Beech trees had not evolved greatly, and any fossil fragments of them found here could have been much older than the Pliocene. Indeed when they had first found beech wood in the Sirius they had assumed it was Triassic wood picked up by a glacier much later. Only when they had come on thousands of beech leaves as well did they realize the wood had been alive when Sirius was laid down. And beech forests supported an array of smaller life as part of their ecology, of course, mostly mosses and lichens, but also weevils and other beetles, freshwater snails, and perhaps even some amphibians. Some of these would be specifically Pliocene species, or could be dated by chemical tests that worked specifically for them. So that looking into the rock of this ancient seafloor (granting for the moment that that was what it was), it was quite possible that one might find fossils larger than the microscopic foraminifera and diatoms. Michelson often mentioned the possibility at the beginning of the day when they set out, or when the helos arrived to carry part of the team to a distant site; cheerily and with no expectations he would call out in farewell, “Keep an eye out for scallop shells!” A kind of joke. Actually the foraminifera and diatoms, although too small to be seen by the naked eye, were enough to prove their contention that the Sirius group was the remnant of a seafloor, and date it as well. But certainly a fossil clam shell would be welcome.
And so when Graham’s finger took a big flake of the diamictite off, revealing a band of yellow-red rusty clayey material, he said “What have we here!”
It was not a clam shell, of course. But it was unusual.
He climbed up the strata to have a closer look at it. He pulled a lens from his pocket and took a glance at 30x power. Crushed plant material.
He called out to Harry, who was worrying at a round block of tillite up the slope. Harry heard him, and called back, “I think I’m in an old estuary here!”
“Very like!” Graham said. “Come here and look at this!”
Harry came around the corner and saw the rusty strata in the gray sandstone. “Hey!”
“Yes. Look at where it is, too. Rudimentary paleosol, at the upper surface of a fluvial diamicton, and see here, root structures going down here vertically, and then spreading out farther laterally.”
“Beech forest,” Harry said, his eyes round. “Oh, my God—this looks like it’ll be as big as Oliver Bluffs or Bennett Platform.”
“Yes.” Carefully they worked the diamictite off the yellow-rust leaf litter mat. “Look, it’s especially well-preserved where it’s compressed under these boulders.” Graham tapped away some more. Harry got on his wrist phone and called Michelson. “Geoff, it looks like we’ve found another beech leaf mat, a good one. Moss cushions too, but mostly beech. Preservation looks good.”
“I’ll be right up. I’m downvalley from you still, right?”
“That’s right. We’re up against the cliff wall, site 3.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Harry was their paleobotanist, and so now grinning ecstatically. At that moment it was like a treasure hunt, Graham realized; or like prospecting for gold. A find like this would result in a paper that would help make a case that would help make a career that would help pay the bills. Gold nuggets right there in the ground, if you wanted to think of it that way. The philosopher’s stone. Or another brick in the wall.
Although Harry was not thinking in such prosaic terms. “Look at that, oh my God. Can you imagine a beech forest growing down here, what it would have looked like! So beautiful. This is a beautiful fjord shoreline, Graham, it’s like a holy place. Really fine mineralization too.”
Another flake of diamictite came off. The yellowy stuff was bowed under the boulders resting on the disconformity. A tiny oil-bearing deposit in the making.
“Leaves up to six or seven centimeters, it looks like. That’s big.”
“So mild temperatures.”
“And maybe cloudy a lot. Check this out, veins in the leaf. Incredible venation.”
“Very nice.”
Of course this would only be another case of disputed age of biological material. Still, it seemed very clear that at the times when the Sirius group was being deposited, this region had been much more than lifeless sand occasionally catching windblown diatoms from afar; if nothing else, this helped to make that very clear, so the main counter-explanation given by the stabilists for the presence of the diatoms was obviously wrong. And if it was clear that there were beech forests here during Sirius, on a cold coast that looked more like the coast of southern Chile than like the current inhospitable icy shore, then one had to admit that Antarctica had certainly had some mild times. And then the diatoms that absolutely permeated the Sirius sandstones, to the point where some diamictites were simply pulverized diatoms and foraminifera and nothing else, could be quite definitively dated to the Pliocene by solid biostratification dating; and so where was the flaw? How could the interpretation of a liquid marine era be faulted at that point? You would have to simply ignore evidence to do it; pretend certain papers didn’t exist; pretend that certain rocks in the field didn’t exist either. And unbiased scientists, without their careers committed to one view or the other, would not do that.
Then another flake of gray rock came off under the pointy end of his hammer, and he and Harry both saw the rounded double bump and the shard behind it. When Michelson hiked up to join them he found them both flat on their chests, their faces centimeters from the stone, their sunglasses pulled off to enable them to see the object better. “What’s this I see?” Michelson cried.
“I’m not sure,” Harry said. “But I think it may be the legbone of a frog. Oh my God.”
“Call it your famous scallop shell,” Graham said, sitting back and grinning crookedly up at Michelson. He felt the sun lance through the chill and drive into his face, a very pleasurable sensation.
The world is a body. Rocks are the skeleton, arteries are watercourses, trees are the muscles, clouds are the respiration. We are the thoughts. Here then we can say that the body has been stripped to the skeleton, for there are no muscles, or veins, or arteries. Yet still the breath of clouds. A skeleton that breathes under its white cloak, and from time to time wakes, and thinks.
We walk up the ice road to the inner highland, the inner self. Morning in sunwashed camp: exercises in chih-fa, the method for the fingers. Valerie, our roshi, the shepherd of this pilgrimage, is purest form in the art of chih-fa. No tea ceremony could have cleaner lines than her breaking camp zazen. The way she cares for us is a joy to behold. And now here we are again, walking. Walking for hours, in the footsteps of Amundsen.
What can we make of Amundsen? His story is a knot. All his life he had been a man of the north, all his career had been an exploration of the north. He had found a Northwest Passage; he had desired for years to reach the North Pole. Then came news of Cook’s and Peary’s claims to have reached it, in the midst of his preparations for his own trip there. But he had no desire to be the third man to the North Pole, nor even the second. This casts his desire in a different light. What he wanted then was not the North Pole, center of his life’s work and placement. He wanted to be first. It is not at all the same thing. Not a hunger for place, but for position. A concentration on time rather than space; a desire to write one’s name on history, rather than to occupy a place on Earth.
Thus when Amundsen wrote of the strangeness of standing at the South Pole, after all his life trying to get to the North Pole, he was only partly correct. In a deeper sense he was standing exactly where he wanted to be: first. And indeed he has been remembered, especially on this continent, where there has been so little human history that what happened at the start still overshadows all. So he made his mark on time. First to the Pole. When did he reach it? I can’t remember.
The method Amundsen used to reach the Pole is also a knot, and difficult for us to come to terms with. On the one hand he had a genius for contemplating his polar experience and analyzing his methods, and making continual innovations in equipment and technique to improve them. His trip
used the finest combination of modern and archaic technology possible in his time, much of it custom designed by Amundsen and manufactured under his direction.
But his change of destination, from one end of the Earth to the other, he hid from all, for fear of losing his financial support. This is one of the strange things about his trip that have puzzled people ever after. Even his men did not know where they were going; he did not tell them until after they left Norway. At that point he also sent a telegram to Scott, which said “Going south.” This shows he too was aware of reaching the Poles as a kind of medieval joust, with certain rules of fair play. Amundsen obviously did not agree with Scott’s notion that no one else should get to try until Scott either won or died. But he did agree they were running a race. So he sent Scott his notice.
And then he used dogs, and ate them. Of course many of us eat animal flesh, and in any market in China you can see more cruelty to animals in a single day than anything Amundsen and his men did to their dogs in their entire polar careers. We cannot judge him. But there is something about planning to use dogs to pull you to the Pole, while eating them as you go, that strikes the British mind at least as somewhat cold and overefficient. The British are both unsentimental and highly sentimental at one and the same time—like the Chinese. And dogs are our comrade-helpers, and intelligent, so there seems to be a touch of murder in killing these sentient beings, especially shooting and eating them to facilitate a trip to a first.
And then there is simply the question of being taken there by other beings, rather than under your own power. Scott by his inability to master dogs in effect raised the stakes to a higher level, where it was not just a matter of getting there, but how you did it. By accident Scott and his men fell in love with walking on Earth, and after that Scott asserted that doing it on your own mattered; and what has happened since tends to reinforce his values rather than Amundsen’s. The first climbers of Everest, for instance, used oxygen, and were the apex of a giant logistical pyramid; later Messner and Habler climbed the mountain without oxygen, and then Messner climbed it alone and without oxygen. Messner’s beautiful act of feng shui made the first climbs look over-reliant on aid. In Antarctica it was much the same. People drove tractors to the South Pole, then flew, and everyone recognized that this represented no great personal achievement for the people using the transport. And standing on the back of a sled pulled by dogs is not that different from sitting in the cab of a tractor, as my friend Elspeth pointed out recently. In short, we can be taken anywhere now, but going alone is still hard. When Børge Ousland walked across the continent alone and unaided, it was an amazing achievement; and it hearkened back to Scott rather than to Amundsen, even though Ousland was another Norwegian.
But Amundsen’s goal was simple; get to the Pole first. No scientific research, no scruples about dogs. He engineered a beautifully efficient trip to an idea. He was first to the axis of rotation, to a spot of planetary power in the landscape of our imagination; a gathering of all the dragon arteries into a single tight knot. Very much an act of feng shui.
Thus for me his expedition is a bundle of contradictions. As we follow their route, I feel confused about what they did, and about what we are doing. The land they crossed is superb, and the crossing of it was a work of art. But an art that included dog murder; and all for an idea of firstness that in the end I don’t find very interesting. North, south, east, west, and all the other attributes of feng shui—these are parts of the landscape of the imagination, which is a crucial part of all landscape, of course; crucial to our placement in the real world, on the Earth as we find it. But if the reality of Earth is perceived merely as material to be passed through, then it is not really there for you, and so the imagination becomes impoverished. The Earth is the imagination’s home and body. Unless you inhabit a place—not stay in one spot, but inhabit a place, as the paleolithic peoples inhabited their places, with every bush known and every rock named—then it becomes too decentered and metaphysical; you live in the imagination of an idea. True feng shui springs forth as an organic part of the landscape itself, which we perceive rather than invent, after learning the land down to each grain of sand.
So Amundsen was the first to the spin axis. But the Americans who started living in that place in 1956 were the first to be there in the full sense of being.
Ahead of us the headwall of the glacier, the crux of our climb, the heart knot of our pilgrimage. A most serious case of kao-yuan perspective. I’ll practice silence now, and keep the cameras on and let you see it newly. We’ll talk again at the top, on the ice cap.
glittering white
shining blue
raven black
(in Amundsen’s journal, December 1911)
Once they had gotten down onto it, the lower stretch of the Axel Heiberg Glacier turned out to be such a broad river of ice that Val’s group ascended long stretches where the ice was bare and crevasse-free. It was like walking on the surface of a pour of unbroken water, the flush surface of a smooth torrent, everything frozen in an instant, even the ripples. Hard work cramponing up this smooth slope, and they traded off the sledge-pulling every half hour, first Val and Ta Shu, then Jack and Jim, then Jorge and Elspeth; but it was quite straightforward compared to the steep broken ice of the mistaken traverse, and they made good time. It would have been a lark, in fact, except that every time they looked forward and up they saw the glacier rising ever more steeply before them, until it leaped right up in a gigantic headwall, the section of the glacier now called the Amundsen Icefalls, towering over them in a broad curve from black sidewall to black sidewall, the great broken crackle of the glacier’s ice gleaming like shattered mirrors in the sun. A thousand vertical meters in less than five kilometers. And they were going to have to get up that, if they wanted to continue.
As they hiked on toward it, hour after hour, crevasse fields began to appear on the ice, like rapids in the current. Here the GPS system helped tremendously, because when they looked up the great white flow the steeper sections beetled down at them, but the flatter sections were telescoped to near nothing, making their way seem steeper (but also shorter) than it really was; and making it hard to see enough to choose a way. One of Amundsen’s many talents had been an ability to read the unseen glacier above well enough to avoid impassable crevasse fields, and the shear zones where the ice was not so much fissured as pulverized.
For Val, whose wrist screen was giving her information from satellite visuals, radar, and a GPS location to within two centimeters, not to mention the pulse radar on her shoulder constantly searching for crevasses ahead, the skill consisted in correlating all that data to the actual icescape facing them, and then choosing from the alternative routes it suggested, where there were alternatives. Usually there were; it was a kind of multiple-path maze they were threading, and at no point in this lower stretch did they run into a set of crevasses and shear zones that was continuous across the front of the glacier. Although once or twice it was close; they had to twist and wind their way, and walked perhaps two or three kilometers for every kilometer of the glacier climbed; so that it was slow, slow work. But they made progress.
And the hours passed. Val looked at the dim little TV screen strapped to her right wrist, and then up at the blazing white jumble, and pointed out the way to the string of clients behind. Off they would go again. She had begun to haul the sledge by herself most of the time, and no one objected. Sometimes the glacier was covered with the hardpacked white snow called firn, and they could tromp along at a good clip. Their sunglasses were all at max power, polarizing so heavily that the cobalt sky had a blackish tint to it.
In some sections the glacier was clean blue ice, pitted or smooth, so that they had to stop and put on crampons, and chip-chip-chip on up. Often the blue ice was pitted with regular cusps that resembled suncups in snow, though not so deep; it was like walking across the surface of an enormous golf ball, their ankles twisted to a different resting angle with every step. It was very hard not to sweat,
even with the smartfabrics open wide and the ambient temperature well below zero. The sledge clitter-clattered behind Val, tugging hard on her, as if trying to escape and shoot back down the length of the glacier, on a mad luge run into the Ross Sea. Looking around during rest breaks, it was so obvious that the glacier was a stupendous flood streaming down an enormous break in the mountain wall; the curve of the fluid obvious in the many rubble lines marking the surface, or just in the creasing of the ice itself, parallel creases like the lines in a whale’s white belly, all turning together with each sweep down the valley. The trench the glacier had carved was deep; the ranges walling it in were both nearly four thousand meters above sea level, and ten thousand feet above where they were now, so that it felt like being in the bottom of an enormous slot. Sometimes it seemed it would take weeks to climb out of a box canyon as huge as this one. In their rest stops they exclaimed over it:
“Stupendous!”
“Awesome!”
“Gnarly.”
“Sublime.”
“Big.”
That was Ta Shu. He spent the rests standing off to one side, rotating like a whirling dervish in extreme slow motion, either to give his distant audience a complete three-sixty or simply because he could not take enough in. His low Chinese commentary was like the chirping of invisible birds.
Val kept the rests short, and the hours passed, hour after hour, each one full of effort. They made progress. It was surprising how hot you could get in Antarctica—walking on a kind of mirror, sunblasted from above and below, working very hard. And yet still the potential for chill was always tangible, in the tip of the nose and the ears, and sometimes, if the going was easy, in the fingertips and toes. At one point she checked; it was fifteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and most of the group were still wearing ear bands, so that they could keep their ears from frostbite while still exposing the rest of their heads, which meant they would not sweat profusely in their suits. The head was the key to ther mostatting. Most of them on this day were down to shirts and windpants over the smartfabric longjohns, with the heating elements in their photovoltaic windpants turned all the way off. The gleaming blue-purple fabric complemented nicely the glary turquoise of the ice and the dark cobalt of the cloudless sky. The sky appeared to pulse over the blaze of ice and snow, as if breathing lightly—a phenomenon that Val had long ago learned to attribute to her own pulse, pounding in her vision somehow. She was working hard, and her clients even harder, but still keeping up. This was the kind of hour she loved; little to worry about with the clients, taxing basic work to do, the mind absorbed in the work and the feelings in her feet and legs and the rest of her body, and in the landscape towering around her as they slowly got higher and higher, with the views correspondingly larger. Sweating, breathing hard, mouth dry; thoughts ricocheting all over the canyon, flying out of it all over the cosmos; but also, for long stretches of time, merged with the ice underfoot and in the ten meters ahead of her, and so happy. The dromomaniac at full stretch.