My Last Continent: A Novel(42)
“What the hell,” I mutter, and, next to me, Thom is shaking his head. Nigel should have known better than to rock-climb with tourists around.
Nigel’s not unlike me—here as a historian because it’s a way to get to Antarctica. At seventy years old, he’s hardy but decidedly old-school, and he’s never quite learned that, on these trips, he’s no longer an explorer or a researcher but a tour guide, and he needs to set a good example. He’s an old dog, Keller said once, as an excuse, and he was right. Nigel’s cracked, leathered face bears the marks of four decades of frostbite and sunburn; his nose is a permanent, unnatural shade of red, and his beard is white with age and sun—I’d once been astonished to see a photo of a young Nigel, black-haired and smooth-faced. When he’d worked for the British Antarctic Survey, he helped restore the survey’s research huts across the continent and, later, helped dismantle them. Last winter, he told me how he’d helped dismantle the Station J hut at Prospect Point, clearly conflicted about the orders to take it down. “Tough choice,” he said, “preserving history or preserving the continent.” We’ve become comrades in conflict as we guide heavy-footed tourists across the ice.
Still, Nigel tends to forget that he is not here on his own, that when he is on the staff of the Cormorant, he is being watched at all times—not just by Glenn but by the tourists. And apparently, when he decided to climb up the sheer side of a bluff in plain view of a tour group, he had a copycat, who is now stuck. Richard had made it about twenty feet up, but now he isn’t moving, too high to jump down, and too unstable to keep going up.
Thom is on his radio, telling Glenn what’s going on, and in the meantime Keller moves closer to the cliff, shouting up at Richard as Nigel shouts down. Through the grayish haze, a light snow is falling, slickening the rocks that Richard is trying to hold on to with his bare hands and rubber boots. As I get closer, I can see him searching for a better hold, his whole body quivering with the exertion of trying to stay put. The ground twenty feet below him is rocky and rough, and I hope he hasn’t looked down.
Nigel’s gaze is locked on Richard, and even though Nigel’s snow-flecked beard covers most of his face, I can see he is serious, focused.
“Stay where you are,” Keller calls out to Richard. “Don’t move.”
But at the sound of Keller’s voice, Richard turns, and as he does his balance shifts, and rocks crumble beneath his boots, the stones tumbling down toward us.
“Hang on!” Nigel shouts.
Richard has managed to find a solid piece of rock, and he hugs the cliff, stable for the moment, shoulders ticking upward with each short breath. He’s not going to last long, and my own breath begins to shorten as I realize what might happen here. A tourist, dead on our watch. His own fault—but that won’t matter. He shouldn’t have come here; he doesn’t belong. Really, none of us do. As I watch the trembling of his body, his arms and legs straining to keep a hold, it feels suddenly as if it’s the ridge itself that’s quaking, the island shuddering underneath us—as if this long-dormant volcano is awakening, ready to reclaim the island, the entire continent, all of us who are doing our part, bit by tiny bit, to destroy it. I feel as if we’re poised for disaster, as if the cliffs might break apart at any moment, as if the seas might start to boil, as if we might all be buried in another layer of carcasses, bones over bones—the goddess Gaia’s final revenge for all her grievances.
Nigel has climbed up about ten feet, to a small plateau, and he’s now on his stomach, lowering a rope toward Richard. Meanwhile, Keller has begun climbing up the side of the cliff toward Richard and is about halfway between him and the ground.
From below, Keller snatches the rope, looping it around his hand. Richard’s grip loosens, and his body begins to peel away from the face of the cliff—but Keller reaches out, catching his wrist.
Both men drop, falling fast—and then the rope grows taut, jerking them hard against the side of the cliff. Nigel slides forward on his stomach, his arms bracing against the rocks at the edge as he struggles to keep himself from going over.
Keller is holding on to Richard’s wrist with his bare hand, his other hand clinging to the rope, which has to be cutting painfully into his skin.
Nigel lowers the rope at a rapid, almost free-fall pace. Richard scrapes against the jagged wall on the way down. Keller is holding tightly on to Richard, but then his other hand begins to slip. When they are about six feet off the ground, the rope finally, inevitably, rips through Keller’s grasp, and the two of them tumble onto the rock-and snow-strewn sand.
“Oh my God.”
I haven’t even noticed that Kate has been watching right beside me; she rushes toward Richard, her winter clothes having been quickly donned again, ski pants stuck above her boots, her coat unzipped.
She helps Richard stand up. “Are you okay?” she asks. She sounds more vexed than concerned.
“I think so.”
I kneel next to Keller as he gets to his feet, his hand bloodied and torn. “Oh, no.”
“It’s fine,” he says. He takes off his bandanna and wraps it around his hand, blood darkening the fabric.
With Thom now at his side, Richard takes a tentative step, then another. As he looks down at his own body, as if to make sure it’s still intact, I see a round beige disk behind his ear—a seasickness patch. He keeps his head lowered for a few moments, looking embarrassed. Finally he turns to look at Keller, and then up at Nigel, who is gingerly making his way down the face of the cliff. He doesn’t look at his wife.