The Ice Museum by Joanna Kavenna Read Free Book Online Page A

village where the streets became fields. And there were the long evenings, when I thought the roads looked like dark rivers, between the shores of streetlights.
    When I read stories of polar exploration, I lingered over the descriptions of intense cold; and when my brother and I played at explorers we were always lost in the storm, beaten by frigid winds. To me, the tales of exploration were more mesmerizing than the fairytales I was supposed to enjoy. Dutifully, with mounting boredom and confusion, I read through the tales of princesses, princes, the whole range of fairytale royals, choking on apples, pricking their fingers, sleeping, waking with dwarfs, generally misbehaving. Discarding the multicoloured child-friendly books, I pored over the explorers’ diaries, the immaculate records of pemmican eaten, pemmican stored, oil cans squandered to the frost, gloves dropped on the snow, never recovered, the sighting of a seal, six o’clock, gun jammed.
    It was the chill of the stories that made them appeal to me. I never responded with such excitement to adventures from deserts or lukewarm places. There was something in the stillness of the ice which gripped me, stillness like suspense, an empty stage ready at any moment for the grand entrance of another explorer, struggling against the snow. I liked the shifting illusions of the Arctic—the bergs which hid their depths in the sea, rising like drifting mountains, the crevasses under a thin surface of ice. I memorized lists of countries, lists of explorers: Britain, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Wilson, Oates, Bowers, Scott, Shackleton, Bjaaland, Johansen, Amundsen. An exotic pantheon, to me. The ships ploughing a furrow through the pallid ocean, towards the great walls of ice. The explorers sounding the refrain—death or glory, a heroic return to a bunting-festooned quayside, or a fading away into the silence of the snow. Some sailed in ships doomed to founder, their wreckage found drifting on floes; men who would become mysteries themselves, never seen again, never heard of. Or years later, a diary would be found at a frozen last camp; they lugged their diaries to the end, recording the dwindling strength of their colleagues—the death of the first officer from a malady which swelled his limbs, the death of the oceanographer who had eaten rotting seal flesh. I imagined these explorers as a series of shadows, stumbling over brilliant white snowfields. Pitching another flag, in the middle of an interminable nowhere, leaving it fluttering against the snow.
    The famous names of British exploration went south: Captain Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, ‘Titus’ Oates. Yet I somehow preferred the stories about the north. When, aged eight, I first read about Scott’s race with Roald Amundsen for the South Pole, I pitied Oates, who disappeared into the ice, in the howling storm: I pitied them all, Scott and Wilson and Bowers, lying in their tent, the sides lashed by the gales, writing their farewells, struggling to grip their pens. Later, I felt my sympathies sliding towards Amundsen, who packed abundant supplies, and raced on skis towards the South Pole, returning without losing a man. Amundsen was a wiry man with a great beak nose, fascinating and grotesque to a child. He had seemed to me like an exotic creature, found only on crazy polar trips. With slick thrusts of his skis, pushing across the ice, following the dogs dragging sledges, he had made Scott’s exhausted labours look like wilful masochism. He had skied to the South Pole, joyfully, brilliantly, with a pack of sliding ace skiers around him. Then, after the thrill of the Antarctic race, he had sailed to the Arctic, and disappeared for seven years, into the ice around the North Pole. It intrigued me that a man could disappear for so long, refusing the applause of the crowds, shrouding himself in the silent ice.
    When I first read about the explorers, I knew almost nothing; I relied on