At first it seemed that nothing much was happening. Twelve craters in a curving line lay open to the stormy sky. The ice dust in them seethed and bubbled like some kind of volcanic activity. On one side of the line, the bulk of the berg with its little village stood firm; on the other, the massive hook of ice kept up its unwelcome pressure against the water, turning the southward pressure of the wind into a westward drift for the ice.
‘Nothing doing!’ yelled Sam.
‘Give it time,’ said Colin Ross, his voice quiet but carried to the others by its desperate tone. ‘It has to work. We calculated everything so carefully.’
‘Back to the drawing board, Colin!’ said Richard. Then, ‘NO! Look. Something’s happening after all!’
The furthest crater was suddenly joined to the distant shoreline by a crack. It stretched for the better part of a kilometre. A crack a metre wide. No, ten metres wide, twenty, no … Distantly, a massive wall of spray rose up as though some huge surf had thrown itself against the ice cliffs. And the crack extended itself magically to the second crater and then to the third.
‘There she goes!’ exulted Colin but his voice was lost beneath the noise. It was as though the greatest tree in all the world was slowly toppling down and the sound it made was amplified a million times. The fissure, widening to a valley even as they watched, sprang from crater to crater beneath them. And the ice beyond the line was in slow, terrifying motion. Calving off from the mass of the big berg, another, made up only of the ice hook, was tearing itself away. Such was the power of the forces at work here that both of the bergs seemed to be in contrary motion. The main one seemed to be striking directly southwards, with the current and the wind, newly liberated and gathering way. The hook as it fell free spun westwards and, impelled by the force of its birth, seemed to be riding northward over the stormy, slate-grey waters.
But then the three men in the helicopter, almost stationary in the sky above this enormous process, saw other forces begin to come into play. The power of the explosion so carefully, and accurately, calculated by Colin and Kate Ross had lanced deep into the iceberg to ensure that not only was that portion of the ice above the water amputated, but a corresponding section beneath the water broke loose too.
The new berg, free of its mother, began to come to terms with its changed situation. Still spinning, it began to topple until it fell on its side in the ocean with an eruption of white water like the greatest of whales spouting.
That was the last the three in the helicopter saw at that stage, for Colin Ross, his excitement out of control, was pounding on Richard’s shoulder and yelling, ‘Down! Let’s go down!’
At first, Richard thought the glaciologist wanted to go immediately to the camp atop the ice cliff, but no. Colin meant straight down and right now. Sam got the message fast enough and the Huey dropped like a stone thrown carelessly over the edge of the new cliffs. At first they could only see the sea ahead, which heaved and foamed as though a hurricane was passing, in the wake of the tumbling calf berg. The water foamed like molten lead and spewed up great pieces of ice to bob between the two greater pieces — debris from the explosion. Richard felt a fleeting worry for any wildlife in this immediate area of the ocean, but then he remembered how careful Colin and Kate had been to ensure that none of the creatures they spent so much time studying were anywhere near enough to be injured.
Then his thoughts moved on, as the helicopter itself moved round to show its occupants the result of all this destruction. The new cliffs were like galleries of blue-green glass. Shattered out of the heart of the ice, they had had no time to weather during the moments since their explosive birth. The rain had stopped now and the last of the runoff spread itself thinly down the new cliffs and froze into place so they seemed to be composed of massive panes of glass, almost like gigantic gemstones in the crystal beauty of their planes and surfaces. Had the sun been shining on them, Sam, Colin and Richard would probably have been blinded. As things stood, they looked, awestruck, into the very depths of the berg. It was as though they could see deep into the antediluvian soul of it, as though they could see back in time to the snows of a thousand years BC which had fallen on Greenland when it had still been a green land and had given slow birth to the monster before them. The crystalline past faded slowly, imperceptibly, into blue-green shadows which in turn became a velvet darkness calling like the spaces between the stars.
But only the longest of inspections would have allowed the spectators to plumb those depths. Now there was only the opportunity to register the dazzling surfaces and to see that this new, beautiful range of cliffs swept inwards along a line which brought them to a sharp edge against the first set so that, three hundred metres high from waterline to topmost gallery, with a bit of a rake from forecastle to forefoot, the iceberg had a pair of proper bows like a ship.
Even before the helicopter’s skids kissed the ice, Colin was wrestling himself out of his seat strap and hooking his mitten-covered right hand round the door release. Richard was a little slower. He thanked Sam for the flight and advised the pilot to grab himself a hot drink from the camp; they would be returning to Antelope in half an hour or so, weather permitting.
When Richard leaped down onto the berg, he found his big colleague had waited for him. Side by side, crouching under the idling rotor blades, they dashed across the ice towards the makeshift encampment. As they ran, they splashed through the last of the puddles left by the rain before they were absorbed into the massive bulk of the berg beneath them. The ice was cold enough to freeze water and big enough to dictate its own microclimate, especially under calm conditions, but both men knew it was only a matter of time before it began to melt.
‘She even rides differently,’ called Colin the second they were clear. They paused for an instant and stood erect, testing the ice with the soles of their feet. Richard had been a seafarer since boyhood, a ship’s captain for more than twenty years, but he would be damned if he could feel any movement in the ice at all. He might just as well have been standing on the pavement outside Heritage House in London. ‘Good,’ he said amiably, infected by the other’s enthusiasm.
Then they were off again, running side by side towards the huts, and abruptly there was a figure from the huts running out to greet them.
This was Colin’s wife and colleague Kate. Kate Ross stood tall and reed-thin, by no means dwarfed by her husband’s massive size — or overcome by his ebullient enthusiasm; if anything, she seemed more excited than he, for she threw her arms round him and gave him the most unscientific hug and kiss. Were it not for their stature, they could have been Eskimos embracing, with their bulky sealskin leggings and hooded jackets of Caribou hide. But Inuit are a small-boned people and it would have taken several of them to fill Colin’s clothing and a couple to fill Kate’s.
‘She’s riding differently! Can you feel it?’ she asked the instant they broke apart.
‘Yes! I was just saying to Richard here …’
‘I think we’ve got it right this time. Paul and his engineers are checking the new cliffs now but it feels right.’
The two glaciologists hurried off without a further word, leaving Richard to follow more slowly. Their excitement was perfectly understandable, he mused as he walked carefully over the treacherous surface. This was the climax of many months of calculation, experiment and planning. It represented the opening of a doorway to them; a doorway into an Aladdin’s cave of possibilities, through which he had promised to accompany them.
Abruptly, Richard turned left. The camp and the waiting helicopter were now both behind him and only the cliffs, old and new, lay ahead. As the last squall fled away south ahead of him, he strode purposefully down the berg. Even if his sailor’s feet were not attuned to the movement of the massive vessel beneath them, there was a vantage point relatively close at hand where his eyes would soon tell him what the soles of his feet would not.