The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 155
He did betray me. I accuse him of that. He is guilty. I cannot believe that he also intended for me to be delivered into the vindictiveness of the republican masters. He could not have thought that I would return from my false quest for Satan, two hundred miles south into mountains never penetrated by man or animal, and after that up the ashen slopes of an active volcano. He must have thought that when we parted at the shore of Anvers Island, I was a dead man. We did not meet again. That was chance, for within the week he was gone to the South Orkneys and then to Africa to speechify for his high dreams, the People’s Republic of Antarctica; and within the year he was gone to his Maker, where I imagine he continues to speechify to the angels themselves for his high dreams, and perhaps for a People’s Republic of Heaven.
“Good luck, Grim,” he said to me on the shore.
“I’ll show them, you’ll see,” I said, some crazed sense of the coming Twilight of the Gods glazing my vision.
“You have done. I have done. We have done. What we have done!” he said, and that was the end for us, unless, I note, my memory is tricking me and he actually said, “What have we done?”
My flight to Satan’s Seat did not take much longer than Lazarus’s to the camps of our enemies. I loaded a thousand pounds of supplies atop my sled. It was the best I knew to build, hand-lashed, light, doubly strengthened ropes. I harnessed nine of the most rugged dogs I could risk, all huskies, part wolf, part everything else, from the stock the Ice Cross had brought in. Such a beast is not calm unless dead. My wheel dog was a massive veteran, nearly blind from fights, sure footed, reliable; my lead dog was one of Iceberg’s great-grandchildren (Iceberg and Goldberg died weeks apart, in their sleep and, yes, peacefully), a gray heap of scar tissue and muscle who could sense crevasses like meat, could break trail without a man leading him, and was blessed with a fierce sense of loyalty: he would always turn the sled when I was pitched off, would bark murder to the team until I righted myself. My team was mongrel and mean, could live on blubber and pemmican, and when that was gone, would live on the promise of more, until hunger made them killers.
Once landed on the continent, I commanded, “Haw!” and we were off across the ice, weaving between the hummocks, over fields broken with jagged slabs, up onto the glacier that I chose as the first leg of my highway to Satan. My dogs did not sense my delusion. They ran heads down, best when wet and cold, their tails raised high behind them in the wind like mainmasts stretching canvas. When we were right, we sailed up that glacier. We had to zigzag, often doubling back when a track ended at a fissure. I remember a feeling of passionate numbness. As long as my strength held, I was exuberant, the sun overhead, the light, wet snow swirling in updrafts right and left. The farther we got from the shore, the easier our run, because the snow slackened off. There is little snowfall on the continent itself, the blizzards being the wind picking up crystals and flinging them. On the glacier, I was protected from the worst of the coastal winds, and the first few days felt myself climbing into an untracked world of white and compelling wonder.
It could not last. My journey was a lie. And I believe what happened to me there was luck. As I left behind Anvers, which I had made my tomb, I also left behind the turbulence in my mind. My heart was lightened by the beauty of Antarctica. I have emphasized the dread of the South. If a man ignores death, sheds Grandfather’s and Longfaeroe’s sense of wreak flesh and holds to the might of the spirit, then he can stand back and appreciate God’s creation. God made Antarctica as seriously as he made Eden. Before those gigantic blue-black mountains that tower to heaven, draped in mantles of gale-blown clouds pink and blue, made majestic by fingers of glaciers that rippled the exposed rock, what is adequate to be said? It can seem a dream.
The physical reward is pain. That pain overcame me after a week’s run. My giddiness passed; a dull vertigo settled in. I anticipated my fall. The cold stiffened my limbs, my solitude slowed my step. I fed the dogs, made sloppy efforts to keep on. They were ready; I failed them. We stayed three days waiting for one blow to pass, lingered another twro days farther up a new glacier for no reason. After that I lost sense of and care for time. At the top of the glacier, I was faced with a futile choice, either down into a valley of mountainous shadows pocked with deep drifts, or off onto a ridge the team might not have managed. I hesitated, camped at the crest, built a shelter of rock slabs and snow, kept a large fire, consumed too much of my coal. The dogs lay down in their holes, I in mine. We all knew I had quit.
My ice mausoleum was well set, a natural window to the south, opening onto crisscrossing mountain chains that heaved ever higher toward the gateway onto the Antarctica plateau itself. That was several hundred miles southward. There was more immediate spectacle: the stepping stones that surrounded the great smoking colossus, Satan’s Seat. It dominated the landscape, master of Graham Land, set above the Wilkins Coast, between the Larsen Ice Shelf and the whale-shaped Alexander Island, and amid what is charted as the Eternity Mountains. I was at least one hundred miles