Erebus was still steaming from its cratered summit, however; steaming more than ever, no doubt, in the cold still air. X hiked quickly around the rim of the active crater, keeping well back from the edge, feeling very small, and obscurely frightened—as if it were simply too bold for a lone human to hike around the crest of Erebus in the dark before dawn. But there he was; and really it was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Nothing more than that; and yet so strange! Could this really be him? On Earth? In this present moment of his life? He could scarcely believe it was happening. But there he was. When he reached the far side of the crater, he even turned and went right up to the rim’s edge, to look down into the active caldera. The steam billowing up past him was pinkish orange, lit from below. Under that was burbling orange lava, scarcely glimpsed through the steam. The rising steam roared airily, and boomed in echoey booms. Beginning of the world.
He hurried on, feeling that he had tempted fate: gases, lava bombs, the spirit of the vasty deep, something ought to get him for taking such a chance for a glance. But he had done it! And now it was all downhill.
By the time he descended to Mount Terra Nova, and stopped for another brace of meals and a nap, and gone up and over Mount Terror too, it was getting very near the time of the first sunrise. It was in the midday twilight that X glissaded down the last spine of Mount Terror to Cape Crozier, the sky lightening all the while, as if he were redescending from the dark peak into the world of light and motion and wind. He had traversed Ross Island, from Knob Point to Cape Crozier, over the tops of the three volcanoes! And so he felt marvelous as he glissaded down one of the long snowy chutes between lava ridges, left snowshoe, right, left, right, all the long way down to Igloo Spur.
He was happy as he came over a final bump, and saw the little knot of people surrounding the rock hut. He walked down and joined them, explaining briefly where he had come from. They congratulated him, then pointed out what they had just recently been surprised to discover, which was that the little museum shelter, built the year before, had disappeared. The structure itself was gone, that was; all the equipment that the three early explorers had left behind was still there, but now relocated in the rock hut itself; the things put back, evidently, where they had been left by the three explorers.
X went over to have a closer look. A narrow wooden sledge lay across the rock oval, and under it on the floor of the hut, coated with a rime of snow, all the objects lay scattered in the tumble they must have been in when the three had beat their hasty retreat.
“Good idea,” X opined.
“George didn’t think so. He practically pulled out his beard.”
“But he’s getting used to it now, see?”
“I wonder who did it.”
“Shh! They’re about to start playing.”
As George had organized the ceremony, there was of course music to be played; and, of course, mikes and cameras to record it. Quite a lot of people, in fact, clustered on the lee side of the ridge under the rock hut.
X walked a short distance back up Igloo Spur, to get some distance from the fuss. Then they all waited. George was apparently timing the start of the music so that the piece would end during the arrival of the sun. X stood with his back to the wind, looking up the jagged coastline north of Cape Crozier. I live on this island, he thought. I just walked across my island. I live in this world. A gust of wind peeled over the ridge. The sky was getting lighter by the second. George raised his baton and jerked it down, and his little orchestra began to play what one of the celebrants had informed X was Jean Sibelius’s “Night Ride and Sun Rise.” Although it was clear immediately to X that the night ride referred to in the title had been a train ride, it was still easy to imagine the strings’ rhythmic rise and fall to be a stylized version of the winds pouring over this place, rather than of a train crossing Finland; the wind and the music in fact fit together very nicely, it was hard at times to tell which was which. Of course no matter what the musicians had tried in their attempt to keep warm, their instruments and fingers and lips had inevitably frozen, and the little ensemble had a windy cracked untuned sound, somewhat like an early music ensemble using period instruments; but music nevertheless, with strings and brass and woodwinds pulsing up and down and up and down, just like the wind.
And George had timed things so well, conducting with many an anxious glance at his wristwatch, that the clarinet made its sudden flight up the stave at the exact moment that the sun cracked the horizon, a very beautiful synchrony, which had George hopping with triumph as he conducted the thawing orchestra through the final rich chords, the whole white world now ablaze with brassy light, beaming outward from the blinding chip of sun on the horizon; the celebrants on the ridge rapt, then cheering as the musicians finished the song. Then one of them pointed south and cried, “Look! Look!”
Black dots in a pale sunwashed sky. Could be a flock of distant skuas; could be blimps, even farther away. Could be Val, come to give him a ride back over the island, come to see his new home. X’s heart leaped inside him. First you fall in love. Then anything could happen.
Acknowledgments
I went to Antarctica in 1995 courtesy of the National Science Foundation, as part of the U.S. Antarctic Program’s Artists and Writers’ Program. My thanks to the members of the NSF and the U.S. Antarctic Program who gave me the opportunity, and especially to Guy Guthridge of the U.S. Antarctic Program for his help throughout the process.
Thanks also to Donald Blankenship, Christopher McKay, Bud Foote, John Clute, Fredric Jameson, Lou Aronica, and Arthur C. Clarke.
In McMurdo, thanks to Lisa Mastro, Kristen Larson, Robin Abbott, Mimi Fujino, Ethan Dicks, Tim Meehan, Steven Kottmeier, Tom Callahan, Cheryl Hallam, Cathy Young, Melissa Rider, George Blaisdell, Sridhar Anandakrishnan, and Jesse.
In the Dry Valleys, thanks to Paula Atkins, John Schindler, Karen Lewis, Robert Collier, Peter Doran, Ray Kepner, and Jeffrey Schmok.
At the South Pole, thanks to Ellen Mosely-Thompson, John Paskievitch, Bjorn Johns, Frank Brier, Tim Coffey, and Harry Mahar; also to Paula, Karl, Jaime, Gloria, Tim, Sparky, Mark, and all the rest of the 1995-96 Pole crew who welcomed me to a wonderful Thanksgiving.
In the Shackleton Glacier area, thanks to Allan Ashworth, Michael Hambrey, Derek Fabel, Lawrence Krissek, and David Elliot.
Thanks to the wormherders Ross Virginia, Page Chamberlain, Melody Brown, Mary Kratz, and Rich Alward, for a memorable trip to Cape Crozier. Thanks also to the Kiwi helo crew Jim Finlayson, Jon Moore, and Lisa Frankel, for that trip and several others.
On Erebus thanks to Philip Kyle, Ray Dibble, Kurt Panter, and U.S. Navy helo pilot Greg Robinson.
Thanks to my fellow Woos Jody Forster, Peter Nisbet, Anne Hawthorne, and Sara Wheeler.
Back at home thanks to Charles Hess, Patsy Inouye, Steve Mallory, Peter Dileanis, Nigel Worrall, Sharma Gapanoff, Ricardo Amon, Terry Baier, Victor Salerno, Jennifer Hershey, and Ralph Vicinanza.
Special thanks to Stephen Pyne, Robert Wharton, Tom Carver, Peter Webb, and Buck Tilley.
Also to Lisa Nowell, David and Tim Robinson, and Don and Gloria Robinson.