Read Online Assorted Prose by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B

Penguins, tough birds in other ways, have no resistance to germs. Expeditions never catch cold until they return to civilization. In a sense, the continent lacks even time. In 1947, members of Byrd’s expedition visited the hut of the English explorer Scott. In thirty-five years, nothing had changed. The London magazine on the table could have been printed the day before. There was no rot in the timbers, no rust on the nail-heads, no soot on the windowsills. Outside, a sledge dog that had frozen while standing up still stood there and looked alive. Explorers have no qualms about eating food that was cached decades previously. Admiral Byrd, the world’s leading Antarcticophile, has suggested that the land might be used as a refrigerator for the world’s food surpluses. Books could also be stored there, out of geopolitical harm’s way and in an air where even the tabloids would not yellow. Were it not for the lung-scorching effect of sub-zero temperatures, this highest and driest of continents would make an excellent tuberculosis sanatorium. Antarctica is a plateau. Its mean altitude is six thousand feet—twice that of Asia, its tallest competitor. Its land area equals that of Australia and the United States combined. The seas surrounding it are not only the roughest but the richest in the world, with a greater weight of diatoms and plankton than tropical waters have. The land probably contains all the baser metals. Its resources of coal are judged to be the largest in the world—a geological puzzle, since there is no reason to assume that the south-polar region was ever warm enough for luxuriant vegetation. The most prominent thesis, supported by glacier scratches and the wide-ranging fossils of the primitive fern Glossopteris, posits Gondwanaland—a vast continent in the southern hemisphere two hundred million years ago, when the flat, swampy earth supported gigantic tree ferns, abundant mosses, and the earliest vertebrates. According to the “continental drift” theory, this mass of land shifted around a good bit, the surface of the earth beingas loose as a puppy’s skin, and eventually fragmented into the pieces now called Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica—the last a once tropical realm brought to rest at the bottom of the world and buried in ice.
    Ice—of two sorts, white (compressed snow) and blue-green (frozen water)—is what Antarctica has lots of. Ten quadrillion tons, say, plus a few billion created by the lack of centrifugal force near the poles. A man weighs almost a pound more at the South Pole than he does at the equator. Glaciers, sliding on water melted by the pressure of their own weight, flow away from the pole, squeeze through notches in the rim of mountain ranges, and extend themselves over the sea in the form of ice shelves. The largest shelf, the Ross, has the area of France. Chips as big as Manhattan crack off the shelves. These icebergs are carved by wind and waves into the shapes of palaces, cathedrals, pagodas, men, and angels before dissolving in temperate waters. In 1927, one was measured and found to be a hundred miles square—the size of two Connecticuts. The snow precipitation does not equal the ice lost in the form of bergs, so a recession of the icecap is believed to be taking place. Were it to melt completely, seeds held in suspension millions of years might germinate. Strange viruses and bacteria could be unleashed on the world. New York City would be under three hundred feet of water. This is not likely to happen in our time.
Postal Complaints
    October 1956
    U P TO NOW , nobody has breathed a word in defense of the dip pens Postmaster General Summerfield is ousting from post offices across the nation, and if we don’t speak up the pens will go out thinking they didn’t have a friend in the world. (Nobody said much when the mailboxes were made as garish as beer advertisements, or when the noble series of Presidential profiles on our postage stamps