags, like school kids. They didn’t look much older than school kids either.

“When was this plane built?” Wade asked the engineer.

“1960.”

“Metal fatigue?”

“All the moving parts get replaced. The fuselage itself is thick as a sewer main. These Hercs are tough. This one here spent fifteen years under the snow after it lost an engine and crashed. Then they dug it out and put on a new engine, and here it is.”

“Amazing.”

“Yeah. Although the Herc bringing in the new engine crashed and was totalled, so it was no net gain.”

“Oh.”

Wade returned to his seat. So these planes really were antiques. Technology from the previous century. Which sometimes crashed. He forced himself to go back to sleep.

When he woke again the interior of the plane was distinctly brighter. He pulled himself up and looked out the porthole. White light blasted his eyes and he fell back, eyes running, and fumbled on sunglasses before looking out again.

Mountains; white mountains. Here and there the sheer face of a black cliff, but everything else covered in what looked like a coat of whipped cream, overspilling all the landscape. The creamy pure white of the snow was unlike anything he had ever seen—as if while he had slept the old Herc had skipped through hyperspace, and was now flying over another planet entirely. Ice World. A white waste of creamy snow, stretching out to fisheye horizons, with a blue-black sky above. Wade knelt on the webbing and pressed his nose to the cold glass, staring as the white mountains flowed under them, the speed of their passage not as great as the usual jet’s passover, so that there was a kind of fluid slow-motion quality to the changing angles of the black cliffs, all sliding by in the white noise of the Herc. Wow, Wade thought. Maybe it really will be different.

When he turned and sat down again, he noticed that one of the young New York Air Guardsmen was wandering around the plane with a flashlight in hand, pointing it up into the dim network of pipes and wires overhead, then going to the porthole in the rear door to look out intently at the left wing. He did this for a while, back and forth, back and forth. He wiped his brow; he was sweating. In fact he looked terrified. He was like a mime doing Deep Fear.

Wade looked around and saw that the New Zealander helicopter crew had also noticed the Air Guardsman. He leaned over to shout in the nearest Kiwi’s ear.

“What’s up?”

“—flaps aren’t working,” in a very strong Kiwi accent. Fleps ahnt wuh-keen.

“A flap isn’t working?”

“None of the flaps are working!”

Wade pulled back to stare, feeling his stomach shrink. The Kiwi pilot was grinning, and he nodded to show that Wade had heard right. Then he leaned toward Wade to add more.

“Wash them in Cheech—water freezes in there—won’t move after that.”

“And so?” Wade shouted.

“—don’t need flaps to land.”

“You don’t?”

The man shook his head, then grinned at the Guardsman and shouted to Wade, “I don’t think he knows that!”

“No!”

Obviously he didn’t. But Wade did. Or so a Kiwi helicopter pilot had told him. Not need flaps to land a plane? Wasn’t that exactly what they were for? Certainly the Kiwis did not look worried. In fact they were watching the Air Guardsman sweat it out, and glancing at each other and grinning, then trying to look dead serious when the Guardsman walked by, then laughing hilariously—all this in pantomime, in the white noise of the howling engines. The Air Guardsman was oblivious of them, however, and he pinballed around the plane, tracing the big hydraulic lines that ran along the ceiling from the cockpit to the wings. Wade saw with a sinking heart that this was a machine run by the force of liquids pushed around in tubes. And the Air Guardsman was sweating bullets, he was literally wiping his brow, though it was freezing in their compartment. The Kiwis could barely contain their mirth when he turned their way. Wade watched it all with his mouth hanging open, wondering who to believe. He preferred to believe the helicopter crew, of course, but they were Kiwis, and who knew what they would do? Not need flaps to land?

Then another crew member came down the hatch, and gestured for them to belt up. Wade could not tell by his expression whether he was worried or not.

So Wade sat for a long time, in the roar which was like a kind of silence, waiting, trying to figure out how a plane could not need flaps. He had seen them curve out and down on a hundred landings, perhaps a thousand. It was like a duck landing. They were definitely part of the descent mechanism.

Finally the plane appeared to slow down. The pitch of the roar lowered; then abruptly it cut back to nearly nothing. Oh my God, Wade thought, his heart beginning to race—they’ve cut the engines. The crew members were rushing around the interior. One of them went to the door at the front and began to open it. Opening the door? Were they bailing out? The other passengers were standing up, and with fumbling fingers Wade unhooked his seatbelt and leaped to his feet.

The door opened. Brilliant white light poured into the plane, and a man in a T-shirt appeared in the doorway. Wade jumped at the sight, severely startled.

They were on the ground. He had felt no tilt forward in the plane, no touchdown on a runway. Actually they appeared to be on snow. A skiway. Apparently a landing made on skis, and without operating flaps, was a very gentle thing indeed.

Mildly stunned, Wade made his way to the open door. White snow everywhere. The airport consisted of four Hercs in a row, and a few lines of red buildings on wheels, with giant hitches at their front ends, like immense U-Haul trailers. It was intensely bright, and very cold; the man in the T-shirt was seriously underdressed. He waved Wade down the steps. “Welcome to Antarctica!”

Hello my friends. Thank you for joining me on this voyage across the bottom of the Earth. As you can see, I have nearly completed the flight south from New Zealand. Soon we will arrive on the frozen continent. As we approach our landing, we see that deep in the big notch in the continent called the Ross Sea, a magnificent volcano has risen from the sea floor. This volcano makes a triangular island seventy kilometers across, and it rises around four or five thousand meters from the sea floor. Every measurement of this volcano’s height comes up with a different figure, a fact that confirms what the eye sees immediately, that the inner line of Erebus’s form creates a knot of lung-mai or dragon arteries that is precisely contiguous with its outward form, so that we see it in all five dimensions at once. This sometimes makes ordinary calculations of its height difficult.

Now we have landed, my friends, and are being driven across the sea ice to McMurdo. The little town, as you see, is placed in a scooped-out hollow on the tip of a long peninsula of the volcano island, an arm of lava that surged down off Erebus to the west not so very long ago, leaving a final lava cone at the very tip. How strong the dragon arteries of this island!

As we approach the tip of the peninsula and our landfall, let me recall for you the story of the first human landfall on Antarctica, which happened on January 24th of 1895. When Borchgrevink’s expedition approached the Antarctic Peninsula, they were aware that all previous landings had been on islands offshore, and that no one had ever stepped on the actual land of the continent before. Borchgrevink and his ship’s captain were rowed toward the rocky beach by a sailor, and as they approached they saw their chance at history. Borchgrevink began to move to the bow of the boat to climb out, and the ship’s captain began to wrestle with him, claiming for some reason that he had the right to go first. The two men were wrestling still as the boat coasted up to the rocky beach, and seeing it the seaman rowing them leaped over the side into waist-deep water, and ran up to the shore ahead of the entangled officers. Thus he was the first human ever to step on Antarctica. What was his name? I can’t remember.

On the slope of the town, now, we look back toward the airport on ice, and beyond it, across some fifty kilometers of the Ross Sea, to the mainland of the continent. It is a superb prospect. Over there mountains jump immediately out of the ocean: peaks taller than Fuji and Mont Blanc stand within twelve kilometers of the ocean, and the whole range, as you can see, is complex, multifaceted, and deeply riven by glacial valleys, down which slanting beams of yellow sunlight glow. On certain days optical effects in the air create fata morganas in which the mountains appear five times as tall as they do now. Oh my, yes. This view from McMurdo is very strong, bringing into play simultaneously all the landscape’s oppositions: hsü-shih or empty-full, yin-hsien or invisible-visible, chin-yuan or near-far, also finite-infinite. Thus naturally the fifth dimension, li, the emptiness before all spacetime, is strongly evoked as well; and also that value of a landscape that goes beyond all notions of beauty, its i-ching or density of soul, and its shen-yun or divine resonance.

Here in the town itself, the views are all kao-yuan, looking up; before anything else, therefore, I am going to walk up to the top of Observation Hill, the volcanic cone at the end of the peninsula, overlooking the town as you see.

Up here, as you see as I climb, the perspective changes to p’ing-yan, the level perspective from a nearby mountain which gives a view horizontally to distant mountains, shading into infinity. I like p’ing-yan very much.

The buildings below me comprise McMurdo Station, Ross Island. The town resembles one of the rusty mining towns of Mongolia. But this shen-yuan angle, looking down from above, is but one part of the picture. We will find soon enough that the seemingly haphazard and emptied village we look down on is actually inhabited by a civilization wielding all the latest in futuristic technology. It is a strange place, as you will see.

The peninsula, however; the island; the sea ice studded with icebergs; the distant mountain range, so far yet so clear: all beautiful.

As we descend to town, I want to remind you that this Ross Island is tangled deeply in the dragon arteries of history. It is the island both Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton used as their base of operations. Therein lies a sad story. The first time they came down was in 1902, on the ship Discovery, in an expedition commanded by Scott. Shackleton was a junior officer, from the merchant marine rather than the navy, but a strong personality. Scott not so much so; withdrawn, and at first somewhat at a loss concerning what to do in this new land. People had stepped on the continent for the first time, as I said, only seven years before. In human terms, it was a blank slate. The geographical societies of imperial Europe had declared it the next great problem for their imperial-scientific study, and the geographical society in England convinced the British Admiralty that dedicating a ship to the exploration of this new continent would be a good thing strategically. Part of the normal course of the business of the empire. So in the same year that we in our country were fighting the Boxer Rebellion against the oppression of these British colonialists, other men in other offices in London, occupied with other arms of that world-spanning empire, agreed that a single badly built boat, a clunker, a lemon, could certainly be spared for such an unpromising venture. In the same spirit they agreed to send Captain Robert Scott, who had been recommended to them for unknown reasons by the head of the Royal Geographical Society. And so two years later Scott and his men landed on Ross Island, and built the hut that you can see on the point at the other end of town—that little square building in the center of the screen, badly exposed to the wind. We will visit it later.

Scott had not spent his two years of preparation very usefully, however, and once on Ross Island he had no very clear brief; just exploration and science, as far as his formal orders went. But geology and the other earth sciences were in their infancy as well, this has to be understood. Without feng shui they had no way to read the inner shape of the landscape, and without plate tectonics they had no real understanding of why the Earth looked the way it did, or what might have happened to it in the past. They thought mountains were the result of the Earth shrinking, and the overlarge crust then buckling in lines; or alternatively, perhaps they were the result of the Earth expanding, and lava mountains leaping up out of the resulting cracks. Wegener would soon articulate every schoolchild’s notion that South America and Africa must once have been joined, but that idea was scoffed at for another half a century; the truth is they did not think there had been time for continental drift to have happened, for they were just beginning to come to grips with the tremendous age of the Earth. Lord Kelvin at that time maintained that the Earth, because it was still radioactive, could not be more than a few million years old. So all earth sciences in 1902 were a kind of taxonomy, gathering information in hopes it would help some later generation of scientists better to pierce the veil of the past.

This being the case, Scott’s scientists took weather data, kept records, gathered rock samples, surveyed the territory, and tested methods of travel to see how they would work. Never had men worked in weather quite so cold as this; it averaged thirty degrees Centigrade colder than the Arctic, and the storms could be brutal, even then.

So they wandered around in short sledging trips away from Ross Island. Their sledging worked, except in the Dry Valleys on the mainland immediately across from them, sledges being for travel over ice and snow. They did not know how to use the sledge dogs, however, to pull the sledges for them, and had brought along no one who could teach them; they thought they had, but the man didn’t really know, and you cannot teach what you do not know. Nansen had learned from the Inuit how to do it, and crossed Greenland using the dogs, and Amundsen learned from Nansen. It was not so hard; the dogs like it. It is only a matter of training and the right harnesses, and off they will go as if it were their destiny to pull humans across the ice—their first act of partnership perhaps, long ago when the whole world was ice.

But Scott never learned that about dogs. What he learned instead was the dogs’ own pleasure in hauling. This is the critical point, my friends; this is the crux of the matter. Scott and his men discovered that even though manhauling wasn’t as efficient as other methods, efficiency was not the highest value. Much more important was the act’s own sben-yun, its divine resonance. And they found that it is a very satisfying thing to haul your home across the snow and ice of this world, setting camp after camp. It appeals to something very deep and fundamental in our collective unconscious. That there is a collective unconscious, my friends, never doubt; it may not be exactly as Carl Jung described it, but it exists most certainly, as the very structures of our brains. The human brain grew from about three hundred cubic millimeters to about fifteen hundred cubic millimeters during the time that we were living the lives of nomads, carrying our homes across the surface of this world; and much of that growth occurred in ice ages, my friends, ice ages when even China itself was a kind of Antarctica. And so the structure of our brain reflects that coevolution, and even now, in landscapes of snow and ice such as those we are looking at, our brains fairly hum with the fullness of their complete structure, resonating under the impact of all the coevolutionary forces that blew it up like a balloon.

And so Scott said damn the dogs, and damn the motor tractors, and damn the hot-air balloon, and the Siberian ponies, which alas could not endure the cold; and even the skis, which in those days were like long planks, and which at first the British tried to use with only a single ski pole, so far out of touch were they with snow and their own bodies. None of that mattered; they had discovered the pleasure of hauling their homes with their own power alone, on foot. Quickly they learned to use two ski poles, and they stomped along on the skis as if they were on two long snowshoes, but only to float themselves better in their walking. It was walking on this Earth they had fallen in love with.