“That’s for sure.”
They walked side by side, as no one way over the sand and rubble underfoot was easier than another. “People make big mistakes in perspective down here,” Val said. “Thinking a snowmobile is a mountain, or a pack of cigarettes a building. Or vice versa.”
“Everything looks big to me.”
“But you thought we were just a short walk from their camp.”
“True.”
The afternoon passed as they walked up and down over low waves of rock. Although in the distance their way looked nearly level, the immediate vicinity was always up and down—twenty feet up a ridge, thirty feet down a saddle crossing an even deeper bowl—forty feet up to get out of the bowl, then twenty down, then a steep staircase—and so on. That local unevenness, and the rough rubble covering the valley floor everywhere, made it hard walking. But Wade slipped through it like a dancer, Val noted, with small neat graceful steps; no complaints; and he kept up a good pace. Val liked this kind of walking very much, but usually she toured these valleys leading trekking groups of up to twenty people, with the tail of the group always stumble-blistering along and requiring delicate care. So she enjoyed this empty afternoon a good deal; and after a few hours, declared it time to stop and cook a meal.
She found them a nook between two big boulders, in the sunlight and out of the wind, and sat down and broke out the food bag and the stove. Wade sat watching her as she cooked up some soup. She gestured at his pack; “There’s hot chocolate in your thermos.”
He helped himself, but didn’t eat much soup or trail mix. Appetite a bit suppressed, as often happened to people when they started trekking out here. He would be ravenous by the time they reached the Hourglass Lakes, she judged. Although he was not a big man. But walking in the cold burned a lot of calories.
“So this is forbidden ground,” he noted as she cleaned up the site and packed her bag.
“Yes. It’s kind of nice to be able to see it.”
“They must be doing important work to be allowed to come in here.”
“Yes. Actually I’ve heard they’re controversial.”
“Letting them in here?”
“That, and also their work as a whole. If they’re right, then the ice caps might be fairly sensitive to climate changes like the one we’re in. Something like that. You’ll have to ask them about it.”
They hiked on into the evening. Some small stumbles, and a slowing pace, made it clear that Wade was tiring. But he made no complaint, nor any requests for rests. Val was impressed; for a slender city boy he was pretty tough. She had had many and many a client who had come out here wild for the mountains and not done anywhere near as well.
Then they topped a short wall of crushed rock, formed in a polygonal frost heave, and the white splay of the glacier filling the upper end of the valley stood there unexpectedly over the rusty rock. “Almost there,” Wade said.
“Actually it’ll be a couple more hours,” Val said. “Do you want to set camp for the night?”
“No. I think I can make it there.”
“Okay. How about another dinner, though.”
“Fine. Sounds good.”
And this time he wolfed down a whole pot of stew. A very quick adjustment, Val thought as she repacked the gear.
The S-375 camp consisted of four colorful small dome tents surrounding two Scott tents, which were tall four-sided pyramids of heavy canvas, looking archaic in the early twilight; one was lit from within like a yellow lantern, and wisps of steam escaped the tubular vent at its top. As they approached this one Val called out, “Hello in there!”
They were expected, so the shouts from inside were not surprised: “Come in!” “Come in!” “But take your boots off first, it’ll be crowded in here!”
It was. Even with their boots off they were bulky in their parkas, but the men inside were shifting around while they pulled them off, and Wade wedged into a corner while Val dropped into the gap between Misha, the group’s mountaineer, and the Coleman stove. Both burners were alight under big pots of water, and the heat felt good against her side. Wade would be crushed in his corner, bent forward like a tailor, but that would be his first lesson in the ergonomics of a Scott tent. One of the main reasons Scott’s group had perished, in Val’s opinion, was that their Scott tent was designed for four people and a stove, and not five. This one was bigger, but six was still more than it could accommodate comfortably, and it was crowded, stuffy, even hot; still, after the frigid barren expanse of the darkening valley, a very welcome refuge.
“Leave the door open for a bit,” the man on the other side of the stove said. He was bearded, and perhaps twenty years the senior of the other men in the tent; no doubt the P.I. that Wade had come to see: Dr. Geoffrey Michelson, a British veteran of over forty years of Antarctic geology, who had taught in the States for almost that long. Introductions were made: Michelson’s team consisted of a younger colleague from UCLA, Harry Stanton; a Kiwi glaciologist named Graham Forbes; and Misha Kaminski, with whom Val had worked on some memorable SARs. It was quite a melange of accents, and Val noticed for the first time the touch of Virginia in Wade’s speech as he said Hi to the others. He and Val were offered mugs of Drambuie, the traditional liquor of the Antarctic Kiwis, and they both accepted gratefully. Val’s feet were throbbing, and she imagined Wade’s were worse, though he had never complained about anything. And the day’s hike had totaled almost thirty kilometers.
“Where are you off to next?” Misha asked Val.
“Footsteps of Amundsen,” she said.
“Dogtracks of Amundsen, you should say!”
“True. But we’ll pull a sledge, as usual.”
“That’s so crazy. These people come down here and pull a sled across the ice cap for a month—”
“Six weeks.”
“—when they could be climbing in the Asgaards, or wherever, somewhere really spectacular. And all because someone did it a century ago.”
“History buffs,” Michelson suggested.
“Fools! People who are in love with ideas rather than real places.” Misha was an Australian who had grown up in Switzerland with Polish parents, and his accent was an odd mix of Aussie and Central Europe.
“It’s a fun trip,” Val said. But they only laughed.
“What about you?” Michelson asked Wade. “What brings you to our special Site of Special Scientific Interest?”
“Well,” Wade said. “I’m down to look into this situation with the African oil exploration that’s going on, among other things. I work for Senator Phil Chase from California, and he’s gotten interested. So, I’m curious to know just how—how realistic these people’s expectations of hitting oil are.”
“Not my field,” Michelson said.
“No,” Wade conceded.
Val saw that he was thinking hard how to gain the older man’s confidence.
“But I was told by Sylvia that you know more about the Transantarctics than, than most people, and that you might be able to tell me something about the geological situation.”
“Yes, I know about the Transantarctics, but there’s no oil there. That’s not where they’re drilling. They’re out on the polar plateau, from what I understand.”
“Yes, but near the mountains?”
“Two hundred kilometers away.”
“Yes … but I thought you might be able to, to extrapolate out—to tell me what you think about the likelihood of oil. Your contention is that East Antarctica had no ice sheet in the past, isn’t that right?”
“Well, but we are studying the Pliocene, about three million years ago. The oil, if there is any, would have been formed a couple hundred million years before that.”
“Ah. So it was warmer down here then?”