My Last Continent: A Novel(52)

With Keller’s eyes closed, I take the opportunity to study him unobserved, blinking out a bead of sweat that has trickled into my eye. He looks unconcerned, relaxed, despite what happened earlier, yet I can see that every moment he’s spent on the continent is already etched upon his face: skin ruddy from the cold and wind and sun, eyes receding into a growing nest of crow’s-feet. What draws me to Keller are things I think few people outside Antarctica—even Glenn, especially Glenn—will ever see. Watching Keller put out a fire in one of the tinder-dry dormitories at McMurdo. Seeing him break up a fistfight between two mechanics in the Southern Exposure. Watching him secure a loose egg back under a penguin’s brood pouch when the bird couldn’t leave its nest, sustaining a gory bite wound for his trouble. But most of all, what I know about Keller comes from the shared silences of our glacial hikes, from stealing away from the tourists for a few moments alone on the uppermost deck of the ship, from the reunions that feel as though we’ve never been apart.

I stand and pick up the sauna’s large wooden spoon, ladling water over the lava rocks. A great sizzle rises, and the room fills with steam, intensifying the heat. It’s getting harder to breathe, and as Keller opens his eyes, as I look at him through the steam, his eyes dark and wet as a seal’s, I realize that, though I may know him as well as anyone, he will always be a bit out of reach, even to me. Not listening to Glenn is one thing—not listening to me is something I hadn’t expected.

“You’ve got to get your act together,” I tell him. “I know you hate sucking up to Glenn, but if that’s what it takes—”

“We work for the APP, not Glenn,” he murmurs, his eyes falling shut again.

“As long as Glenn transports us down here, we do work for him. The whole program depends on getting a free ride.”

“It’s not a free ride,” Keller says. “There’s a huge price to pay.”

“Believe me, I know. But it’s worth it.”

Keller opens his eyes and looks at me. “So you agree with Glenn? You think seafood belongs on the menu?”

“No, of course I don’t, but at least I see the reality—that it’s impossible to fill a cruise if you don’t serve what the passengers want to eat.”

“These passengers need to know what a disaster this is.”

“I hear you,” I say. “I do. But since we’re bringing people down here, we have to teach them, show them how important it is, everything they’re seeing firsthand. If you had your way, you’d just fence it all off.”

“Damn right, I would.”

“Well, if that were the case, none of us would be here. Including you.”

The heat of the sauna blurs my vision, and I can no longer see him clearly.

“The explorers,” Keller says, “were obsessed with firsts. Scott, Amundsen, all of them—it was about doing it first. Now everyone’s obsessed with lasts. Checking off their last -continent. Seeing it before it’s all gone. Soon they’ll be bragging about who photographed the last living Adélie.”

“God, I hope not.”

“Brace yourself,” he says.

Abruptly Keller gets up, opens the door, and walks out, letting in a blast of cool air. More quickly than I believed possible, I feel the heat leave my body.





ONE DAY BEFORE SHIPWRECK


South of the Antarctic Circle

(66°33'S)





It’s not uncommon in Antarctica to see what does not exist—to see the mountains levitate in the distance, to see the rising towers of a city on the horizon. When the sea is colder than the air, a layer forms that creates a polar mirage. The more layers, the more refracted the light: Mountains are born from the sea; cliffs turn into castles. Such mirages usually last only moments, until the air layers mix, and then they disappear.

These illusions can be dangerous—they often caused explorers to miscalculate distances—or simply embarrassing, leading the explorers to identify land that was not actually there. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Captain Sir James Clark Ross discovered a mountain range he named the Parry Mountains, about twenty-five miles from his position east of Ross Island—but there were, in fact, no mountains there at all; what he’d seen was a reflection of another mountain range, more than three hundred miles away.

Such visions have a name—fata morgana—and I feel as though I’m seeing a mirage right now: a large, multilayered building rising from the sea, moving along the horizon. I’m on the foredeck, braced against a biting headwind, and I’m hoping that this is only a trick of the eyes. It’s normal to see a fata morgana just before a storm or change in the weather.

But this mirage doesn’t waver or blur; it doesn’t disappear. Heart thudding, I raise my binoculars to confirm what is even more bizarre than a fata morgana, and all too real—the Australis, about half a nautical mile away, headed in our direction. Headed south.

I run up to the bridge. Glenn is standing next to Captain Wylander, who’s speaking into the radio.

“What the hell is that ship doing down here?” I ask.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

The captain hands the radio to Glenn, who barks a warning to the ship. “Lack of advance notification is in violation of IAATO protocol.”