The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 108

On the morning it cleared, I was prepared to strain my eyes to the south. That was unnecessary. To port, fifty miles distant, loomed the giant mountains of Elephant Island, shrouded at their base by a thick mist that pushed miles to sea. Shafts of sunlight reflected off the glacier that wrapped the center of the island and atop it all a steady thin and black plume of smoke poured from the lip of an active volcano. As a result, the ice and snow were dirty, gray, black in patches. The volcano seemed to have a twin—unless it was a separate crater of the same—up and behind it, smaller but smokier, the two of them like black pyramids in that mist-shrouded range.

Neither of them was Satan’s Seat; rather, that chain of islands before us, the South Shetlands, was a volcanic chain, part of the volatile Scotia Arc that curls from the Antarctica peninsula (Graham Land) northeast through the Palmer archipelago, the South Shetland, South Orkney, and South Sandwich islands, then curls back northwest through South Georgia and the Falklands to the tail of the Andean mountain chain in Tierra del Fuego. It was our discovery that the sealer tales of Satan’s Seat (it did exist) had overlooked a whole chain of eruptions. The South Shetlands’ volcanoes were awakened anew. Every one of the major mountains and some of their satellites seemed in various stages of eruption; tremors, seaquakes, steam venting, banks of ash and sulfurous poisons, lava bubbling up through fissures in the craters. It was not a cataclysm of fire on ice, instead a slow rupture of the earth, shaking, pounding, crumbling. I cannot now say how complete the rupture was, whether what appeared a general salvo was in fact only two or three volcanoes pouring steam and ash through seams in the mountains, like burrowing by a fantastic being. More, I have no science to report why it had happened, how long it had been happening. I can only report what I saw then and over the next twenty years.

That first day under that thunderous gloom—the stench of sulfur, the lash of ashen waves—was filled with surprises. The major revelation was not the volcanoes, instead that the sea was pocked with ships arriving from the northeast, northwest. I took careful stock, helped by the fact that visibility in the Antarctic can alter suddenly from nothing to stunning clarity—what is one hundred miles can appear at hand. In between the banks of ash and steam, I watched the small flotillas of the wretched being intercepted by small white cutters. One such white cutter made for us. It signaled in international code. It wanted us to heave to for boarding. It did not threaten warfare. I put my glass on its side, did not hesitate; I ordered Germanicus to signal Malody, to bring us about to the west. The white cutter pursued but eventually veered off for a single frigate with a broken mainmast. We put to sea for the cover of a fogbank. The next day, we eluded another white cutter by heading into the steam canopy that ringed King George, the largest and most foreboding island in the South Shetlands. I ordered Germanicus to keep on slow for the sixtieth meridian.

I do not intend this narrative to become confused with mystery. I made a good guess of some of what we found those first two days, and with Xique’s answers I realized more, far from the truth. The white cutters, marked with the red cross of international relief, were part of the fleet of what was called, what I called, the Ice Cross. They were dispatched to corral into sheltered anchorages the wretched arriving pell-mell and battered. There were relief camps at those anchorages. Xique could only confirm for me then that there was one large camp on the lee shore of Elephant Island. He provided some details of the camp, but that information was four years out-of-date. More, I recognized that the large freighters were part of the relief effort, bringing in food and goods even as more wretches arrived. I only sketch here. Those camps were no relief; those mercy ships were no mercy. All this I would learn later. Then, off King George and heading for Roberts Island, I assumed that my magic had worked, my luck had held. I assumed that I had pursued a fantasy to discover a world of ice and ash and, yes, charity.

There is more that I do not want to become confusion—the portents by Lamba of Skallagrim Strider and me. Was he with me, that outlaws ghost? It is a distortion to say yes, he stood at my ear as King James ran from Mead’s Kiss to Elephant Island. Yet I did experience the phenomenon of seen-twice. I am aware that seen-twice might be an inappropriate explanation, for it can imply some form of reincarnation, as if one has lived the experience before in a previous life. I make no such claim, make a strange point nonetheless, consistent with Norse ways. The ghost of Skallagrim Strider seemed to whisper to me, seemed to give me the feeling that I had seen those hundred-foot crests and that purple sea and those thousand screaming petrels before. I was not Skallagrim Strider come again. I was Grim Fiddle come for the first time, somehow with the memory of a man who had been there. I too blink at the antirational nature of my talk. But how else was I to explain to myself that when King James was swamped by fog or snow, I knew what I would see when we emerged? It was an exact power: I could look at my hands stiff on the rail in the damp, could smell the brine and taste the weather, and believe that I had known what it was like to be there. I was not a timeless soul. That is not Norse. In philosophical talk, I was precognitive. The forbidding pinnacles of Elephant