The White Darkness Read online

  Somewhere out there—far, far away across that shining silver plain—Titus hauled and marched and staggered and fell and crawled to his . . .

  “Paris. I remember saying I was game for Paris. Did you mishear me, perhaps?”

  Behind us, beyond the clutter of oil drums and flapping tents, parked-up Ski-Doos, fluttering flags, storage tanks, antennas, and red, blood-blister igloos, a handful of little mountains sheltered Aurora from the worst of the southerly winds. But even they looked lost amid the immensity of wrinkled whiteness stretching east to the edge of forever; hefty wrinkles, as you’d get on an albino rhinoceros the size of Everest. I’ve read about you. You are sastrugi, I thought, molded by the wind out of ice and snow. I know you. Sastrugi. They sound like a villain in a fairy tale.

  “Titus. Do you know the story of the princess held prisoner in the tower?”

  “Her body encircled by three bands of iron.”

  “Can’t move, can’t blink her eyes, can’t speak a word. However hard she tries.”

  “Unless some friend can foil the evil magic, three nights in a row . . .”

  “. . . keep her by his side until morning.”

  “With a noise like the crack of ice, one of the iron bands broke, and she was free to blink her eyes,” said Titus.

  “You heard it too, then. The crack.”

  “Sym, I hear everything you hear.”

  The silent crack was so loud that it traveled outward and outward and outward to the edge of Space. I blinked my eyes to dislodge the snowflakes resting there; also in sheer wonder. And for the first time in years I could see the possibility of Happiness.

  Chapter Seven

  Talk

  I don’t know if I’m stupid. I might as well be. When I open my mouth, nothing intelligent comes out. Inside my head I’m as articulate as anything, look. But try to get a thought out and it’s like pushing raw potatoes through a sieve. There are things roaming around inside my head as clever as Theseus in the Labyrinth. It’s just that nobody ever gave them the necessary piece of string, so they’ll never find their way out.

  “Look at goldfish in a bowl,” says Titus. “Are they gormless—nothing to say for themselves? Or are they addressing the world in classical Greek on parthenogenesis among the lower pelagic life forms, and we are just too dense to lip-read?”

  “Quite, Titus. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Sym. My speling was awfull, you know? Couldent spel or puntuate atal, not to save my life. . . .”

  “So much for an Eton education.”

  “Not that it would have, of course.”

  “Have what?”

  “Saved my life.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “Oddly enough, no one remembers me for that: Captain Oates, the duffer at English.”

  “Astounding. I wonder why. Anyway, I won’t be doing a talk about you. You can rest easy.”

  “Excellent. Least said the better. I deplore the whole polar hero thing, myself. And getting up in public.”

  “I’d sooner die.”

  Titus considered this for a moment. “Well, no. Taken all in all, I’d rather not have.”

  Being always part of the group got a bit wearing. For all the vastness of Antarctica, we were forever on top of one another: we tourists, plus Vicenzo, the ski-plane pilot; Hugh, the camp doctor; and Popsie, the cook; Jon, the tour guide; Mike and Bob, the technicians. We were either sheltering in the tents and plastic igloos or clambering into the ski-plane for another excursion. The various voices jangled inside my head; no getting away from them. And the muscles behind my ears hurt from so much smiling. Camp Aurora was surrounded by safety flags, telling us where we might walk and where to avoid. After a while, even the safety flags felt like sentries deterring escape.

  “Going to the pictures again tonight, dearie?” said Titus teasingly each day when they announced the evening’s entertainment. (He was never a joiner-in when it came to lectures and slide shows.) And encouraged by his cynicism, I would sometimes skip lectures and walk to the perimeter of the camp to look out at the distant Queen Maud Mountains. The nunataks. The wind-sculpted snowdrifts. The Ice Shelf itself. Mirages of things far beyond the horizon hung in the sky, as though by levitation, colored gold by the sun.

  It churned up such foaming, fuming feelings. Antarctica doesn’t need anyone’s admiration, so why should it go to the trouble of being so beautiful? Of riming ice caves with emerald green and turquoise? Or pumping vuggy ice full of rhinestones? Why optical illusions like oil paintings in the sky? Why corniches of snow like freeze-frame waves? Why, when we overflew the coast, were there turquoise sculptures of ice rolling over and over in waves of indigo? It terrifies me, the sea. I know it would kill me if it could. I know this whole continent would kill us if it could once sink its teeth into us. . . . And yet I’ve never seen anywhere so beautiful, so marvelous.

  Our excursions, during the first week, were by twin-engine ski-plane to sites fringing the ocean—a colony of elephant seals, minke whales nudging through tessellations of pancake ice, a rookery of penguins . . .

  Ms. Adolphus would marry an emperor penguin if she could. Me, I’m spoken for already, but I might be persuaded to vote for an emperor penguin in a general election. We stood and watched them while they stood and ignored us, and Ms. Adolphus told us their feats of endurance, trekking miles or standing hunched and hungry in the winter dark, for the sake of their chicks. “The daddies do just as much as the mommies,” she said, hands bunched under her chin, face wreathed in smiles. There is something even pinker about Ms. Adolphus than there is about Mimi Dormouse-St.-Pierre in her fuchsia ski suit.

  Is instinct not so strong among human fathers, then? Maybe not. Or are there actually some rogue emperor penguins who, in the depths of polar winter, let the egg tucked under their belly fat roll away into the dark? Or turn against it and lean down and smash it with their beaks? No? No. That would go against Nature. I think I could have enjoyed lying curled inside an egg, cradled on my father’s feet while the half-year darkness raged with snow. But my father didn’t like me. Uncle Victor is forever reminding me.

  “You are correct about the stinking of the penguins.” Sigurd returned the binoculars, which we were sharing between us. There was a smell like an open cesspit. Their noise was every bit as thick. So maybe you can hear penguins stink, after all.

  I asked Sigurd if he knew about the man in America who changed his name to Penguin because he was so obsessed with them. But I forgot to speak aloud, so Sigurd didn’t answer. Obviously. A penguin carcass was being flayed by skuas nearby. It did nothing to settle my queasy stomach.

  I told Sigurd how in 1910 Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garard almost died on a scientific expedition to fetch back a single emperor penguin egg from Cape Crozier. To my astonishment, I found I had said it out loud, because he remarked, “This is story for a film!”

  “Your dad would have to pay the film crew extra,” I said.

  “Because of the danger?”

  “Because of the smell.”

  He laughed, and a plume of steam came from his mouth that turned to a diamond dust of ice and caught the sun as it fell. For a few seconds there was a rainbow hanging in the air between our faces.

  “The prehistoric penguins might be better,” I said. “Six feet tall. And turtles the size of Volkswagens. Return of the Killer Penguin: now, there’s a film.”

  Sigurd looked at me, to see if I was serious. “They lived? I will tell my father.” The green sunscreen on his pale skin was like warrior war paint. “You will ride snowmobile with me sometime, yes?”

  Behind us Colonel Oliver studied his itinerary anxiously, to see where we were and where we would go next. With a gouge of his thumbnail, he checked off “Penguin Colony.” Hue Fah chivvied his hand back into its mitten—but it made him drop his itinerary. One or two people made a grab as the sheets of paper blew past their feet, but they got away and away and away, rising into the air, looping over and over, disappearing
against the white brash ice. I gave the colonel mine: I had reached my destination. This whole continent was where I wanted to be: now, yesterday, and tomorrow.

  “You are a kind person,” said Sigurd. “And you, too, know much about The Ice, I think. You will give a talk to us about these dinosaur penguins, yes?”

  I shook my head violently. “My uncle might. He knows everything.”

  “To be sure? Everything?” And he laughed.

  “No, really. Everything,” I hastened to assure him. I don’t like it when people doubt Victor’s genius.

  “I have heard this. That he is very clever. I do know this,” said Sigurd, suddenly serious. I checked for sarcasm, but polite Sigurd would never have stooped so low. He and his gracious father were always civil. I mean, whenever Sigurd came up and talked to me, you’d almost have thought he wanted to. And he did it often. He made me feel as if he had come looking especially for me—but I daresay that’s a knack; something you learn if you’re brought up to be charming. Everyone liked the charming Sigurd. I liked him.

  My clever uncle Victor, on the other hand, was not turning out to be the most popular man on the trip.

  Unlike Titus, you see, Uncle Victor doesn’t think reticence and reserve are the requirements of an English gentleman. He feels he has to give people the full benefit of his knowledge, whether they want it or not. So while Ms. Adolphus sang the praises of emperors, he was busy putting the others right about the date of the first flight over the South Pole. He corrected Jon about the wording of the International Antarctic Treaty. He broke it to Tillie that Arctic pemmican was dog or horse and not penguin meat. He told Mr. Pogsbaum how swigging whisky from a hip flask would not warm him but open the pores of his skin and make him die of cold. . . . Theoretically they ought to have been happier for knowing these things, but people don’t seem to work like that.

  So when, that evening, Mike and Bob gave a lecture on fossils, I truly feared for them.

  We all squeezed into the Leisuredome, a molded-plastic, scarlet igloo where people went to read and play cards and write up their diaries. The talk was entitled Seymour Island: Realm of Dinosaurs, and Mike and Bob spoke of fossil pavements; intrepid little marsupials crossing to Australia by way of Gondwanaland; a billion fish wiped out by a meteorite half a world away. . . . Bob and Mike were good talkers—and quite as interesting as giant penguins, in their own way. They were paleontology students who took any vacation job they could to get themselves back to The Ice. As with Kay in The Snow Queen, a sliver of Antarctic ice must have embedded itself in their hearts; I could almost see it when I looked into their eyes. But now they were doing Uncle Victor’s special subject, and I feared for them. I kept waiting for him to interrupt, to take issue with them, to put them straight. So did everyone else: I could tell from the way they flinched whenever Victor cleared his throat or shifted position.

  But he didn’t interrupt! When he smiled his patient smile, made popping noises with his lips, I would have sworn he was loading the ammunition to shoot them down. But he only went on smiling and nodding, beads of sweat gathering in the crease between his eyes.

  “Are you all right, Uncle?”

  Bob asked if anyone had a question. The Expeditionary Force looked around—as one man—at Victor. He simply glanced across at Manfred Bruch and gave a deep, merry, Old King Cole sort of chuckle. Even the igloo itself breathed a sigh of relief, I swear.

  Poetry.

  In the end, that was how it began to unravel.

  We were having a barbecue back at Camp Aurora the next day, dining alfresco with the thermometer at thirty degrees below zero. As you do. It was the most lavish barbecue I ever went to (despite the biting wind and the smell of kerosene), with salmon fillets and champagne and skewers of hot fresh fruit. Clients of Pengwings are used to the finer things of life, and besides, they were on vacation. So they ate as they ate at home, though presumably at about a thousand times the price.

  “We dug up Christopher’s head, but it was rotten.”

  “Not now, Titus. I don’t want to be sad.”

  “We dug up Christopher’s head, but it was rotten.”

  “Shut up, Titus. That was then, this is now. What’s wrong with eating shrimp cocktail?”

  Unfortunately, I was feeling too queasy to enjoy the shrimp. Jon said that feeling lousy is part of getting acclimatized to Antarctica and that The Ice is really the healthiest place on Earth. But it still wasn’t a good time for Mrs. Pogsbaum to say: “Guess it’s time for our youngest member to entertain us!” (Maybe she was in such pain from her arthritis that she thought someone else ought to suffer too.)

  “Yes, Sym, tell us something about yourself!” said Brenda, promptly taking my photograph.

  “Oui, bien sûr!” said Madame Dormouse-sans-Pee. That’s probably the full extent of her French. Her number-one home is on Long Island.

  Uncle Victor beamed with pride. “There’s not much Sym doesn’t know about this place. I say, there’s not much she hasn’t read up on.”

  “Right, lass!” said Clough with a malicious glare at Victor. “Let’s see what’s in you.”

  There’s this sketch, done eighty years back: Captain Scott’s photographer jumping from ice floe to ice floe while killer whales rear up out of the sea, trying to kill him. That’s how I felt. These people came at me like killer whales, agape with smiles, hungry for a taste of my stupidity.

  “Perhaps Sym does not wish it,” said Sigurd.

  “I—”

  Ms. Adolphus came and put an arm around me, half squatting so as to look me in the eye. Then she said very loudly and slowly, as to a little child, “What’s your loveliest thing, sweetie? Your absolutely favoritest hobby?”

  It made me so mad that my neck arched convulsively and my head came up. “The Ice,” I said. “That’s my thing.” I promptly dropped my potted shrimps and they spilled out onto the ice, whispering among themselves: “Gutless, spineless little shrimp . . .”

  “Help me, Titus! I’m Sym the sad weirdo who runs on nerd power.”

  “That was there. This is here,” said Titus. “Tell them why the sea is cobalt blue. Tell them how Ponting was nearly eaten by whales. Tell them how Shackleton shot his carpenter’s cat. Tell them there are trees here that grow only one-quarter of an inch high and lions even smaller. Tell them how ships find their way through pack ice by reading ice-blinks off the clouds. Tell them how Bill Wilson once saw nine suns in the sky. . . .”

  “She’s a mite shy,” Uncle Victor was saying—quite superfluously really, since two minutes had passed and I had yet to utter a sound. Ms. Adolphus patted me sadly on the head and withdrew, convinced I was simpleminded. Mrs. Pogsbaum rubbed her hip. The barbecue spat.

  “On Scott’s birthday,” I said, “he and his men ate seal soup, roast mutton, red currant jelly, fruit salad, asparagus, and chocolate. Well, not chocolate with the asparagus, I don’t suppose.”

  The assembled company looked at me and laughed, but not unkindly.

  “Ah yes, Captain Scott!” said Colonel Oliver, and he checked his itinerary, remembering that Scott featured somewhere on it.

  “They put together a newspaper,” I said. “During the winter. In the quarters at Hut Point. One of them wrote this poem. . . .”

  Madame Dogrose-sans-Phew promptly switched on her tape recorder and thrust the microphone at me.

  “It’s called ‘The Barrier Silence,’” I said, and shut my eyes. I was in my bedroom again, reaching up to my Ice shelf, tearing one page from among the thousands of pages compressed there between the wardrobe and the wall. . . .

  “And this was the thought that the Silence wrought,

  As it scorched and froze us through,

  For the secrets hidden are all forbidden

  Till God means man to know.

  We might be the men God meant should know

  The heart of the Barrier snow.”

  Why that one, Titus? Of all the bits of snowy doggerel in the world, why did you have to hand me tha
t one? If I live to be your age, I’ll never understand why you fed me that one.

  I opened my eyes and Sigurd rewarded me with a very nice smile, for all the world as if he had understood it. Everyone else, though, was looking at Victor, who was rocking from foot to foot and wagging both fists in agitation like a man feeding rope through his hands. He had pushed back his hood to stand bareheaded in the wind. And there were tears streaming down his face.

  Was it my fault? Had I moved him to some unbearable pride in me, by remembering a six-line verse? Or was he suddenly touched once more by the tragedy of Scott and Titus and the rest? I was still wondering, when he suddenly burst out, “By God, but we are! We are the men!”

  I thought I saw Manfred Bruch, at the back of the group, frown slightly and pass a hand in front of his mouth: a signal signifying silence. But I don’t suppose Victor could see him through his tears. Anyway, the stopper was out now, and like the contents of a bottle on its side, some secret was about to flow out of him to the very last drop.

  “I didn’t come here on any footling jaunt, you know! I didn’t come here on vacation! This trip here, it’s the climax—the culmination of a lifetime’s work! You think you’ve read the books and you know all about this place, but I’m telling you, you don’t know a thing—nary a thing!”

  The aircraft that had taken us on the excursion to the penguin colony took off and flew away. Eyes trailed it toward the end of the sky. Despite the food and the grill, people were starting to feel chilled through. No one had any idea what Victor was talking about. Including me.

  “Forget Newton. Forget Galileo. Forget Stephen bloody Hawking. You people don’t understand what’s going on here!”

  The American journalist gave a bark of laughter, picturing, maybe, an international conspiracy of terrorist penguins.

  Uncle Victor jabbed his lecture finger at him. “Fifteen years I’ve bent the power of a good mind to proving it, one way or t’other. And it came to me! The proof! A revelation! Symmes was right!”