They followed the mountains Grid East for two hundred kilometres, past bare brown mountain slopes and blinding glaciers. The ice fog was thickening, obscuring much of the Shelf off to their right, but the peaks of the Queen Maud Range stood out sharply against the deep, empty blue of the sky. The helicopter curved around Mount Kyffin, an ice-drowned island, and then they were over the Beardmore.
“My God,” Penny said.
Will, sitting beside her, smiled as if he owned it. “Bloody gorgeous, isn’t it?”
In its length and breadth it dwarfed the mountains. From the polar plateau to the Shelf, the Beardmore was two hundred kilometres long and thirty wide; when the helicopter was halfway across it, the mountains on either side seemed like children’s sand castles, about to be swept away by the tide. The surface of the glacier was a multi-coloured jumble, streaked by long bands of darkness: crushed rock, ground away from mountainsides and carried down by tributaries. Crevasses yawned up at the sky, wide and deep enough to swallow a super-tanker without a trace. Across the monstrous labyrinth of that cracked and mottled surface, an endless wind screamed down from the Pole, carrying ground drift that made the whole glacier seem to be moving.
The sheer scale of it made Penny feel shrunken. If mountains could be overwhelmed and ground to dust by such a torrent of ice, of what significance were human beings? Scott and Shackleton, and their men and ponies, had somehow fought their way up and down that glacier; Scott had been grateful for such a highway to the Pole. Penny thought they must have been mad. Against such blind mass and inertia, courage and intelligence and resolve were no more than the buzzing of a mosquito as it flew to meet an avalanche.
The helicopter crossed the glacier. On the far side, a nunatak — a mountain peak half-buried in ice — rose near the mouth of Garrard Glacier, a tributary of the Beardmore. They landed on a lonely outcrop of black rock on the shoulder of the nunatak, and fifty metres from a small yellow hut identical to the one at Ramsey. Al and Steve came into the passenger compartment.
“Here we are,” Al bellowed over the continuing roar of the engine. “I’m going to try to contact Shacktown for a weather report. Be with you in a few minutes.”
It was even colder here than at Ramsey, and Al kept the rotors turning slowly to prevent the engines from freezing up. Again Will and Jeanne went straight out onto the ice while the others hurried into the hut.
Soon it was warm enough for them to shed at least their anoraks. Steve sat on a little table and unpacked the breakfast, while Penny and Tim crowded into the lower bed of the double bunk. The equipment hummed and chattered.
“What an ideal spot for a picnic,” Penny said.
“Not many flies,” Tim agreed. He looked around the cramped, windowless little room. “You know, I must be crazy, but I’m going to miss this whole lousy continent.”
“It gets in your blood,” Steve said. “Well, we’ll be back next year.”
She felt a brief, irrational envy of them all. Then she remembered the stink and squalor of Shacktown. God, that was too high a price to pay for some spectacular scenery.
Al burst in, a grim expression on his face.
“Get through?” Steve asked.
“I got McMurdo, not Shacktown. Just for a minute. They’re having an eruption.”
“A what?” Tim asked after a shocked moment.
“Mount Erebus is erupting — has been since early yesterday.”
Penny remembered Erebus. She’d seen it as their plane approached Ross Island, a huge, gnarled mountain with a thick plume of steam trailing from its peak. McMurdo and its suburb, Scott Base, stood at the foot of the volcano, just where the edge of the Shelf met the waters of McMurdo Sound.
“Most of it’s coming from the summit,” Al went on, “but there’s a new vent right on the shore, a few kilometres past Scott Base. They’re getting great chunks of rock falling all around them. A Coast Guard ice-breaker in the Sound was hit last night and went right to the bottom. They’ve closed down Inner Willy.” That was Williams Field, the airstrip bulldozed into the surface of the Shelf; an auxiliary strip, Outer Willy, was twenty or thirty kilometres Grid North of Ross Island.
Steve got up from the table and pressed buttons on the seismograph. The screen lit up in a flicker of coloured lines and changing numbers. The others watched him in silence.
“Right — this must have been when it started,” he said at last. “A strong shock at 0500 hours — then another twenty minutes later — and another — damn it, they keep getting stronger.” He turned to Al. “You couldn’t raise Shacktown?”
“Not a whisper.”
“We’ve got to get back right away. Even if Inner Willy is closed down, Outer Willy should be okay. They’ll be evacuating everyone as fast as they can, and we’ve got to let them know we need to get out as well.”
“Okay. What about the shot Will and Jeanne are setting up?”
“Call ’em back. We don’t have time for it.” He hastily changed tapes on the seismograph while the others finished their meal. In less than two minutes they were back in their anoraks and heading for the door. Steve switched off the light and heat, leaving the hut illuminated only by the glowing dials of the instrumentation. Al opened the door.
The hut trembled, as if a violent gust of wind had struck it, and then lurched violently. Al lost his balance and fell through the doorway. The plywood walls began to creak; a chair slid across the floor and fell over.
“Out! Right now!” Steve shouted. He grabbed Penny, lifted her and shoved her through the doorway; she nearly fell over Al, who was scrambling to his feet. Tim followed an instant later. Three hundred metres away, Will and Jeanne were struggling up the icy slope from the glacier, their gear abandoned. Except for the creaking and rumbling of the hut, everything seemed very silent; only after a few seconds did Penny become aware of a profound, almost inaudible vibration in the rock beneath her. From the glacier below came a sudden sharp bang, then another and another, until each blurred into the other’s echoes.
“Get into the helicopter,” Al said. Penny and Tim started to obey when the mountain shuddered violently and they lost their footing. Clumsily Penny got to her hands and knees and looked around for Steve. He was still inside the hut, watching the seismograph. He was smiling.
He’s crazy, Penny thought. Crazy. Bonkers.
The word made her giggle. A hum filled the air, like wind in a forest. The rock shuddered again and the hut snapped off its foundations with a shriek of torn metal and splintering plywood. The windmill toppled over, clanging on the twisted aluminium roof. Then the walls parted and the roof collapsed.
Al got up again and lunged towards the wreckage, but Steve came out by himself, feet first and unhurt. He was clutching a tape under his arm — the tape Tim had just put on the machine.
Penny turned to look at the helicopter. It was skidding away from its landing site, moving erratically down the shallow gradient towards the glacier, and towards Will and Jeanne.
Penny screamed: “The helicopter!” She couldn’t hear herself. The hum was turning into a deep, rolling roar, growing louder every second, like an endless peal of thunder. Once she had watched a rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral; this was worse, much worse. It went on in a mindless, meaningless blur of sound that drugged and stupefied.
Another shock hit, rousing her enough to reach out to Al and make him look away from Steve, towards the helicopter. She saw his eyes widen. Then he was on his feet, lurching towards it. It had found a steeper slope and was now sliding steadily downhill, not just skidding about.
Al reached the helicopter, yanked open the door and hauled himself inside. A few seconds later Penny could see him in the cockpit; the rotors quickened, but the engines were muted against that strange unending thunder. She shut her eyes against the downdraft from the rotors. The downdraft increased, throwing snow as fine and sharp as powdered glass against her face. The helicopter had lifted off, and was hovering just overhead.