Terra Incognita

The Heroic Age began at the Sixth International Geographical Congress at London’s Imperial Institute in 1895.

As everyone who has done it has discovered, and as many writers have written since Horace (though no one has ever done it better than him), Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt –You can run away as far as you like but you’ll never get away from yourself.

Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, ‘What is the use?’ For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.

From him I had seen that it was possible to do anything two ways, whether a five-week dance with death or an hour-long business meeting. You could do it with dignity and loving kindness, keeping your temper with God, or with ambition, self-interest and greed, allowing the world to sweep you away like an Antarctic wind.

Just before the Second World War, Hitler decided that Antarctica too was to be part of the great Nazi empire. He ordered several thousand steel-barbed swastikas, loaded them on to planes, put the planes on a ship and sent the whole lot south, telling the pilots to drop their cargo over a vast tract of the icefields.

When you look upon such things there comes surging through the confusion of the mind an awareness of the dignity of the earth, of the unaccountable importance of being alive, and the thought comes out of nowhere that unhappiness rises not so much from lacking as from having too much . . .

In John Rymill’s book Southern Lights, they all seem to be indescribably happy all the time. When they were leaving Antarctica, Rymill wrote of ‘a feeling of loss as though a friend had died’. ‘To think’, the book ends, ‘that when we return to England one of the first questions we shall be asked – probably by a well-fed businessman whose God is his bank book – will be “Why did you go there?”’

When the snow had absorbed all the water, he shovelled it out again.

The Eskimos could have saved them the trouble of their research –they know all about the depression of the long night. They call it perlerorneq, which means ‘to feel the weight of life’.

If our landscapes were canvases, they were conceived by a mind raised above the troubles which afflict the human spirit.

I knew that the peace I had experienced in the south would always come back to me, even if I had to sit out more bleak times waiting for it, and that meant I needn’t be frightened of what my vagabond thoughts might uncover. The demons hadn’t disappeared, but they had shrunk. Many things changed. Living without a glass of wine in my hand was another voyage of discovery. Like all the best journeys, it had its long moments of agony, too. But I couldn’t jump ship now. It was too thrilling.

‘It was by Reinhold Messner,’ I said. ‘The greatest mountaineer alive. When he was down here, slogging across the plateau, he wrote, “It seemed to me as if I were restored to that time and that state when nature alone was God.”’

It had allowed me to believe in paradise, and that, surely, is a gift without price.