The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 113

had come to choose Livingston Island for their mission. I note that the Brothers did differ profoundly from Father Saint Stephen and The Free Gift of God; they were kind, muddled, long- suffering servants of Jesus, mostly Europeans, and at that mostly northern Europeans, Latvians and Poles. It is credible that the original wretches were landed at Golgotha by a ship, or ships, not unlike what The Free Gift of God had been before Father Saint Stephen and his men were overwhelmed by the perversity of their charity and collapsed to their worst nightmares. There was much that was not credible about what the Little Brothers said: that the Church was dispatching thousands of priests to convert the camps; that some of the Little Brothers had been soldiers captured in a war in the Caribbean (like Xique); that the camps were now being stuffed with wretches deliberately transported to the South Shetlands by governments gripped by civil wars. There were whole areas left blank then: how dependable the supply ships were; who had provided the earth-moving and construction equipment in the service huts; where we were to be resettled if and when someone arrived to hear our pleas.

For the year I was there, Golgotha never contained more than five thousand internees. We were housed in several dozen crudely linked longhouses carved into the bedrock. Someone had done that earthmoving, and with powerful, sophisticated equipment; we would never learn specifically who. The death rate at Golgotha was hard to measure; my guess is that it was less than ten a day. The perilously damp cold, caused by the excessive humidity offshore of Antarctica, did not kill outright. It weakened the strong, ravaged the indigent. There were at least fifty Brothers, aping anonymity; and twice that many Little Brothers of all sorts: brutes, lechers, campesinos. Together they were not our jailers, needed our cooperation as much as we needed their access to the Ice Cross’s haphazard authority.

Inside the camp, the society of mankind showed its commonplace vices, as Dietjagger meant when he said it was not different from what either of us had left behind. Food, heat, and space were the needs. Selfishness, despair, and accident were the threats. The Little Brothers were the chief transgressors, pathetic sneaks. They bought women, hoarded food, had firearms, which they brandished oafishly. There were beatings, hangings, persecutions, lawlessness. Barter was the currency. The Little Brothers, many internees, and my people, indulged usury. Rations were always inadequate, because one had to work or keep moving to fend off the damp, yet this caused one to need more food. The heating was makeshift. Those of us from colder climes, like my people, knew how to insulate, how to bear the rawness, and did what we could to teach those from equatorial climes how to survive. A few learned, most did not. We burned the coal we were given, also burned blubber we got by hunting, both of which filled the longhouses with thick smoke that blackened our skins. There are many tricks on the ice: bathing in urine, keeping one’s extremities dry; it is a hard game, and can be won, if not indefinitely.

A significant mystery for us at first was that the barracks had an internal heat source. We determined that the heat must come from the mountain, that the camp must have been sited there because of the eruptions. I think this sort of heat is called geothermal. We called it godsend. Also there was hot steam in the cracks outside, along the ravine, on the glacier; and in two of the longhouses there was a pool of boiling hot water that proved a curse, for many had bathed in it, shedding their body oils, becoming defenseless to pneumonia. From what I know of science, and from what I later learned, it is probable that the eruptions had opened up heat seams throughout the South Shetlands; one of those seams, on Elephant Island, proved to contain very hard coal, which was mined by slaves for slaves.

My people came to flourish in Golgotha, if that word flourish is sufferable. We were homogeneous, tough-minded, and our learning brought us to the fore of the community. Community! I do not intend irony; my words fail to portray the extremes there, make it seem as if Golgotha was like human culture everywhere. That is a lie. I strain to get it right. We South Georgians took over the work battalion, divided our labor between shoring up our space and hunting outside, on the slopes of Livingston and in longboats. This soon involved us in the camp’s security. The Little Brothers were morbid about the dark-faced creatures they called the Hielistos. There had been an attack every summer, they said; we guessed that meant there had been a massacre every summer, the Little Brothers quitting the defenses to hide within. We had the few firearms we had secreted from the Ice Cross; the Little Brothers were armed, would not give up their guns to us. It was obvious to us that what protected us was chance. I assumed that either the Ice Cross kept those dark-faced creatures away, or nothing would. Closer to the truth was that we were a small camp, unworthy of regular raids, and that the Hielistos were crudely organized, that they were us one step removed—condemned, inept, ice-cursed. Lazarus solved that puzzle, saying Hielistos meant, figuratively, ice brothers.

I have cause for presenting Golgotha as tolerable, fair-minded. It was our shelter in the darkness. It was never as bad as it could have been, as I know other camps were. There was more continuity than my people had enjoyed since leaving South Georgia. Our wounded either died or lived; we starved and scratched—not other than would have happened at sea. We were situated badly, but arguably better than might have been ours on a strange coastline against chauvinists like the Patties, or against disease. The Brothers tried to divide the supplies equitably, mercy to those more in