The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 83
Christmas Muir and Peggs and Wild Drumrul would climb up with me. Peggs, a man who, no braggart, could reminisce about the seven seas of the world and the ice of both poles, did describe for us the gathering of the pack. After all this time, I still take satisfaction in knowing the natural process that has entombed me and mine. Sea water freezes at twenty-eight and a half degrees Fahrenheit. He was not precise about the science, and from what I recall, the air temperature is independent of the temperature at sea level. First, frazil ice forms on the water, like slush with oily water atop. Then, as the temperature drops with the wind and current, the frazil ice transforms into a sludgy layer called grease ice. Finally, the temperature plunging, independent sheets, called pancake ice, congeal into new ice that, when it thickens to nine feet, loses its salt content and bobs free of the water. This new ice crumbles and stratifies as the sea beneath, or a storm above, throws one floe against another, a process called hummocking or, in the case of one floe thrusting over another, rafting. Hummocking and rafting combine new ice into ragged, heaving walls that can grow to barriers forty feet high, the forward redoubts of millions of square miles of a tireless crystal army.
I enjoy how placid the process can seem. To watch it the first time was awful. I felt as if the sea were dying, all life slowing to an omnipresent nothingness. As the pack gathers strength, cooling the air temperature before it, it sends out new ice like claws that bend back into the pack, then dart out again to grab new sea or to anchor onto the ice islands that serve as advance guard. The pack was ever moving, ever violent. It had no plan, rather it was a condition; yet because the pack grew hourly, it seemed sublimely alive. It was actually the antithesis of life.
Have I communicated the noise? South Georgia was wind and rain, the sea smashing the cliffs, seafoam arching over the crags, elemental chaos building to endless howls. That same ceaseless wind rushing across the ice pack was transformed into an omnipresent scream. The pack rippled with the tides, which, ever changing, sent crackling explosions across a line, the pack shivering as a wave ran beneath the mass. Pressure ridges formed when one gigantic floe crushed against another, huge pieces of ice, whole bergs, fired into the air like cannon salvos. The ice islands were continually disintegrating in the sun’s heat, and they whined as they twisted against themselves, roaring as a crack ran lengthwise, sludgy rivers cascading from their faces. Whenever the open sea broke through the field, it would catch up brash ice and throw it against the ice fronts with rattling, knocking, scratching sounds. And the fast ice, that which attaches to land masses, would rub up against South Georgia and the outlying rocks, screeching when the pack heaved north, ever north, to replace the vanguard melted off in the warm currents of the horse latitudes.
The pack swept over South Georgia. I am not sure if it was more frightening to sit on the ridge with the sea covered in a fog and listen to the pack rumble and whine, or to stand on the ridge under clear gray skies and watch the pack grow, a hundred hundred tongues of ice licking the gray waves. The contrasts were hypnotizing, and I came to anticipate them: one noon, the sun pushing through in the low northeastern sky like torchlight, not warm but reassuringly there, the pack would be solid to the west, but to the east there would be open sea pocked with wave crests, dotted with brash ice, some giant bergs bashing one another. The next day the pack would be everywhere, flat, glistening, wind-scourged, ice islands in the sky; then again in several hours the floes would part to shape a seamlike channel, the sea breaking through to shape a lake in the ice, perhaps a storm rolling black clouds and fog over the field. For beneath the pack was the cauldron of the Scotia Sea, thrusting untold billions of tons of water up against the ice.
“It’s beauty to me,” said Christmas Muir. “I been icebound more’n once out there. Peggs, he walked the pack once, no place to no place, to launch a boat. Out there, man forgets things. Until she moves on ye, or she squeezes yerr ship to splinters. And them killers come sniffin’, those pig eyes looks at ye for supper.”
Wild Drumrul asked, what killers? Christmas Muir laughed, pleased that he had scared us, and told of the killer whales, thirty feet long, really large dolphins, that preyed in packs upon anything living or dead above or beneath the ice pack; that was in the Antarctic Circle, he said, and need not worry us on South Georgia.
Wild Drumrul spoke my mind, asking, what was it like on the pack? Christmas Muir started to joke, let Peggs answer soberly, “It makes a man want to sit down and quit. Jes’ quit.”
The pack had the same effect on South