In the company’s small library next to the coffee room he reads about a man named Milankovitch, a Yugoslav astronomer who insisted, early in the twentieth century, that the glaciation of eighteen thousand years ago (earth’s most recent ice age) was caused by a small variation along the earth’s axis and in the shape of the earth’s orbit around the sun.
Using Milankovitch’s figures as well as more recent data, Adams predicts that continental ice sheets have an oscillation period, based on earth’s orbit, of roughly a hundred thousand years. He projects on the screen a simulation of continental drift and discovers that Antarctica iced over about thirty thousand years ago, after it had separated from South America and was isolated from warm equatorial waters.
Presently there is less ice on the earth’s surface than there has been at any time in the past hundred and twenty thousand years. Though he knows it makes no difference in his travels, Adams is somewhat comforted by the fact.
The kids want to go for a walk in the park that Pamela takes them to, where the zoo is, and the public golf course. Adams anticipates a dreadful day, explaining what little he knows about lions, as he did when the kids were small, but the zoo is not on their list. They just want to walk.
It is a cool spring afternoon. The park is fresh, wet pines snapping under a whitecap of mist. On still days deer sometimes skip across the fairways — briefly, always a surprise — and disappear into the pines. Beyond the trees, wheat and corn sway dryly in tight little rows.
“Will you bring us something, Daddy?” Deidre says. “From that place you’re going to?”
“Of course I will.”
Toby, predictably, is quiet.
A V of grackles swings from the sky. Adams pulls his sweater tight around his chest. The black birds work their beaks into a collective sound like air leaking from a hose, and settle on the golf course several yards ahead. A field of black poppies, wings lifting like petals before growing still. Adams can feel his children’s bodies — first Toby’s, then Deidre’s — break from his hands as the children rush toward the birds, flapping their arms. The grackles rise at once, gyre toward the trees, circle up, then right, descending again toward the kids, then wheel over Adams’ head and are gone. Strings of mist break from the trees where the birds have made a hole, the children, meanwhile, laughing.
Part Six
WORDS for the sea:
sw
nrde
brimes
yðe
wiægholm
sund
eoletes
In Old English the sea is called “swan road” or “whale road,” the pouting or billowy track. A ship is called a wave-traverser (yð1ida) or simply sea-wood.
A flight to London, a journey by car to northern England, past Penrith and Glassonby, then into the country where Adams visits Long Meg and her Daughters, a set of ancient stones in an uneven field of gravel and broom. Legends say that Long Meg, the largest rock, was a witch, and the surrounding fragments her coven. In the days of the Celts, the witches met on this spot until Michael Scot, a Scottish wizard, turned them into stone. If the rocks are chipped or scratched, it is said, they bleed. Adams approaches Long Meg. He can smell the salt in the air, the powerful scent of the broom. Dust-spots fly off the rock and shower his coat in the breeze. He cannot imagine stones — any stone, not even a stone at the bottom of the sea — moving. Surely they drop from the sky and remain where their great weight has placed them.
North from England. In late summer Svalbard is effectively cut off from the rest of the world. The North Atlantic freezes over in winds forecasting autumn, lean chunks of ice imperil ships, commercial air flights are canceled. Only Braathen’s SAFE lands on Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard group, on a permafrost landing strip in Advent-dalen, the largest outpost. Comtex, however, has made its own arrangements. In Edinburgh, along with a small crew of geologists and engineers, Adams boards a four-hundred-ton, one-hundred-and-fifty-foot square-rigger named Desire Provoked after a point in Hudson Bay.
A shark’s tail hangs from the jibboom, a voluptuous wooden maiden leads the ship into the cold Atlantic spray.
Adams stores his pack in a small cabin belowdeck. The hull is new — freshly painted metal. The cabin smells of varnish. Wooden bunk, blanket, and a quilt. A small hand mirror fastened to the wall.
One of the crew members gives the scientists a tour belowdecks. “We’ve recently renovated the entire ship,” he says. “It was originally built in England around the turn of the century and traded mainly in sugar, rum, and mahogany. Then a Swedish exporting firm bought it, reduced it to a barkentine, and put an engine in. After the Second World War, it kicked around the Mediterranean for a while before winding up in a Greek scrapyard. Then, in ‘79, Comtex purchased and restored it.”
He shows them the galley, the heads, and the engine room. Oil and steam. Standing water. Fresh paint. Already Adams feels cold.
The sixteenth century saw the first sea charts printed on paper. On board Desire Provoked, Adams discovers that paper doesn’t work at sea. Documents he has packed soon become soft and moist. On deck, maps shred in his hands or become so wet with spray that the ink begins to run. The crew’s maps, printed on vellum, still tear. The pilot depends for the most part on the compass and electronic equipment.
In his bunk, jostled softly against the hull, Adams realizes he’s never known the past. He knows its maps, but they’re only paper, bound in books or displayed in museums. The seamen’s actual charts must have been destroyed at sea or reduced to illegibility. Maps printed for the public were based on explorers’ notes, or on hearsay. The most accurate information was lost. In this sense the past has broken free, like ice from a glacier, making its way over distance.
In all there are twenty-three scientists aboard Desire Provoked: eleven geologists, eight engineers, one landman, two marine biologists, and Adams. He has touched base with only a handful of his colleagues. The geologists he likes — they’re openly curious about their surroundings. Engineers he finds aloof. An exception is Than Nguyen, a drilling engineer from South Vietnam on his first international assignment. Adams enjoys filling him in on the do’s and don’t’s of fieldwork.
The only other person who especially interests him is a young geologist named Carol Richardson, a recent graduate of the University of Texas. As the only woman aboard, she receives much attention from her colleagues and it’s hard to get a private moment with her.
After dinner one evening, Adams finds her alone on deck. She is striking, Candice Bergen with dark hair. Eyes that seem to wander on their own to the sides of her face, slightly out of focus. This has an unsettling effect, but the tension in her brow, when she concentrates and brings her vision back into line, is disarming. She appears angry and confused, then her face relaxes, her forehead pale and even. She stands at a distance from Adams, arms withdrawn, defensive.
“Do you have a cigarette?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t smoke,” Adams says.
“I quit two years ago, but I’ve wanted one ever since coming aboard.”
“Nervous?”
“Fidgety. The cabins are so small. I’m used to lots of space — spreading my stuff out all over the place. You’re the cartographer?”
“Yes.”
“I have a terrible memory for faces, but I remember you from the briefing.” She points to her eyes. “Plus I can’t wear glasses out here. The spray.”