The sun is gone in the morning, the cloud too low. The meteorologist says to wait.
They help, as best they can, with the construction of Maudheim. The expedition members winch crates and equipment and Liberty Oil fuel drums off the ship and onto tank-treaded weasels that chug and grind a mile and a half over the ice to the site of the huts. Men are crafting ice foundations and putting up the timbering. Men are digging caves for storage and workshops, building passageways out of crates and tarps, stacking oil barrels as windbreaks. All of it will be buried in drifting snow soon enough. Dozens of sled dogs are tethered all around, keeping up a constant chorus of barks and howls.
The expedition leader tells Marian he’d never seen dogs so happy as theirs when they landed. On the sea voyage, the animals had been tied and kenneled on deck in the sea spray and the sluicing blood from the heaped-up whale meat and their own shit, but once they were finally on the ice they rolled themselves clean and dry in the snow and barked and frolicked and were new again. Perhaps Eddie is not a mirage; perhaps he is simply refreshed by the purity of the place.
* * *
—
After a day and night of cloud, the sky clears. The fuel barrels are brought, the Peregrine’s tanks filled. The engines are thawed under canvas hoods and fed a breakfast of warm oil.
Despite the heavy load and the throttle’s stiffness in the cold, the skis lift cleanly from the hard-packed snow. Marian turns the plane away from the waving men and barking dogs, away from the sea, toward nothing.
In an hour, they pass over mountains that don’t appear on their charts. Probably no one else has ever seen them. Steep ridges of black rock and lonely nunataks jut from the ice.
Then an astonishing infinity of white.
The surface of the ice has an ever-changing texture, like the sea. （Marian supposes it is a kind of free-standing sea, thousands of feet deep.） Sastrugi ripple like frozen waves; cracks run through like currents. Even with sun goggles, the glare bores into her skull. After four hours, a filmy haze forms, grows denser: a relief from the light but a problem in other ways. Ice speckles the wings. She climbs to twelve thousand feet, into clear air, only three thousand feet or so above the plateau, which has been rising steadily toward the pole. The sun casts the plane’s shadow down on diaphanous cloud, a perfect miniature, ringed by a rainbow—a glory, it’s called. By the book, they should be on oxygen, but she decides to conserve their supply. Who knows how long the fog will last, how much higher they will have to go.
South Pole now, reads the note Eddie passes up a bit later. PNR -30. He is smiling, radiating enthusiasm. He appears elated. The bottom of the world shows faintly through the haze, white and trackless, indistinguishable from the rest of the trackless white. Marian gazes on it without emotion. The only place she wants to go is onward, away. She understands now this place, vast and lifeless, might as well be death itself.
The oil pressure gauge has gone flat, but the instrument has probably just failed in the cold, as the engines still drone along. The heater has surrendered, too, and the metal in the cabin is cold enough to sear exposed skin.
She hesitates, thinking of the PNR. But why does she hesitate? Nothing is wrong.
She shouts to Eddie, “What do you think?”
He looks blank, bawls back, “About what?”
“Should we keep on?”
He peers at her from under the hood of his reindeer parka. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Just checking.”
He grins and gives her a thumbs-up. “All good.”
Was it possible she had dreamed the frightened man in the hotel in Cape Town, staring at her like she’d come to escort him to the gallows? How could that man be the same as this dauntless, ebullient one? But he is also being logical: There is no better reason to go back than forward. The visibility isn’t perfect, but it could certainly be worse. Nothing is amiss with the plane. If they were to go back, assuming they made it to Maudheim, they would have no fuel to try again but would have to wait out the season, rely on the supplies and hospitality of the expeditioners, be retrieved by ship.
Another leap must be made. Go against your instincts, Trout had told her. Give in when you want to resist, she’d told Eddie in London. Resist when you want to give in. She flies on.
* * *
—
Sky and ice blend into a seamless shell, can’t be prised apart. Like flying in a bowl of milk, pilots say. The horizon is gone. There is empty space around her, above and below, but she has no means of judging how much. The altimeter says they are at eleven thousand feet, but that’s above sea level. She doesn’t know how thick the ice is. They might be only a thousand feet above it. She can see nothing beyond a vague swirl of blowing snow. Eddie is leaning up beside her, peering out.