Antarctica

8 The Sirius Group

Graham walked some distance behind Geoffrey and Harry and Misha, over broken dolerite. They were checking a beautiful long band of Sirius sandstone plastered above them against one of the dolerite cliffs of the Apocalypse Peaks. The band was a succession horizontally stratified at scales both large and small. Diamictons containing different mixes of boulders, cobbles and laminated silts, and bounded above and below by distinct disconformities, horizontal to slightly inclined. Planar to slightly undulating small-scale relief. One line was traceable for more than thirty meters as Graham walked it off. Certainly this succession had been deposited in situ, and then plowed away by the next grounded glacier to pass over, leaving only this sandy blond band against the rock, where the force of the passing ice was lessened just enough to leave a trace against the wall.

He leaned down and tapped at white diatomite with his geological hammer, then scratched at it. The D-7 disconformity, about a centimeter wide. Below it all the diamictons were marine; above it they were subaerial. Which did not mean that this line had been sea level, but that the rise of the Transantarctics had lifted this region out of the seas for good at about the time this disconformity had been laid. As they were now at some fifteen hundred meters above sea level, it implied an uplift rate of about five hundred meters per million years, if you accepted the Pliocene dating of the Sirius, as Graham did. That was a fairly rapid uplift rate, and one of the ways that the stabilists criticized the dynamicists’ conclusions; but faster rates were certainly known, and it was hard to argue the evidence, displayed here on the cliffside like a classroom diagram. Graham would have very much liked to take his first thesis advisor by the scruff of the neck and haul him to this very point and shove his face into such a display, clearer even than the Cloudmaker Formation. See that! he would have said. How can you deny the facts!

But of course it was not actually a cliff of facts, but of stone. Interpretations were open to argument, at least until the matter was firmly pinned down and black-boxed, as Geoffrey put it, meaning become something that all the scientists working in that field took for granted, going on to further questions. Some scientific controversies resolved themselves fairly quickly, and others didn’t; and this was proving to be one of the slow ones. As they had not black-boxed this particular question, it was still sediment only and not yet fact.

This process was something that Graham had not understood early in his career, and it had gotten him into considerable trouble. He had started his graduate work in geology at Cambridge, working with Professor Martin, unaware of the fact that Martin’s own work dating ash deposits in the Transantarctics allied him with the stabilists in the Sirius controversy. Graham had merely wanted to work in the Antarctic and knew that that was Martin’s area of research. He had been very naive, having been educated mostly in physics, with only a late switch to geology because of the field work, and the tangibility of rock—a switch just begun at that time in his life, and by little more than his entry into graduate level work in Martin’s group. Then he had been so immersed in catching up on the basics of geology that he had not been fully aware of the Sirius controversy and how Martin fit into it, and so he had not understood why Martin had been so cool to his geomorphological research into the question of why the Transantarctics were there at all. As part of that study Graham had examined the question of how quickly the range was uplifting, and had come to the conclusion that although the range was quite old, dating from about eighty million years ago, when the East Antarctic craton began to show intracraton rifting, still it looked like it had been rising at a fairly rapid clip in the most recent period, perhaps (he had ventured rashly) because of the lithostatic pressure of the ice cap. And Martin had been cool, and had never devoted any of his time to critiquing Graham’s papers on the subject, or contributing any of what he needed to contribute, as second author and principal investigator, to make the papers publishable. In a fit of angry frustration Graham had sent one paper to a journal without Martin’s approval, as the approval seemed likely never to come; and the paper had been rejected, Martin informed of the submission, and Graham basically dismissed from the program, as he was not invited to return to Antarctica in Martin’s group the following season.

This experience had made him bitter. He had gone back to New Zealand, and there one night in a pub one of his old teachers from the university in Christchurch had shaken his head and explained some things to him. Martin had cast his lot in with the stabilists in the Sirius controversy because his findings in volcanic ash convinced him that the Transantarctics and Antarctica generally had been in the deep freeze for at least twelve million years. One of the many other aspects of the controversy had to do with the rate of uplift of the Transantarctics, with the stabilists maintaining that there was no reason for the range to be rising anywhere near as fast as the dynamicists claimed, so that the Sirius formations had to be older than they claimed in order to be found now at such high elevations. And so naturally, his old teacher told him, Graham’s conclusions had not been welcome.

This had outraged Graham. A perversion of science! he cried. But his old professor had chided him. No no, he had said, it’s your own fault; you should have known better. Perhaps it’s even my fault; I should have taught you better than I did how science works, obviously.

There was nothing particularly untoward in Martin’s response, Graham’s teacher explained to him, with no outrage or indignation whatsoever. Indeed, he said, if Graham had joined the program of one of the dynamicists, and begun to produce work indicating that the ice had lain heavy on Antarctica for millions and millions of years, he would not have prospered there either. It was not a matter of evil-doing either way; the simple truth was that science was a matter of making alliances to help you to show what you wanted to show, and to make clear also that what you were showing was important. And your own graduate students and post-docs were necessarily your closest allies in that struggle to pull together all the strings of an argument. All this became even more true when there was a controversy ongoing, when there were people on the other side publishing articles with titles like “Unstable Ice or Unstable Ideas?” and so on, so that the animus had grown a bit higher than normal.

So, Graham had been forced to conclude, thinking over his talk with his old teacher in the days after: it was not that Martin was evil, but that he Graham had been naive, and, yes, even stupid. Thick, anyway. Bitterness was not really appropriate. Science was not a matter of automatons seeking Truth, but of people struggling to black-box some facts.

So his education began again, in effect, after two years wasted in Cambridge. Which was not so very great a length of time in scientific terms. Many scientists had taken far longer to learn how their disciplines worked. And so Graham had become reconciled to the experience and had shelved it, and gotten into a program in glaciology at the University of Sydney, and gone on from there.

That had all happened a long time ago. And yet still the Sirius controversy raged on, with both sides finding new allies and students, and producing papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Graham thought he began to see a tilt on the part of outsiders toward the dynamicist interpretation; but as he was a dynamicist himself now, he supposed he could not really tell for sure. Anyway, the case was beginning to look stronger to him as the years passed and evidence from other parts of Antarctica was collected. Over in the Prince Charles Mountains, for instance, on the other side of Antarctica, the Aussies were making a good case that there had been Pliocene-era seas as far as five hundred kilometers inland from the current shore. The Beardmore Glacier had been pretty conclusively shown to be a paleofjord, and there were unallied scientists referring to a “Beardmore paleofjord” in other contexts, also to Nothofagus beardmorensis, the beech type found in the Cloudmaker Formation and named by dynamicists to underline its location of discovery. And evidence of beech forests was showing up elsewhere in Sirius formations, with seeds and beetles and other plant material all pointing to the Pliocene or late Miocene. No, the case was coming together at last, after all these long years; all of Geoff Michelson’s career, effectively, and passed on to him from his advisor Brown, who had also spent a career working away at it; and now, come to think of it, a good fair fraction of Graham’s career had been devoted to it as well. All to build the walls that would box this part of the story up for good, building it brick by brick over years and generations. Because the stones did not speak, not really. They had to be translated.

The sun wheeled and the steep wall of dolerite overhead now cast them in the shade, and it got markedly colder. They were truly much younger-looking mountains than any other eighty-million-year-old range, still as steep and jagged as the Himalayas or the Alps, both only a fourth as old; saved by the cold from the ravages of water erosion, and so aged by the winds only, and rising so fast that the rise more than compensated for that abrasion. Cryopreserved, so to speak.

To keep warm Graham went to work taking some samples from the disconformity just above head level. The diamictite would rub away with a gloved fingertip, but hacking out a good sample was work to warm one up. Certainly water had been here, and seafloor diatoms, the paleobotanists told him, benthic genera that indicated brackish to near-normal marine conditions. A shallow seabottom, a fjord probably, perhaps later a lake that slowly dried out. Shoreline of a fjord. Above the shore, a low hardy beech forest. The Pliocene had without a doubt had temperatures high enough to support Nothofagus; this was agreed upon by everyone, having been an earlier case that some other group had already black-boxed: warm Pliocene, no questions asked. And now a fact basic to the dynamicist case; that was the crux of their whole argument, really—that if you got global temperatures as high as the Pliocene, the Antarctic ice sheets melted both east and west, leaving glaciated archipelagoes and an embayed craton, in a sea covered every winter by substantial amounts of sea ice. That would account for the clear varving here, now that he thought of it; it need not be just the tidal marks on a seashore, but annual sediment fall on a seafloor that in winters was covered by a roof of sea ice. “Hmmm …” Graham said, glancing at Michelson.

Beech trees had not evolved greatly, and any fossil fragments of them found here could have been much older than the Pliocene. Indeed when they had first found beech wood in the Sirius they had assumed it was Triassic wood picked up by a glacier much later. Only when they had come on thousands of beech leaves as well did they realize the wood had been alive when Sirius was laid down. And beech forests supported an array of smaller life as part of their ecology, of course, mostly mosses and lichens, but also weevils and other beetles, freshwater snails, and perhaps even some amphibians. Some of these would be specifically Pliocene species, or could be dated by chemical tests that worked specifically for them. So that looking into the rock of this ancient seafloor (granting for the moment that that was what it was), it was quite possible that one might find fossils larger than the microscopic foraminifera and diatoms. Michelson often mentioned the possibility at the beginning of the day when they set out, or when the helos arrived to carry part of the team to a distant site; cheerily and with no expectations he would call out in farewell, “Keep an eye out for scallop shells!” A kind of joke. Actually the foraminifera and diatoms, although too small to be seen by the naked eye, were enough to prove their contention that the Sirius group was the remnant of a seafloor, and date it as well. But certainly a fossil clam shell would be welcome.

And so when Graham’s finger took a big flake of the diamictite off, revealing a band of yellow-red rusty clayey material, he said “What have we here!”

It was not a clam shell, of course. But it was unusual.

He climbed up the strata to have a closer look at it. He pulled a lens from his pocket and took a glance at 30x power. Crushed plant material.

He called out to Harry, who was worrying at a round block of tillite up the slope. Harry heard him, and called back, “I think I’m in an old estuary here!”

“Very like!” Graham said. “Come here and look at this!”

Harry came around the corner and saw the rusty strata in the gray sandstone. “Hey!”

“Yes. Look at where it is, too. Rudimentary paleosol, at the upper surface of a fluvial diamicton, and see here, root structures going down here vertically, and then spreading out farther laterally.”

“Beech forest,” Harry said, his eyes round. “Oh, my God—this looks like it’ll be as big as Oliver Bluffs or Bennett Platform.”

“Yes.” Carefully they worked the diamictite off the yellow-rust leaf litter mat. “Look, it’s especially well-preserved where it’s compressed under these boulders.” Graham tapped away some more. Harry got on his wrist phone and called Michelson. “Geoff, it looks like we’ve found another beech leaf mat, a good one. Moss cushions too, but mostly beech. Preservation looks good.”

“I’ll be right up. I’m downvalley from you still, right?”

“That’s right. We’re up against the cliff wall, site 3.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Harry was their paleobotanist, and so now grinning ecstatically. At that moment it was like a treasure hunt, Graham realized; or like prospecting for gold. A find like this would result in a paper that would help make a case that would help make a career that would help pay the bills. Gold nuggets right there in the ground, if you wanted to think of it that way. The philosopher’s stone. Or another brick in the wall.

Although Harry was not thinking in such prosaic terms. “Look at that, oh my God. Can you imagine a beech forest growing down here, what it would have looked like! So beautiful. This is a beautiful fjord shoreline, Graham, it’s like a holy place. Really fine mineralization too.”

Another flake of diamictite came off. The yellowy stuff was bowed under the boulders resting on the disconformity. A tiny oil-bearing deposit in the making.

“Leaves up to six or seven centimeters, it looks like. That’s big.”

“So mild temperatures.”

“And maybe cloudy a lot. Check this out, veins in the leaf. Incredible venation.”

“Very nice.”

Of course this would only be another case of disputed age of biological material. Still, it seemed very clear that at the times when the Sirius group was being deposited, this region had been much more than lifeless sand occasionally catching windblown diatoms from afar; if nothing else, this helped to make that very clear, so the main counter-explanation given by the stabilists for the presence of the diatoms was obviously wrong. And if it was clear that there were beech forests here during Sirius, on a cold coast that looked more like the coast of southern Chile than like the current inhospitable icy shore, then one had to admit that Antarctica had certainly had some mild times. And then the diatoms that absolutely permeated the Sirius sandstones, to the point where some diamictites were simply pulverized diatoms and foraminifera and nothing else, could be quite definitively dated to the Pliocene by solid biostratification dating; and so where was the flaw? How could the interpretation of a liquid marine era be faulted at that point? You would have to simply ignore evidence to do it; pretend certain papers didn’t exist; pretend that certain rocks in the field didn’t exist either. And unbiased scientists, without their careers committed to one view or the other, would not do that.

Then another flake of gray rock came off under the pointy end of his hammer, and he and Harry both saw the rounded double bump and the shard behind it. When Michelson hiked up to join them he found them both flat on their chests, their faces centimeters from the stone, their sunglasses pulled off to enable them to see the object better. “What’s this I see?” Michelson cried.

“I’m not sure,” Harry said. “But I think it may be the legbone of a frog. Oh my God.”

“Call it your famous scallop shell,” Graham said, sitting back and grinning crookedly up at Michelson. He felt the sun lance through the chill and drive into his face, a very pleasurable sensation.

The world is a body. Rocks are the skeleton, arteries are watercourses, trees are the muscles, clouds are the respiration. We are the thoughts. Here then we can say that the body has been stripped to the skeleton, for there are no muscles, or veins, or arteries. Yet still the breath of clouds. A skeleton that breathes under its white cloak, and from time to time wakes, and thinks.

We walk up the ice road to the inner highland, the inner self. Morning in sunwashed camp: exercises in chih-fa, the method for the fingers. Valerie, our roshi, the shepherd of this pilgrimage, is purest form in the art of chih-fa. No tea ceremony could have cleaner lines than her breaking camp zazen. The way she cares for us is a joy to behold. And now here we are again, walking. Walking for hours, in the footsteps of Amundsen.

What can we make of Amundsen? His story is a knot. All his life he had been a man of the north, all his career had been an exploration of the north. He had found a Northwest Passage; he had desired for years to reach the North Pole. Then came news of Cook’s and Peary’s claims to have reached it, in the midst of his preparations for his own trip there. But he had no desire to be the third man to the North Pole, nor even the second. This casts his desire in a different light. What he wanted then was not the North Pole, center of his life’s work and placement. He wanted to be first. It is not at all the same thing. Not a hunger for place, but for position. A concentration on time rather than space; a desire to write one’s name on history, rather than to occupy a place on Earth.

Thus when Amundsen wrote of the strangeness of standing at the South Pole, after all his life trying to get to the North Pole, he was only partly correct. In a deeper sense he was standing exactly where he wanted to be: first. And indeed he has been remembered, especially on this continent, where there has been so little human history that what happened at the start still overshadows all. So he made his mark on time. First to the Pole. When did he reach it? I can’t remember.

The method Amundsen used to reach the Pole is also a knot, and difficult for us to come to terms with. On the one hand he had a genius for contemplating his polar experience and analyzing his methods, and making continual innovations in equipment and technique to improve them. His trip used the finest combination of modern and archaic technology possible in his time, much of it custom designed by Amundsen and manufactured under his direction.

But his change of destination, from one end of the Earth to the other, he hid from all, for fear of losing his financial support. This is one of the strange things about his trip that have puzzled people ever after. Even his men did not know where they were going; he did not tell them until after they left Norway. At that point he also sent a telegram to Scott, which said “Going south.” This shows he too was aware of reaching the Poles as a kind of medieval joust, with certain rules of fair play. Amundsen obviously did not agree with Scott’s notion that no one else should get to try until Scott either won or died. But he did agree they were running a race. So he sent Scott his notice.

And then he used dogs, and ate them. Of course many of us eat animal flesh, and in any market in China you can see more cruelty to animals in a single day than anything Amundsen and his men did to their dogs in their entire polar careers. We cannot judge him. But there is something about planning to use dogs to pull you to the Pole, while eating them as you go, that strikes the British mind at least as somewhat cold and overefficient. The British are both unsentimental and highly sentimental at one and the same time—like the Chinese. And dogs are our comrade-helpers, and intelligent, so there seems to be a touch of murder in killing these sentient beings, especially shooting and eating them to facilitate a trip to a first.

And then there is simply the question of being taken there by other beings, rather than under your own power. Scott by his inability to master dogs in effect raised the stakes to a higher level, where it was not just a matter of getting there, but how you did it. By accident Scott and his men fell in love with walking on Earth, and after that Scott asserted that doing it on your own mattered; and what has happened since tends to reinforce his values rather than Amundsen’s. The first climbers of Everest, for instance, used oxygen, and were the apex of a giant logistical pyramid; later Messner and Habler climbed the mountain without oxygen, and then Messner climbed it alone and without oxygen. Messner’s beautiful act of feng shui made the first climbs look over-reliant on aid. In Antarctica it was much the same. People drove tractors to the South Pole, then flew, and everyone recognized that this represented no great personal achievement for the people using the transport. And standing on the back of a sled pulled by dogs is not that different from sitting in the cab of a tractor, as my friend Elspeth pointed out recently. In short, we can be taken anywhere now, but going alone is still hard. When Børge Ousland walked across the continent alone and unaided, it was an amazing achievement; and it hearkened back to Scott rather than to Amundsen, even though Ousland was another Norwegian.

But Amundsen’s goal was simple; get to the Pole first. No scientific research, no scruples about dogs. He engineered a beautifully efficient trip to an idea. He was first to the axis of rotation, to a spot of planetary power in the landscape of our imagination; a gathering of all the dragon arteries into a single tight knot. Very much an act of feng shui.

Thus for me his expedition is a bundle of contradictions. As we follow their route, I feel confused about what they did, and about what we are doing. The land they crossed is superb, and the crossing of it was a work of art. But an art that included dog murder; and all for an idea of firstness that in the end I don’t find very interesting. North, south, east, west, and all the other attributes of feng shui—these are parts of the landscape of the imagination, which is a crucial part of all landscape, of course; crucial to our placement in the real world, on the Earth as we find it. But if the reality of Earth is perceived merely as material to be passed through, then it is not really there for you, and so the imagination becomes impoverished. The Earth is the imagination’s home and body. Unless you inhabit a place—not stay in one spot, but inhabit a place, as the paleolithic peoples inhabited their places, with every bush known and every rock named—then it becomes too decentered and metaphysical; you live in the imagination of an idea. True feng shui springs forth as an organic part of the landscape itself, which we perceive rather than invent, after learning the land down to each grain of sand.

So Amundsen was the first to the spin axis. But the Americans who started living in that place in 1956 were the first to be there in the full sense of being.

Ahead of us the headwall of the glacier, the crux of our climb, the heart knot of our pilgrimage. A most serious case of kao-yuan perspective. I’ll practice silence now, and keep the cameras on and let you see it newly. We’ll talk again at the top, on the ice cap.

glittering white

shining blue

raven black

(in Amundsen’s journal, December 1911)

Once they had gotten down onto it, the lower stretch of the Axel Heiberg Glacier turned out to be such a broad river of ice that Val’s group ascended long stretches where the ice was bare and crevasse-free. It was like walking on the surface of a pour of unbroken water, the flush surface of a smooth torrent, everything frozen in an instant, even the ripples. Hard work cramponing up this smooth slope, and they traded off the sledge-pulling every half hour, first Val and Ta Shu, then Jack and Jim, then Jorge and Elspeth; but it was quite straightforward compared to the steep broken ice of the mistaken traverse, and they made good time. It would have been a lark, in fact, except that every time they looked forward and up they saw the glacier rising ever more steeply before them, until it leaped right up in a gigantic headwall, the section of the glacier now called the Amundsen Icefalls, towering over them in a broad curve from black sidewall to black sidewall, the great broken crackle of the glacier’s ice gleaming like shattered mirrors in the sun. A thousand vertical meters in less than five kilometers. And they were going to have to get up that, if they wanted to continue.

As they hiked on toward it, hour after hour, crevasse fields began to appear on the ice, like rapids in the current. Here the GPS system helped tremendously, because when they looked up the great white flow the steeper sections beetled down at them, but the flatter sections were telescoped to near nothing, making their way seem steeper (but also shorter) than it really was; and making it hard to see enough to choose a way. One of Amundsen’s many talents had been an ability to read the unseen glacier above well enough to avoid impassable crevasse fields, and the shear zones where the ice was not so much fissured as pulverized.

For Val, whose wrist screen was giving her information from satellite visuals, radar, and a GPS location to within two centimeters, not to mention the pulse radar on her shoulder constantly searching for crevasses ahead, the skill consisted in correlating all that data to the actual icescape facing them, and then choosing from the alternative routes it suggested, where there were alternatives. Usually there were; it was a kind of multiple-path maze they were threading, and at no point in this lower stretch did they run into a set of crevasses and shear zones that was continuous across the front of the glacier. Although once or twice it was close; they had to twist and wind their way, and walked perhaps two or three kilometers for every kilometer of the glacier climbed; so that it was slow, slow work. But they made progress.

And the hours passed. Val looked at the dim little TV screen strapped to her right wrist, and then up at the blazing white jumble, and pointed out the way to the string of clients behind. Off they would go again. She had begun to haul the sledge by herself most of the time, and no one objected. Sometimes the glacier was covered with the hardpacked white snow called firn, and they could tromp along at a good clip. Their sunglasses were all at max power, polarizing so heavily that the cobalt sky had a blackish tint to it.

In some sections the glacier was clean blue ice, pitted or smooth, so that they had to stop and put on crampons, and chip-chip-chip on up. Often the blue ice was pitted with regular cusps that resembled suncups in snow, though not so deep; it was like walking across the surface of an enormous golf ball, their ankles twisted to a different resting angle with every step. It was very hard not to sweat, even with the smartfabrics open wide and the ambient temperature well below zero. The sledge clitter-clattered behind Val, tugging hard on her, as if trying to escape and shoot back down the length of the glacier, on a mad luge run into the Ross Sea. Looking around during rest breaks, it was so obvious that the glacier was a stupendous flood streaming down an enormous break in the mountain wall; the curve of the fluid obvious in the many rubble lines marking the surface, or just in the creasing of the ice itself, parallel creases like the lines in a whale’s white belly, all turning together with each sweep down the valley. The trench the glacier had carved was deep; the ranges walling it in were both nearly four thousand meters above sea level, and ten thousand feet above where they were now, so that it felt like being in the bottom of an enormous slot. Sometimes it seemed it would take weeks to climb out of a box canyon as huge as this one. In their rest stops they exclaimed over it:

“Stupendous!”

“Awesome!”

“Gnarly.”

“Sublime.”

“Big.”

That was Ta Shu. He spent the rests standing off to one side, rotating like a whirling dervish in extreme slow motion, either to give his distant audience a complete three-sixty or simply because he could not take enough in. His low Chinese commentary was like the chirping of invisible birds.

Val kept the rests short, and the hours passed, hour after hour, each one full of effort. They made progress. It was surprising how hot you could get in Antarctica—walking on a kind of mirror, sunblasted from above and below, working very hard. And yet still the potential for chill was always tangible, in the tip of the nose and the ears, and sometimes, if the going was easy, in the fingertips and toes. At one point she checked; it was fifteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and most of the group were still wearing ear bands, so that they could keep their ears from frostbite while still exposing the rest of their heads, which meant they would not sweat profusely in their suits. The head was the key to ther mostatting. Most of them on this day were down to shirts and windpants over the smartfabric longjohns, with the heating elements in their photovoltaic windpants turned all the way off. The gleaming blue-purple fabric complemented nicely the glary turquoise of the ice and the dark cobalt of the cloudless sky. The sky appeared to pulse over the blaze of ice and snow, as if breathing lightly—a phenomenon that Val had long ago learned to attribute to her own pulse, pounding in her vision somehow. She was working hard, and her clients even harder, but still keeping up. This was the kind of hour she loved; little to worry about with the clients, taxing basic work to do, the mind absorbed in the work and the feelings in her feet and legs and the rest of her body, and in the landscape towering around her as they slowly got higher and higher, with the views correspondingly larger. Sweating, breathing hard, mouth dry; thoughts ricocheting all over the canyon, flying out of it all over the cosmos; but also, for long stretches of time, merged with the ice underfoot and in the ten meters ahead of her, and so happy. The dromomaniac at full stretch.

Her screen data and the view above made it clear they were reaching the foot of the icefall proper. Up there out of sight, sixteen hundred meters higher than they now stood, the ice fell off the polar cap, down a funnel-like head section, channeled between the triangular mass of Mount Don Pedro Christophersen—Amundsen’s financial savior—and the high southern end of the Herbert Range, called Mount Fridtjof Nansen—Amundsen’s patron and friend. With a rock bump in the middle of the funnel, which Amundsen’s group had christened Mount Ole Engelstad, after the Norwegian naval officer who had been Amundsen’s second-in-command until killed by lightning while still back in Norway. Being in good with Amundsen had meant getting some quite amazing peaks named after you, Val thought as she studied the map on the screen.

The Norwegians had been pushed ever rightward in their ascent by the crevasse fields of their time, until they had been forced to climb the funnel on the right side of Mount Engelstad, and only then turn left and south. But Val could see on the screen that the glacier had changed in the last century; there was a makable route leading off to the left, straight up the more southerly slope. If they went that way it would save them several kilometers, and also save them the ascent of the right side of the funnel, which appeared to be quite a bit more broken up than it had been a century before.

So she waited for everyone to catch up to her, and declared a rest stop. While they were drinking the meltwater out of their arm flasks—which were on the outside of their upper arms, and wired to the photovoltaic elements in their suits so that they melted a pint of water per hour in good sunlight—she showed them what she had seen on her screen. “Maybe we should go left here, directly to Butcher’s Spur.”

“Oh, come on,” Jack said, panting a little—red-faced, dried sweat streaking his cheeks, grinning handsomely at her. “We’ve been sticking to their route through all the other really hard parts, and once we get up to the plateau it’ll be easy from there on to the Pole. Why wimp out now, with just this last stretch to go?”

The others shrugged uneasily, looking at the cracked ice above. Both ways looked bad, to tell the truth. Elspeth muttered something. No one seemed to care that much one way or another.

It was Val’s call, she knew. If conditions in the icefall had changed, enough to make the right-hand route too dangerous, they should go left, and that was it. No one tried to repeat any particular route up an icefall, that would be absurd; icefalls changed every month, and one had to react to that.

Irritated, she looked at the screen again. Hard to tell what it would be like on either side, really, until they tried it. “Let’s set camp for today,” she said finally. “This might be the last flat spot in a long time, and it’s too late to take on another hard pitch. And I’ll need to think about the route a bit more.”

“Why?” Jack said.

“To see if it will go,” Val said shortly, and went to the sledge and started the work of making camp.

That night in the dining tent they ate for the most part in silence. They were tired, and the crux of their entire trek would be in tomorrow’s climb; and camped right under the slope the foreshortening made the icefalls seem very steep indeed, so that every time they looked outside they were confronted with what they had taken on. Even inside the tent the great broken white wall seemed to be visible to them. It reminded Jack, he said, of the night he had spent at the Hornlihutte on the side of the Matterhorn, looking up at that great spike overhanging them and wondering what he had gotten himself into. “And then we started while it was still dark, and we couldn’t see a thing. I climbed the first hour with my flashlight hanging from my teeth so I could use both hands. But in the end it turned out to be a piece of cake.”

People nodded. It was curious anyone ever boasted, Val thought, considering that no one was ever taken in by it.

“Have you climbed the Matterhorn?” Jack asked her.

“Uh, yeah. Long time ago.”

“The Normalweg?”

“What—the ridge from the hut? No no. We did a traverse that time.”

“Oh yeah—up the Zmutt and down the Lion? I’ve heard that’s great.”

“No, that time we went up the north face and down the south face.”

Jack was taken aback, and he colored a little. “Whoa,” he said. “That must have been radical!”

“Yeah. My partner was five months pregnant at the time, so it was kind of nerve-racking.”

People laughed, and Jack did too, coloring some more as he watched her.

“Like Alison Hargrove!” Elspeth exclaimed, eyes smiling wickedly.

“That’s right. In fact Meg called it doing her Hargrove.”

Like many women climbers Val honored the memory of Hargrove, a Brit who had climbed the north face of the Eiger in a single day while five months pregnant. Later on she had been killed on K2 when her kids were four and six years old, which was a shame. But certainly after that it was hard to do anything as a woman climber that seemed unmaternal in comparison.

Jack abandoned the Matterhorn, and the conversation wandered as they shifted from chili to chocolate, and began to wash the dishes. At one point Elspeth said to Ta Shu, “Butcher’s Spur is where they shot half their dogs, you see.”

“Ah! I see.”

The Norwegians had of course become fond of their dogs by the time they reached this point: each one a hardworking eager enthusiast, like a furry Birdie Bowers. So it had made them melancholy to shoot so many of them. Each man had shot the weakest half of his team, meaning two or three dogs apiece. And so despite the incredible accomplishment of climbing the icefall, the accomplishment that Val’s party still faced—despite making it from sea level to the polar cap in only four days, taking a difficult route never seen before by humankind—they had still had a very, very melancholy evening of it. Not that that had kept them (or the surviving dogs) from feasting on steaks carved out of their late companions.

“Kind of like cannibalism,” Elspeth said.

“The British killed dogs too,” Jack reminded her. “They wanted to use dogs, they just couldn’t figure out how.”

“And all the while hammering Amundsen for it,” Jim said, shaking his head ruefully. “You know the British Royal Geographical Society finally held a dinner in Amundsen’s honor, years afterward, and the man introducing him ended the introduction by saying ‘I propose three cheers for the dogs!’”

“You’re kidding!” Elspeth said.

“I am not kidding. Lord Curzon, as Amundsen recalled when he wrote about it in his autobiography. He was really pissed off.”

“What did he do?”

“He left after the dinner and went to his hotel, and asked for an apology but never got one. And so he quit the Royal Geographical Society, and never went back to England again.”

“Incredible.”

“There’s no one ruder than the British when they want to be.”

They ate in silence for a while, thinking about it. Val tried to imagine it: the roar of laughter from the British audience, Amundsen furious and humiliated, sitting on the stage unable to move. Quite a scene.

Ta Shu finished a chocolate bar. “These dogs deserved three cheers,” he observed.

“But it was Amundsen who should have toasted them,” Elspeth said.

“He did not get a chance, not then. But other times he always told their importance.”

They sat eating, resting, thinking it over. It was strange, Val thought, how heavy a mark those first expeditions had left on the people in Antarctica; they composed the continent’s only shared culture, really. No one knew what had happened here in the International Geophysical Year, no one knew what the U.S. Navy years had been like, no one knew the history of the Australian sector, or the Kiwis up at Lake Vanda, or the steady trickle of solo crossings and the like. Nothing remembered but the beginning.

Now Jim said to Ta Shu, “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, about how all our stories have colored lights on them. I know what you mean, and to a certain extent it’s true, of course. But what good historians are trying to do, I think, is to see things in a clear light—see what really happened, first, to the extent possible, and then see how the stories about the events distorted the reality, and why. And when you’ve got all those alternative stories together, then you can compare them, and make judgments that aren’t just a matter of your own colored lights. Not just a matter of temperament. They can be justified as having some kind of objectivity.”

Ta Shu nodded, thinking it over as he jammed down a second helping of chili and camp crackers. He ate, Val thought, like a man who had been seriously hungry at some time in his life.

“A worthy goal,” he remarked between gulps. He got up and went over to the faintly roaring stove to refill his bowl. The others looked at each other.

Under his breath Jack announced, “And there’s your fortune cookie for the day.”

The next morning Val decided to agree to follow the Norwegians’ route. She could see, on both her screen and when looking up at the ice fall, a makable route to the very far right of the funnel, up and under a small nunatak on the edge of the polar cap called Helland Hansen Shoulder. So she told the others, and Jack nodded complacently, and they packed the camp into the sledge and took off.

It should have been easier than it was. It was the least steep part of the funnel, after all; Val could see why the Norwegians had trended to this side. But something—perhaps the slight lowering in the height of the polar cap, reducing the thickness of the glacier’s upper section—had caused the ice across the whole chute to break up. Possibly it was crossing an underice rock ridge between Mount Engelstad and the Hansen Shoulder, for it looked on the map like they might be two exposed parts of a curved saddle overrun by ice.

In any case, it was very hard going. They zigged and zagged, from one narrow ramp or block of ice up to the next, sometimes crossing snow bridges over narrow crevasses, other times physically hauling the sledge over even narrower breaks in the ice, all of them pulling together. In sections like these the Norwegians had each dealt with their own sledges and dogs, and reported in their journals that they had become quite calloused to the incessant danger below; they photographed each other straddling crevasses to look down into them, or eating lunch with their feet hanging over the edges of them. But the NSF would not of course sanction any such cavalier approach, and in zones as fractured as these Val’s group had to rope up and treat it like any other serious climb, which was only appropriate. So Val went ahead and screwed in ice screws, and belayed the others up and over any serious exposure; then they hauled up the sledge; then she went back down to remove the ice screws, and climbed back up again and carried on. It was slow work, and hot and cold in turns, depending on whether they were making adrenalated climbing moves or standing around stamping their feet waiting for the others to do the same. Even the smartfabrics were not up to that kind of alternation, and as the sun wheeled over and stood right at the top of their route, blazing down at them in a photon deluge, the temperature differentials became more and more extreme and uncomfortable; a hundred degrees of subjective difference between sun and shade, one’s face and one’s back; and nearly two hundred degrees’ difference between work and rest. Even Val was uncomfortable, and this was really what she loved doing above all else. If she had been without clients, alone or with other climbers, she would have been in that state of hyper-alert attuned-to-landscape no-mind that was the zen of climbing, the great joy of it, the source of the addiction. As it was, however, the objective dangers underfoot were great enough to put her in a high state of apprehension for her clients’ sake. A guide was only as happy as her least happy client, and right now she was surrounded by a bunch of frost-flocked insect-eyed mute people, Ta Shu and Jack enjoying themselves, the rest really eager for this part to be over.

And yet as it got higher it got steeper, and they had to go slower. It was as if they were trapped in Zeno’s paradox, and halving the distance to the top in increments of time that remained the same. Burning and freezing; waiting for Val to screw in ice screws, or screw them out; looking or not looking at the blue gaping fissures in the ice underfoot, each one a potential deathtrap.

Thus it was nearly three in the afternoon when they finally came under the Hansen Shoulder, where a narrow ramp of ice led them right under its exposed rock, up toward the polar plateau. There was a wide bergschrund gap between their ice ramp and the dolerite of the shoulder, smoothed into a vertical wall by the ablation of the wind. There was also, unfortunately, a tumble of big broken seracs to the left of the ramp as they climbed, cleft with deep crevasses that ran out across the first great drop of the icefall. So they had no room for maneuvering on either side, and could only press onward up the ramp, their crampons sticking in the blue ice as they labored up the slope. But the screen image showed that it would go all the way.

Before they topped out, however, they had to pass a single tall block of ice filling the bergschrund to the right and overhanging their ramp—a smooth bluish fang of ice, a chunk of a serac which must have fallen from higher on the Hansen Shoulder, or across the ramp from the serac field to their left. The width of the ramp as it curved under this serac was just a bit wider than the sledge itself, because a crevasse curved out of the serac field and ran parallel to the ramp on the left. Val saw that this crevasse was a deep one. So they were on an ice bridge, in effect, running up the slope between bergschrund and crevasse. Where the crevasse ran out across the icefall, it was soon filled at its top by a snowbridge, leaving an opening under the snowbridge that was a very considerable ice tunnel. Not an unusual sight, but it added a certain frisson to the narrowness of the ramp, suggesting as it did the depths on each side of them.

Val stopped her group. It looked like the ramp ran all the way around the overhanging block without obstruction, after which it widened again. Very workable, but narrow enough that a fixed line would be appropriate. So she uncoiled one of the ropes, flaking it out neatly so that it would come up after her without knotting. From her gear sling she took an ice screw—a hollow metal tube, screw-threaded on the outside, with a sharp point on the driving end, and holes in the other end to insert an ice axe for easier turning—and chipped a hole about a quarter-inch deep with the sharp end of the screw, then got it set and rotated it in squeaking at every turn, the first half by hand, the second half with the leverage of her ice axe, until it was almost completely buried. A bombproof belay. She asked Jack to clip onto the screw with a runner, which was a looped piece of webbing, and belay her as she went on up. Then she took off up the ramp, Jack feeding out just enough rope that Val could feel it tugging back on her a bit. Jack somehow always ended up doing this job, and it was true he was good at it; a tight belay, with just the right slack in it, so that the middle of the rope scarcely touched the ice.

Around the corner and above the ice block, Val stopped and screwed in two more ice screws, connecting them by a sling attached to each through carabiners, so that any force that came on them would be equalized. She tied a figure eight in the end of the belay rope, and attached it to the sling with another carabiner.

Before returning to the others she reattached herself to the belay rope with a prussik loop. This was a small loop of rope, tied to the belay rope in a simple knot that tightened and held position when you put weight on the loop, but could be loosened and slid up or down the belay rope by hand when there wasn’t weight on it.

She got back to the others. “Okay, up we go.” She lined the clients along the rope, made sure they were attached to both the rope and their harness, and sent them ahead. They cramponed up the ramp, hunched over a bit. Jack stayed behind to help her haul the sledge up.

The others had all gone around the ice block to the higher belay and gotten off the rope, and Val and Jack had clipped their harnesses onto the belay rope and were just beginning to pull the sledge into line, when the ice block above them leaned over with a groan and fell. Val leaped into the crevasse to the left, her only escape from being crushed under falling ice. She hit the inner wall of the crevasse with her forearms up to protect her. The rope finally caught her fall and yanked her up by her harness; then she was pulled down again hard as Jack was arrested by the same rope below her. For a second or two she was yanked all over the place, up and down like a puppet, slammed hard into the wall. The rope was stretching almost like a bungee cord, as designed—it was very necessary to decelerate with some give—but it was a violent ride, totally out of her control.

But the belay above held, and the belayers too. As soon as she stopped bouncing, however, she twisted and kicked into the ice wall with both front point crampons, then grabbed her ice axe and smacked the ice above her with the sharp end to place another tool.

A moment’s stillness. Nothing hurt too badly. She was well down in the crevasse, the blue wall right in front of her nose. Ice axe in to the second notch, but she wanted more. Below her Jack was hanging freely from the same rope she was, holding onto it above his head with one hand. No sign of the sledge.

Voices from above. “We’re okay!” she shouted up. “Hold the belay! Don’t move it!” Don’t do a thing! she wanted to add.

“Jack!” she called down. “Are you okay?”

“Mostly.”

“Can you swing into the wall and get your tools in?”

“Trying.”

He appeared to be below a slight overhang, and she above it. A very pure crevasse hang, in fact, with the rest of the group on the surface several meters above them, belaying them, hopefully listening to her shouts and tying off, rather than trying to haul them up by main strength; it couldn’t be done, and might very well end in disaster. Val didn’t even want to shout up to tell them to tie off; who knew what they would do. Not wanting to trust them, she took another ice screw from her gear sling, chipped out a hole in the wall in front of her, set the screw in it, then gave it little twists to screw it into the ice. Its ice coring shaved out of the aluminum cylinder. A long time passed while she did this, and it became obvious that they were underdressed for the situation; it was probably twenty below down here, and no sun or exertion now to warm them; and sweaty from adrenaline. They were chilling fast, and it added urgency to her moves. She had to perform a variant of the operation called Escaping the Situation—a standard crevasse technique, in fact, but one of those ingenious mountaineering maneuvers that worked better in theory than in practice, and better in practice than in a true emergency.

The screw was in, and she clipped onto it with a carabiner and sling attached to her harness, then eased back down a bit. Now both she and Jack had the insurance belay of the screw.

From the surface came more shouts.

“We’re okay!” she shouted up. “Are the anchor screws holding well?”

Jim shouted down that they were. “What should we do?”

“Just hold the belay!” she shouted up anxiously. “Tie it off as tight as you can!” More times than she cared to remember she had found herself in the hole with the clients up top, and they had often proved more dangerous than the crevasse.

She tied another prussik loop to the belay rope, then reached up and put her right boot into it. Then she stood in that loop, jack-knifing to the side, and unclipped her harness from the ice screw, then straightened out slowly as she slid the prussik attached to her harness as high on the rope as it would go. When she was standing straight in the lower loop, she tightened the upper prussik, then hung by the waist from it, and reached down and pulled the lower one up the rope, keeping her boot in the loop all the while. There was the temptation to pull the lower loop almost all the way up to the higher one, but that resulted in a really awkward jackknife, and made it hard to put weight on her foot so she could move the higher one up. So it was a little bit up on each loop, over and over; tedious hard work, but not so hard if you had had a lot of practice, as Val had, and didn’t get greedy for height.

“Jack, can you prussik up?”

“Just waiting for you to get off rope,” he said tightly.

“Go ahead and start!” she said sharply. “A little flopping around isn’t going to hurt me now.”

Soon enough she reached the edge of the crevasse, and the others on top helped haul her over the edge, where she was blinded by the harsh sunlight. She unclipped from the belay rope and went over to check the belay. It was holding as if nothing had ever even tugged on it. Bombproof indeed.

Then it was Jack’s turn to huff and puff. Prussiking was both hard and meticulous, accomplished in awkward acrobatic positions while swinging in space all the while, unless you managed to balance against the ice wall of the crevasse. Jack appeared to be making the classic mistake of trying for too much height with each move of the loops, and he wasn’t propping himself against the wall either. It took him a long, long time to get up the belay rope, and when he finally pulled up to the point where the others could haul him over, he was steaming and looked grim.

“Good,” she said when he was sitting safely on the ramp. “Are you all right?”

“I will be when I catch my breath. I’ve cut my hand somehow.” He showed them the bloody back of his right glove, a shocking red. The blood was flowing pretty heavily.

“Shit,” she said, and hacked some firn off the ramp to give to him. “Pack this onto it for a while until the bleeding slows.”

“A sledge runner caught me on its way down.”

“Wow. That was close!”

“Very close.”

“Where is the sledge?” Jorge said.

“Down there!” said Jack, pointing into the crevasse. “But it got knocked in and past us, rather than crushed outright by the block. I gave it a last big tug when I jumped in.”

“Good work.” Val looked around. “I’ll go back down and have a look for it.”

“I’ll come along,” said Jack, and Jim, and Jorge.

“You can all help, but I’ll go down and check it out first.”

So she took from her gear sling a metal descending device known as an Air Traffic Controller, and attached it to the rope, then to her harness using a big locking carabiner. She leaned back to take the slack out of the rope between her and the anchor, then started feeding rope through the Air Traffic Controller as she walked backward toward the crevasse, putting her weight hard on the rope. Getting over the edge was the tricky part; she had to lean back right at the edge and hop over it and get her crampon bottoms flat against the wall, legs straight out from it and body at a forty-five-degree angle. But it was a move she had done many times before, and in the heat of the moment she did it almost without thinking. After that she paid the rope slowly up through the descender, one hand above it and one running the rope behind her back for some extra friction. Down down down in recliner position, past the ice screw she had placed, down and down into the blue cold. She was keeping her focus on the immediate situation, of course, but her pulse was hammering harder than her exertion justified, and she found herself distracted by an inventory that part of her mind was taking of the emergency contents of everyone’s clothing. This was no help at the moment, and as she got deeper in the crevasse she banished all distracting thoughts.

Just past the tilt in the crevasse that blocked the view from above, there was a kind of floor. Her rope was almost entirely paid out, and she had not tied a figure-eight stopper knot in the end of the line, which was stupid, a sign that she wasn’t thinking. But it got her down to a floor, and it was possible to walk on this floor, she saw, still going down fairly steeply; and as she saw no sight of the sledge, but a lot of chunks of the broken ice block leading still onward, she called up that she was going off rope, then unclipped, and moved cautiously over the drifted snow and ice filling the intersection of the walls underfoot—a floor by no means flat, but rather a matter of Vs and Us and Ws, the tilts all partly covered by drift. There was also no assurance at all that it was not a false floor, a kind of snowbridge in a narrow section, with more open crevasse below it; she would have stayed on rope if there had been enough of it. As it was she crabbed along smack against the crevasse wall, hooking the pick of her axe into it as she went, testing each step as thoroughly as she could and hoping the bottom didn’t drop out from under her.

She moved under the snowbridge she had noted from above, and the crevasse therefore became a tall blue tunnel. She moved farther down into it. Sometimes ice roofed the tunnel, other times snowbridges, their white undersides great cauliflowers of ice crystal, glowing with white light. The view from below made it clear why snowbridges over crevasses were such dangerous, things, so tenuous were they and so fatally deep the pits below them. But that was why people roped up.

The tunnel turned at an angle, and then opened downward, into a much larger chamber. Val kept going.

This new space within the ice was really big, and a much deeper blue than what she had come through so far, the Rayleigh scattering of sunlight so far advanced that only the very bluest light made it down here, glowing from out of the ice in an intense creamy translucent turquoise, or actually an unnamed blue unlike any other she had seen. The interior of the space was a magnificent shambles. Entire columns of pale blue ice had peeled off the walls and fallen across the chamber intact, like broken pillars in a shattered temple. The walls were fractured in immense translucent planes, everything elongated and spacious—as if God had looked into Carlsbad Caverns and the other limestone caverns of the world and said No no, too dark, too squat, too bulbous, I want something lighter in every way, and so had tapped His fingernail against the great glacier and gotten these airy bubbles in the ice, which made limestone caves look oafish and troglodytic. Of course ice chambers like these were short-lived by comparison to regular caves, but this one appeared to have been here for a while, perhaps years, it was hard to tell. Certainly all the glassy broken edges had long since sublimed away in the hyperarid air, so that the shatter was rounded and polished like blue driftglass, so polished that it gleamed as though melting, though it was far below freezing.

Val moved farther into the room, enchanted. A shattered cathedral, made of titanic columns of driftglass; a room of a thousand shapes; and all of it a blue that could not be described and could scarcely be apprehended, as it seemed to flood and then to overflood the eye. Val stared at it, rapt, trying to take it all in, realizing that it was likely to be one of the loveliest sights she would ever see in her life—unearthly, surreal—her breath caught, her cheeks burned, her spine tingled, and all just from seeing such a sight.

But no sledge. And back at the entrance to the blue chamber, there was a narrow crack running the other way, not much wider than the sledge itself; and looking down it, into an ever-darkening blue, Val saw a smear of pale snow and ice shards, and below that, what appeared to be the sledge, wedged between the ice walls a hundred feet or more below; it was hard to judge, because the crevasse continued far down into the midnight-blue depths below. There was no way she could get down there and get back up again; and even if she could have, the sledge was corked, as they said. Stuck and irretrievable. In this case crushed between the walls, it looked like, and broken open so that its contents were spilled even farther down. A very thorough corking. No—the sledge was gone.