January 18 marks the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Robert Falcon Scott’s party at the South Pole – five weeks after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen got there first. Bitterly disappointed, Scott wrote in his diary: “All the day dreams must go.”
Laurence Aberhart
Antarctica makes no distinction between the living and the dead. They exist as mute cousins and only in dreams do they converse. We are a small group of the living in the vast expanse of the Ross Ice Shelf, here to do our survival training. Our group is an odd collection of Antarctic misfits, welded together by the immensity of the ice that surrounds us. We huddle in a pit sawn into the polystyrene-like snow that we refer to as our lounge. Our conversation hovers around the detail of living somewhere else, while Joe finishes a coffee table and begins on a TV set, all carved from snow with a dessertspoon.
A light evening breeze springs up and gives us an excuse to build a wall on the windward side of our lounge. The wall is a vertical rebellion against the enormous horizontal whiteness. Not one of us is brave enough to mention this. Instead, we set about building the wall on the premise that it will shelter us from the wind.
Laurence wanders the camp with his 120-year-old camera, cramming it all into 8x10in negatives and escaping the space under a black hood. Wal talks in raspy tones about the intricacies of diesel engines and hydraulics in the cold, and Joe finishes the TV and places it in our wall. It frames a brave attempt at the picturesque.
We hang about well past bedtime. The sun plays its part by refusing to set, merely doing an orbit around the horizon and waltzing shadows across our lounge. We talk of our children and their dreams, turning them over like hot coals of the fire we lack.
Beneath us are 80m or so of ice, floating on the dark waters of McMurdo Sound. Further towards the mainland and buried some 16m down are Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Henry Bowers and Edward Wilson, still on their journey home and nearly 100 years on from their death. They lie together, frozen into their sleeping bags and wrapped in their tent, where the effects of scurvy, malnutrition and frostbite ushered them into sleep. Out beyond them Lawrence Oates lies curled up. Further back near the bottom of the Beardmore Glacier, Edgar Evans lies slumped forward as if in prayer. They are all on a journey to the sea, and around 460 years from now Scott and his companions will be committed to the deep somewhere near Cape Crozier. Around the lounge the conversation turns to this place that makes glaciers out of men.
By 1.00am I have that woozy, overtired feeling starting to fill the long pauses in our conversation. I slip into my tent and pull layers of thick sleeping bags over my head to block out the sun that beats through the thin walls.
On the blackness I have created, white visions of the day are projected. Somewhere deep in this vivid slideshow I find myself shuffling down the steps of a large tunnel carved under the ice shelf. The light from the surface is a glaring white halo that catches the twinkle of ice dust wafting into the long, deep tunnel. There is a murmuring of men’s voices like those in a vast cathedral while a pale blue light emanates from the walls that have been intricately carved by Joe with a spoon.
At intervals along the tunnel there are recesses, which serve as sleeping quarters. In the first of these I find Wilson lying prone in his sledge-hauling gear, complete with harness. I fetch an emperor penguin’s egg from my pack and Wilson cradles it in his hands. He tells me of his dreams and of a painting he is working on. He is shivering and has a layer of frost over him. I find a sleeping bag in my pack and cover him, tucking him in like a child.
I listen to his dreams of great science for a while before closing his eyes with my gloved hand. I move on down the passage where I can hear more murmuring voices. I come across Bowers lying in the next recess. He is checking his supply lists and I listen to his mutterings about the lack of paraffin left in the depots. I place a handful of rubber washers into his hands and close his frostbitten fingers tight before covering him. He dreams of depots full of food and his mum waiting for him back home.
Evans’s large bulk takes up most of the next recess. I hand him a bottle of beer. His hands are shaking as he puts it to his mouth and takes a long draught. We talk about the pub he will own when he gets back home. His teeth chatter as he rolls into a deep sleep. Further on Oates is mumbling something about the ponies and the lack of feed. I place a fresh lime in his hand, which he clutches to his breast, repeating a whispered “thank you, thank you”. I listen to each of their dreams as a father and tuck them into their sleeping bags, shivering like children too long in the cold sea on a summer’s day.
Scott is last. Instead of talking, he is writing furiously in his journal. The others are silent in their sleep now except for a soft snoring. I offer him my last sleeping bag, but he bats me away with a stiff arm as he hisses, “For God’s sake, man, leave me alone.” We stare at each other for a moment, both wrapped in disbelief. My breath steams with disappointment. He breaks the gaze with a grunt and goes back to scrawling in his journal.
I turn and make my way back down the tunnel past all his fine men, quiet now in their dreams. Through the blinding light of the surface I see two men and a dog team. I wave my arms mutely. They swish by, close enough for me to hear the driver swearing to the dogs in Russian, while the other searches the horizon blindly through thick frosted spectacles. They coalesce into one black dot and disappear over the horizon. A wave of hopelessness engulfs me. I drop to the snow, the weight of the ice shelf pulling me down into a deep, fruitless sleep.
When I finally wake, the dream still has a presence hovering in the tent before ebbing back to the dead beneath the ice shelf. While my tent mate softly snores, I check outside for my footprints or any sign of the cave in the distance, on some chance that it was all real. I am groggily tired; the dream has exhausted me. I brew a cup of tea and stare to the south through Joe’s TV screen.
By the time we return to Scott Base, it is early afternoon. We are back in the world of the living, of noise and of immediacy. The warm flood of home comes down the phone line from a place that is summer. I can hear the leaves rustling and the bird song in the background as my daughters wake from their afternoon sleep and tell me of their dreams.
I shiver.