The fuel is dropping too quickly. She peers around, spots an opalescent spray fanning out behind the wing. In her drowsiness, she had not noticed when it started, but now there is nothing to be done except hope the leak doesn’t get worse. Settling down to fix it is out of the question. Maybe some line had been wrenched loose in their hard landing or some seal had cracked in the cold.
They come to the Axel Heiberg glacier. Beyond, below, a layer of cloud extends to the horizon. Alarm revives her. Eddie passes her a course adjustment, and they exchange solemn glances. What can be said? Under the cloud, the glacier descends more than nine thousand feet from the mountains to the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating sheet of ice bigger than Spain. They see only a low blanket of gray.
To overshoot the ice edge is their best chance. They fly on and on, fuel draining down to nothing, until they must be over open water. At Eddie’s signal, she drops into the cloud. Lower and lower through the blind white. Then, finally, a rapid darkening rising up from underneath, and they are in clear air, low over black water hazed with sea smoke. Not far away, a massive tabular iceberg reaches nearly to the bottom of the cloud. She turns the airplane, and there is the edge of the ice shelf, the barrier, a sheer blue wall emerging from the sea. Eddie has put them precisely on their target.
Here is where Roald Amundsen built his base Framheim before striking out on skis for the South Pole. Here is where Richard E. Byrd’s camps, Little Americas I through IV, are sunken in the snow, subterranean mazes of living spaces and laboratories and workshops with caches of fuel and supplies. Marian had written to men who’d been on the expeditions; Eddie had made a map of the bases’ relative locations. They’d formed guesses on what might still be protruding from the snow, what they should look for.
But the ice is always moving, pushed outward by the heaped-up mass of itself in the continent’s interior, always sliding down to the sea, breaking off, floating away. She sees the remnants of Little America IV near the ice edge, closer than she expected, precipitously close, the tops of Quonset huts erected in 1947 for a navy operation of forty-seven hundred men, thirteen ships, seventeen airplanes. She aims instead for a cluster of ventilators and masts a few miles to the northeast: Little America III.
* * *
—
Strange to be warm. They had been so surprised when the generator came alive they had sprung back in terror and then laughed, teary and exhausted, collapsed on the floor of an ice tunnel. Eddie had cranked it as an experiment, almost a joke, but Admiral Byrd’s men must have left kerosene in the hardy machine because it rattled and roared and set grumblingly to work. The main structure is designed so the generator blows warm air between two layers of a double floor, and quickly the chill had lost its harshness. Camped on the plateau, Marian had begun to regard even the slightest lessening of cold as warmth, but this, as she lies in a bunk after interminable sleep, is the real thing. There is no sense of struggle.
She had felt as vaporous as sea smoke while they anchored the plane and covered the engines, made their best guess at where to dig. She hopes never to dig snow again. Her hands resemble bloody beef, frozen then thawed. One veteran of the Byrd expeditions had sent her a sketched diagram of the base, and using that, they had dug and chiseled down into the subterranean lair of huts and ice tunnels, found the generator, melted snow for water, found bunks, collapsed in their sleeping bags.
She wakes in total darkness. Slowly, deprived of all other senses, she becomes aware first of the intense soreness in her arms and back and the stinging of her hands, then of her thirst and the fullness of her bladder, and then of a faint, nearly imperceptible rocking: the ice shelf flexing, floating on the swell. She lights a kerosene lantern. Her wristwatch reads four o’clock, but she doesn’t know if it is night or day. “Good afternoon,” Eddie says from somewhere nearby.
“Is it afternoon? What was it when we went to sleep?”
“I think it was yesterday evening,” he says.
They are in a room tightly packed with bunks and jumbled supplies and gear, middens of discarded woolens and worn-out boots, the leavings of thirty-three men. Books lie open where they were left ten years ago. The walls and beams are carved with names and cryptic messages. Pinup girls laugh and point their toes. No catastrophe happened here, but there’s a haunted feeling. It’s the cold that does it, holds everything suspended, staves off decay. There’s no water to corrode anything, no pests to nibble and gnaw, no rot, nothing to mark the passage of time. One of the ice tunnels has caved in, and the roof sags some, but otherwise the place might have been abandoned yesterday.