He is not suggesting they turn back, only telling her, as is standard practice, that any opportunity to do so will soon be gone. But she is long past that point already. Their beginning and their end lie ahead.
The clouds clear. The PNR evaporates behind them. Below is a sheet of dark blue, ribbed with swell. In the plane, the temperature drops. Marian sits in comfortable boredom, the familiar trance of flying, watches the instruments and the engines, switching from one fuel tank to the next, following Eddie’s recommendations. This is all she can do.
The first iceberg appears, a flattopped island the size of a city block, blue caves dug in its sides by waves. White birds wheel around. A glowing aqua lip of ice shows through from underwater. There is more of the berg down there, of course, much more, a huge frozen root.
The compass begins to wander, confused by the abundance of southerliness. The cold is getting the better of the Peregrine’s heaters. They put on heavy sweaters. Sometime in the eleventh hour, a bright white patch appears above the horizon: an iceblink, the overcast sky reflecting ice they can’t yet see. The water is black now, glossy as obsidian, and soon enough a band of pack ice appears, a mess of slush and slabs and bergs. In places the water is mottled with translucent disks of ice like massed jellyfish. A group of seals lie clumped on one floe, and they stir and heave around, peering up at the noise. Another is speckled with penguins as though with poppy seeds.
The ceiling lowers, pushing them down to four hundred feet. Eddie is quiet, bent over his desk, recalculating and recalculating. Flecks of ice build up on the wings, clumping together like spitwads blown by the clouds. Marian inflates the boots on the wing edges to break off the crust. Twelve and a half hours.
Something strange appears between the black of the sea and the white of the clouds: a thin silver line, vertically striated like a stretched seam of glue, running as far as Marian can see in either direction. She calls to Eddie, thumps his shoulder when he comes up to see. The ice shelf. She hadn’t expected him to look as he does, gazing out—like a man witnessing a holy miracle. His eyes well. She supposes he’d braced so violently against the fact of this flight that awe catches him by surprise.
They fly low, following the edge of the shelf. After twenty minutes, in answer to Eddie’s repeated transmissions, radio contact is made with the expedition base, Maudheim. They’ve marked a landing strip with flags. After forty minutes: a ship docked against the ice, stacks of cargo and lines of chained dogs, trails in the snow from the ship to the site where the huts are being erected, small figures, arms waving. Flags and a wind sock mark a flat strip of snow. Marian circles, puts down the skis.
The sound of the wind has become my idea of silence. Real silence would sit heavily on my ears, like the pressure of the grave.
—marian graves
Maudheim, Queen Maud Land, to Little America III, Ross Ice Shelf
71°03? S, 10°56? W to 78°28? S, 163°51? W
February 13–March 4, 1950
20,123 nautical miles flown
They are offered accommodations on the Norsel, but the ship so stinks of whale meat and dogs and men that Marian and Eddie are glad to leave after dinner and pitch their tent near where the plane is anchored with cables, blocks of snow stacked on its skis for good measure. On Richard Byrd’s first expedition in 1929, a Fokker was torn from its tethers by the wind, blown backward, and wrecked. If such a thing were to happen to the Peregrine after they’ve left Maudheim, Marian thinks the best course of action will be to lie down in the snow and wait. Rescue doesn’t figure into her plans. Rescue would be impossible. For the sake of weight, they are carrying only enough food to see them through one or two prolonged periods of bad weather.
Her bones still vibrate with the memory of the engines. Before plunging into sleep, she looks outside again. Daylight, of course, though it is late. The clouds have cleared, and a miasma of ice crystals shimmers around the plane. Antarctica had always seemed fantastical, but now it seems like the only possible place, the rest of the world fading away like an outlandishly lurid dream.
In the night, a sound like a burst of rifle fire wakes them. After a wide-eyed moment, Eddie says, “It’s just the ice shifting.” He had been lively at dinner, so much like the charming young man she’d known in London that she’d been disconcerted, almost fearful. Pilots who’d flown in Antarctica had warned her about fata morganas, phantom mountain ranges or icebergs that might hang above the horizon, doubling or magnifying some lesser feature of the landscape, and she wonders if this Eddie is another kind of mirage.