Antarctica - Rilegato

Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of the Nebula and Hugo award-winning Mars trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, as well as The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge, A Short, Sharp Shock, and other novels. He lives in Davis, California.
From the Paperback edition.

Hello my friends.  Thank you for joining me on this voyage across the bottom of the Earth.  As you can see, I have nearly completed the flight south from New Zealand.  Soon we will arrive on the frozen continent.  As we approach our landing, we see that deep in the big notch in the continent called the Ross Sea, a magnificent volcano has risen from the sea floor.  This volcano makes a triangular island seventy kilometers across, and it rises around four or five thousand meters from the sea floor.  Every measurement of this volcano's height comes up with a different figure, a fact that confirms what the eye sees immediately, that the inner line of Erebus's form creates a knot of lung-mai or dragon arteries that is precisely contiguous with its outward form, so that we see it in all five dimensions at once.  This sometimes makes ordinary calculations of its height difficult.

Now we have landed, my friends, and are being driven across the sea ice to McMurdo.  The little town, as you see, is placed in a scooped-out hollow on the tip of a long peninsula of the volcano island, an arm of lava that surged down off Erebus to the west not so very long ago, leaving a final lava cone at the very tip.  How strong the dragon arteries of this island!

As we approach the tip of the peninsula and our landfall, let me recall for you the story of the first human landfall on Antarctica, which happened on January 24th of 1895.  When Borchgrevink's expedition approached the Antarctic Peninsula, they were aware that all previous landings had been on islands offshore, and that no one had ever stepped on the actual land of the continent before.  Borchgrevink and his ship's captain were rowed toward the rocky beach by a sailor, and as they approached they saw their chance at history.  Borchgrevink began to move to the bow of the boat to climb out, and the ship's captain began to wrestle with him, claiming for some reason that he had the right to go first.  The two men were wrestling still as the boat coasted up to the rocky beach, and seeing it the seaman rowing them leaped over the side into waist-deep water, and ran up to the shore ahead of the entangled officers.  Thus he was the first human ever to step on Antarctica. What was his name?  I can't remember.

On the slope of the town, now, we look back toward the airport on ice, and beyond it, across some fifty kilometers of the Ross Sea, to the mainland of the continent.  It is a superb prospect.  Over there mountains jump immediately out of the ocean: peaks taller than Fuji and Mont Blanc stand within twelve kilometers of the ocean, and the whole range, as you can see, is complex, multifaceted, and deeply riven by glacial valleys, down which slanting beams of yellow sunlight glow.  On certain days optical effects in the air create fata morganas in which the mountains appear five times as tall as they do now.  Oh my, yes.  This view from McMurdo is very strong, bringing into play simultaneously all the landscape's oppositions: hsu-shih or empty-full, yin-hsien or invisible-visible, chin-yuan or near-far, also finite-infinite.  Thus naturally the fifth dimension, li, the emptiness before all spacetime, is strongly evoked as well; and also that value of a landscape that goes beyond all notions of beauty, its i-ching or density of soul, and its shen-yun  or divine resonance.

Here in the town itself, the views are all kao-yuan,  looking up; before anything else, therefore, I am going to walk up to the top of Observation Hill, the volcanic cone at the end of the peninsula, overlooking the town as you see.

Up here, as you see as I climb, the perspective changes to p'ing-yan, the level perspective from a nearby mountain which gives a view horizontally to distant mountains, shading into infinity.  I like p'ing-yan very much.

The buildings below me comprise McMurdo Station, Ross Island. The town resembles one of the rusty mining towns of Mongolia.  But this shen-yuan angle, looking down from above, is but one part of the picture.  We will find soon enough that the seemingly haphazard and emptied village we look down on is actually inhabited by a civilization wielding all the latest in futuristic technology. It is a strange place, as you will see.

The peninsula, however; the island; the sea ice studded with icebergs; the distant mountain range, so far yet so clear: all beautiful.
As we descend to town, I want to remind you that this Ross Island is tangled deeply in the dragon arteries of history.  It is the island both Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton used as their base of operations.  Therein lies a sad story.  The first time they came down was in 1902, on the ship Discovery, in an expedition commanded by Scott.  Shackleton was a junior officer, from the merchant marine rather than the navy, but a strong personality.  Scott not so much so; withdrawn, and at first somewhat at a loss concerning what to do in this new land.  People had stepped on the continent for the first time, as I said, only seven years before.  In human terms, it was a blank slate.  The geographical societies of imperial Europe had declared it the next great problem for their imperial-scientific study, and the geographical society in England convinced the British Admiralty that dedicating a ship to the exploration of this new continent would be a good thing strategically.  Part of the normal course of the business of the empire.  So in the same year that we in our country were fighting the Boxer Rebellion against the oppression of these British colonialists, other men in other offices in London, occupied with other arms of that world-spanning empire, agreed that a single badly built boat, a clunker, a lemon, could certainly be spared for such an unpromising venture.  In the same spirit they agreed to send Captain Robert Scott, who had been recommended to them for unknown reasons by the head of the Royal Geographical Society.  And so two years later Scott and his men landed on Ross Island, and built the hut that you can see on the point at the other end of town--that little square building in the center of the screen, badly exposed to the wind.  We will visit it later.

Scott had not spent his two years of preparation very usefully, however, and once on Ross Island he had no very clear brief; just exploration and science, as far as his formal orders went.  But geology and the other earth sciences were in their infancy as well, this has to be understood.  Without feng shui they had no way to read the inner shape of the landscape, and without plate tectonics they had no real understanding of why the Earth looked the way it did, or what might have happened to it in the past.  They thought mountains were the result of the Earth shrinking, and the overlarge crust then buckling in lines; or alternatively, perhaps they were the result of the Earth expanding, and lava mountains leaping up out of the resulting cracks.  Wegener would soon articulate every schoolchild's notion that South America and Africa must once have been joined, but that idea was scoffed at for another half a century; the truth is they did not think there had been time for continental drift to have happened, for they were just beginning to come to grips with the tremendous age of the Earth. Lord Kelvin at that time maintained that the Earth, because it was still radioactive, could not be more than a few million years old. So all earth sciences in 1902 were a kind of taxonomy, gathering information in hopes it would help some later generation of scientists better to pierce the veil of the past.

This being the case, Scott's scientists took weather data, kept records, gathered rock samples, surveyed the territory, and tested methods of travel to see how they would work.  Never had men worked in weather quite so cold as this; it averaged thirty degrees Centigrade colder than the Arctic, and the storms could be brutal, even then.

So they wandered around in short sledging trips away from Ross Island.  Their sledging worked, except in the Dry Valleys on the mainland immediately across from them, sledges being for travel over ice and snow.  They did not know how to use the sledge dogs, however, to pull the sledges for them, and had brought along no one who could teach them; they thought they had, but the man didn't really know, and you cannot teach what you do not know.  Nansen had learned from the Inuit how to do it, and crossed Greenland using the dogs, and Amundsen learned from Nansen.  It was not so hard; the dogs like it.  It is only a matter of training and the right harnesses, and off they will go as if it were their destiny to pull humans across the ice--their first act of partnership perhaps, long ago when the whole world was ice.

But Scott never learned that about dogs.  What he learned instead was the dogs' own pleasure in hauling.  This is the critical point, my friends; this is the crux of the matter.  Scott and his men discovered that even though manhauling wasn't as efficient as other methods, efficiency was not the highest value.  Much more important was the act's own shen-yun, its divine resonance. And they found that it is a very satisfying thing to haul your home across the snow and ice of this world, setting camp after camp.  It appeals to something very deep and fundamental in our collective unconscious.  That there is a collective unconscious, my friends, never doubt; it may not be exactly as Carl Jung described it, but it exists most certainly, as the very structures of...