embarrassed. I’ve got very hardened, believe you me.”
“I thought Tony was
nice
?”
“I used to get
so
embarrassed.”
The three girls stood up, fastened capes around the chaste white collars of their dresses, became women, and were heard no more.
Our Own Baedeker
March 1956
I N A NTARCTICA , everything turns left. Snow swirls to the left; seals, penguins, and skua gulls pivot to the left; the sun moves around the horizon right to left; and lost men making a determined effort to bear right find they have made a perfect left circle. Sunlight vibrating between white snow and white clouds creates a white darkness, in which landmarks and shadows disappear. A companion three feet away may vanish, and moments later rematerialize. On the other hand, whales and ships appear inverted in the sky. The sun may appear to rise and set five times in a day. Mountains actually over the horizon seem to loom close at hand. Minor irregularities in the ice tower like steeples. All these illusions are created by a combination of the oblique solar rays, the refraction and reflection of light among strata of warm and cold air, and the appalling lucidity of a dust-free, nearly vaporless atmosphere. In unclouded sunshine, the eye can follow an observation balloon for sixteen miles of its ascent into an inky-purple sky. Sudden veils of intense blueness fall over the world and in a few minutes are mysteriously lifted. When the sun is low, the sky appears green. Men exhale, in their crystallized breath, iridescent rainbows. Weather rainbows are white. The wind-driven snow charges men’s noses and fingertips with static electricity, which is given off as a phantom luminescence.
For centuries, the continent itself was a phantom. From the time men first recognized that the earth was spherical, a great land mass in thesouth was imagined. In 1539, Emperor Charles V, of the Holy Roman Empire, appointed Pedro Sancho de Hoz governor of an area shown on maps of the period as stretching from the tip of South America across the pole to China. European scholars equated southerliness with fecundating warmth. Alexander Dalrymple, an eighteenth-century hydrographer for England’s East India Company, predicted that the human population of the unknown continent would be found to exceed fifty million. In 1768, Lieutenant James Cook was sent by the British on a secret mission to locate the southern land mass and “to observe the genius, temper, disposition, and number of the natives and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them.” Cook was unable to penetrate the ice pack, and concluded that if a continent lay beyond it, it was uninhabitable and inhospitable. How true! Antarctica more nearly resembles Mars than the earth we live on. It has no trees, no rivers, no land animals except a few degenerate insects, no vegetation other than some doughty moss and lichen, and no political or economic significance, though it may have some any day now. Permanent bases are being established by scientists of many of the nations involved in the antarctic aspect of the International Geophysical Year 1957–58. Russia thus far has not pressed the claims that the offshore explorations of Czar Alexander I’s Admiral von Bellingshausen might justify. In 1948, though, the Kremlin ominously resurrected and published his report. Hitler once dropped thousands of swastika-stamped darts into a mammoth stretch of ice, named it New Swabia, and left it at that. Britain, France, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Argentina profess to own wedges of the pie. The United States has recognized no claims. Our antarctic policy, reportedly due for an overhaul, was established by Secretary of State Hughes in 1924, when he asserted that the
sine qua non
of territorial rights is permanent settlement. *
Rain and disease are practically strangers to the antarctic. The air is sterilized by ultraviolet rays, which are present in enormous quantities.
“I thought Tony was
nice
?”
“I used to get
so
embarrassed.”
The three girls stood up, fastened capes around the chaste white collars of their dresses, became women, and were heard no more.
Our Own Baedeker
March 1956
I N A NTARCTICA , everything turns left. Snow swirls to the left; seals, penguins, and skua gulls pivot to the left; the sun moves around the horizon right to left; and lost men making a determined effort to bear right find they have made a perfect left circle. Sunlight vibrating between white snow and white clouds creates a white darkness, in which landmarks and shadows disappear. A companion three feet away may vanish, and moments later rematerialize. On the other hand, whales and ships appear inverted in the sky. The sun may appear to rise and set five times in a day. Mountains actually over the horizon seem to loom close at hand. Minor irregularities in the ice tower like steeples. All these illusions are created by a combination of the oblique solar rays, the refraction and reflection of light among strata of warm and cold air, and the appalling lucidity of a dust-free, nearly vaporless atmosphere. In unclouded sunshine, the eye can follow an observation balloon for sixteen miles of its ascent into an inky-purple sky. Sudden veils of intense blueness fall over the world and in a few minutes are mysteriously lifted. When the sun is low, the sky appears green. Men exhale, in their crystallized breath, iridescent rainbows. Weather rainbows are white. The wind-driven snow charges men’s noses and fingertips with static electricity, which is given off as a phantom luminescence.
For centuries, the continent itself was a phantom. From the time men first recognized that the earth was spherical, a great land mass in thesouth was imagined. In 1539, Emperor Charles V, of the Holy Roman Empire, appointed Pedro Sancho de Hoz governor of an area shown on maps of the period as stretching from the tip of South America across the pole to China. European scholars equated southerliness with fecundating warmth. Alexander Dalrymple, an eighteenth-century hydrographer for England’s East India Company, predicted that the human population of the unknown continent would be found to exceed fifty million. In 1768, Lieutenant James Cook was sent by the British on a secret mission to locate the southern land mass and “to observe the genius, temper, disposition, and number of the natives and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them.” Cook was unable to penetrate the ice pack, and concluded that if a continent lay beyond it, it was uninhabitable and inhospitable. How true! Antarctica more nearly resembles Mars than the earth we live on. It has no trees, no rivers, no land animals except a few degenerate insects, no vegetation other than some doughty moss and lichen, and no political or economic significance, though it may have some any day now. Permanent bases are being established by scientists of many of the nations involved in the antarctic aspect of the International Geophysical Year 1957–58. Russia thus far has not pressed the claims that the offshore explorations of Czar Alexander I’s Admiral von Bellingshausen might justify. In 1948, though, the Kremlin ominously resurrected and published his report. Hitler once dropped thousands of swastika-stamped darts into a mammoth stretch of ice, named it New Swabia, and left it at that. Britain, France, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Argentina profess to own wedges of the pie. The United States has recognized no claims. Our antarctic policy, reportedly due for an overhaul, was established by Secretary of State Hughes in 1924, when he asserted that the
sine qua non
of territorial rights is permanent settlement. *
Rain and disease are practically strangers to the antarctic. The air is sterilized by ultraviolet rays, which are present in enormous quantities.
Similar Books
![Four-Alarm Blaze [Southern Heat 4]](https://fs.dianahicksbooks.com/546059/thumbs/152x264/four-alarm-blaze-southern-heat-4.jpg)
