The Ice Museum Read online

  It was around that time that I regained an earlier obsession with polar exploration. It was an old interest of mine; I had always enjoyed an Arctic saga, but I began to buy them in bulk. There was something about the starkness of life in the snow, the terrible risks of travelling across ice plains, that seemed to supply a release from the sameness of my days, the relentless round of my hours. Leafing through explorers’ accounts, I read about Thule again. The old fantasy of a remote northern land appeared in a book by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the story of his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1893. As a way to draw the reader in, to emphasize the significance of his journey, its place in polar history, Nansen added Thule to the narrative. For Nansen, Thule meant the grandeur of the ice, the pure beauty of the northern landscape. It was a land obscured by mists, standing somewhere in the northern ocean.

  Each day, I took another explorer into the packed carriages, flicking through another attempt to shade in a few more blanks on the maps. My mounting fascination supplied a sense of purpose, something I had lost in my dislocated progress round the city. I thought of plains of ice, snowscapes and glaciers shining under a pale sun. As the crowds swelled into the underground, I thought of emptiness, barren rocks washed by a clear blue sea, the long shanks of ancient mountains. I had travelled and lived in the far north; I knew that the ragged mountains and cold fjords still supplied the consolations of a perfect view, the tranquillity of slowness, and I longed to set out for them.

  On this theme of Thule, I started compiling notes, scribbling down quotations as I read through books. A long line of philosophers, poets, advocates and detractors referred fleetingly to Thule, from Boethius to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mostly they cast it in a cameo, adding the word to a line of their prose or verse, using it to evoke pallor and the north. Alexander Pope wrote a slapstick interlude in “The Dunciad,” in which a fire was extinguished with a dank and clammy page of a poem about Thule. Charlotte Brontë put Thule into a gothic scene, as Jane Eyre sits, abandoned by her relatives, dreaming alone on a rain-drenched afternoon. She is reading a book about the Arctic; a reference to the lonely rocks of Thule sets her off into a wild transport, as she conjures the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with ‘the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the Pole, and concentre the multiplied rigors of extreme cold.’ Thule was the symbol for all of this, Brontë thought, all these dreams of beauty and fears of desolation. From Julius Caesar to Edgar Allan Poe, Thule suggested cold silent plains, the blank spaces of the remote northern lands, awaiting discovery and interpretation. ‘. . . To the west, to Hesperian darkness, and the shores of barbarian Thule,’ wrote William Godwin, in Caleb Williams. ‘A wild weird clime,’ Edgar Allan Poe called it, a land on the way to night, a strange unworldly place.

  Thule appeared in fairytales, in children’s fables. Through the years, a complete cast of fantasy Thulean inhabitants appeared in verse: there was a ‘King of Thule,’ a ‘Lord Archbishop of Thule’ who preached to ‘elfin legions,’ there were ‘children of wild Thule’ who lived in the deep caves of the northern sea, and there was the Queen of Bubbles living in her caves on the coast of Thule. Thule came to stand in for anything superlative, any finest example of its type. So e e cummings wrote of the ‘Ultima Thule of plumbing,’ and Cecil Day Lewis wrote of trains drawing out from a terminus, ‘snorting towards an Ultima Thule.’ It could be anywhere remote, so Thomas Hardy talked about Thule as the geographical antithesis of London, and Anthony Trollope described Penzance as ‘your very Ultima Thule.’ By then, Thule was so hoary and established that you could play with it, laugh a little at its antiquity and resonance.

  In the twentieth century, Thule told a changing story. For thousands of years, no one had known what lay in the ice around the North Pole. During the twentieth century the most northerly places had been mapped and seen, a slow line of explorers with sledges and planes had arrived onto the ice. Lands draped in shadows for thousands of years had been drawn into the light. Fantasy had been replaced by knowledge. It was a desperate struggle, filled with uncertainty. For generations it was thought that the American Robert Peary had been the first man to reach the North Pole by land, arriving there in 1909. Later, Peary’s account was questioned: his skiing was too fast; his diary had perhaps been doctored. In 1926, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, with his companions Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile, flew above the Arctic ice in an airship, dropping flags onto the North Pole. They saw the Pole, but they didn’t land on the ice. In 1948, a Russian expedition, led by Alexander Kuznetsov, landed an aircraft and walked the last steps to the North Pole. If Peary’s detractors were right, Kuznetsov’s team would have been the first to stand at the Pole, fifty years after Nansen had come home. And if Peary had never arrived, it would have been as late as 1969 that the first overland ski and sledge expedition reached the Pole, led by a British explorer, Wally Herbert. It was in the same year that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The northerly regions remained distant and inaccessible throughout most of the twentieth century, even as the focus turned to space travel.

  Now, you could fly to the North Pole if you had the resources and mass tourism had made incursions into the northern lands. You could take a tour of Greenland and Svalbard, for the pleasures of the white mountains, the Northern Lights or the midnight sun. Wilderness treks set out across the interior of Iceland. Norway was a winter playground, offering dog sledging, reindeer herding, skiing; and in the summer the coast was full of slow-moving ferries, bringing tourists to the north. These mysterious lands, once untouched, then barely known, were now trading on their ancient credentials: their purity, their emptiness, their beauty. There was an industry in Thules—Thule tours, Thule gear, Thule knitwear shops, Thule cruises. Typing in Thule on the Internet released an array of Thule companies touting for trade, offering the sublime experience of northern wilderness. I knew that things were changing in the north. I knew there was a sombre theme in reports from the Arctic—the suggestions of climate change, the glaciers haemorrhaging ice into the fjords, the heat of the sun scalding explorers. The dour predictions hardly stopped the Thule tours; the intimations of pending destruction failed to dampen the longing for empty nature.

  Further reading on the subject revealed another strain to the story, another fantasy cast onto the receptive blankness of Thule. In Munich at the end of the First World War, a sinister group met in secret under the name of the Thule Society. Members and guests of the Thule Society had included Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg and Dietrich Eckart. The uncertain provenance of Thule meant that the word could be used by anyone who found it. It could be tied to any cause, any deranged perspective on the history of the north. For these Germans, Thule suggested the lofty origins of the Germanic race; it was from the mists of Thule that the Germans had come, they thought.

  A century of wars and technological revolutions separated my sense of Thule from that of nineteenth-century explorers like Nansen, as they dabbed the word onto the scenery. The former lands of Thule had been invaded by the Germans and the Russians, sparred over in world wars. The ambiguity of the myth had been drawn into interwar hatred and extremism, though Thule was an ancient mystery, thousands of years old, and could never be reduced to a single definition, a single set of ideas. From the age of modern exploration to the contemporary age of mass travel, Thule had lingered on, a potent symbol of empty lands and silence. But what had happened, I started to think, to the idea of remoteness, the sense of magisterial nature embodied in the word “Thule”? In a hundred years explorers had mapped the most remote regions. In a hundred years, it seemed that we had passed from imagining the far north to imagining its future destruction. We had passed from the age of modern exploration—when Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen and Robert Peary set out for the northern blankness
—to the age of scientific warnings about the melting of the polar ice. The subject engrossed me; it kept me in a trance, as the spring sunshine flickered across the London parks and everyone lounged through their lunch hours, reading papers in Soho Square, massing in Hyde Park at the weekends. What had happened in this wild and forceful century to an old idea like Thule? When B-52s flew across the Pole, when nuclear waste rotted in the depths of the Arctic Ocean, what had happened to a dream of a pure place, a place apart from the ambiguities of the world below?

  The questions and the northern lands themselves summoned me. Thule was a traveller’s account; in its first appearance, Pytheas claimed he had really been there. And though the name became a mystery, it was a mystery intricately entwined with ideas of a particular sort of place, identified in relation to the midnight sun, to the frozen ocean. It was a word suggesting the rocks of the north, whiteness and space. It was a word suggesting innocence, a prelapsarian place. I did a faintly foolish thing. I gave up my job, a job everyone had told me I was lucky to have, and I prepared to travel through the lands that had been named Thule—from Shetland to Iceland, then to Norway, Estonia, Greenland and finally to Spitsbergen.

  FORWARD

  THE MAN OF BONE CONFIRMS HIS THRONE

  IN CAVE WHERE FOSSILS BE

  OUTDATING EVERY MUMMY KNOWN,

  NOT OLDER CUVIER’S MASTODON,

  NOR OLDER MUCH THE SEA:

  OLD AS THE GLACIAL PERIOD, HE;

  AND CLAIMS HE CALLS TO MIND THE DAY

  WHEN THULE’S KING, BY REINDEER DRAWN,

  HIS SLEIGH-BELLS JINGLING IN ICY MORN,

  SLID CLEAN FROM THE POLE TO THE WETTERHORN

  OVER FROZEN WATERS IN MAY!

  “THE MAN OF THE CAVE OF ENGIHOUL,” HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

  By way of prelude I made a trip to Oslo, to look at Nansen’s boat, the boat he made to sail beyond Thule in. I wanted to start my trail with him, with his polar ambitions and his sense of the far north. Of all the polar explorers, he was the most compelling to me. He had lived through a crux time, when a great surge of explorers was coming closer and closer to the unknown edges of the globe: the North and South Poles. Once these points were reached, thousands of years of fantasy and speculation about what lay at the extremes of the earth would be replaced by concrete knowledge. Nansen was born in 1861, when Norway was a poor country, its inhabitants struggling to survive on fishing and farming. Powered from an early age by ravenous ambition, Nansen stared intently out of early photographs, a man with blond hair and a powerful jaw, tall and strong. He looked excellent on a horse; he cut a fine figure in a uniform, but was equally suited to the rags and beards of Arctic exploration. He was a neurologist, he was awarded a doctorate; he hunched himself over microscopes in Norwegian research laboratories, but became restless. Yearning for grand vistas, the empty spaces of the north, he set off for Greenland, making the first known crossing of the ice-bound country in 1888. He returned to Norway a national hero, hailed as an explorer in the Viking tradition. In 1889, still short of thirty, he decided he needed another challenge and opted for the North Pole, a place still taunting explorers, lingering out of sight in the shadows beyond the maps. Nansen decided he would build the perfect Arctic boat, and end the ancient argument about the far north.

  Writing an account of his journey towards the North Pole, a brilliant and egomaniacal description called Farthest North, Nansen reached for a way to attach his expedition to the ancient history of exploration in the far north. He rummaged in his remembered store of tales, and found the old idea of Thule. He used lines from Seneca as the epigraph to the book, creating a symbolic focus for his journey: ‘A time will come in later years when the Ocean will unloose the bands of things, when the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries, and Thule will no longer be the extreme point among the islands.’ The extract from Seneca’s Medea hinted at it all, entwining the longings and optimism, the silence of the Arctic night and the terrible beauty of the drifting ice with the old story of the land of Thule. Nansen had been much preoccupied with the deathly kingdom he planned to enter and by the presumptuous nature of his enterprise. By opening his account with Thule he claimed a victory against the old superstitions, the dusty old pile of fantasies about the far north. Thule had been the most northerly place for the early geographers, but Nansen was aiming to clear up the lingering mysteries, and sail even beyond Thule.

  The mountains were coated in frosted trees and on the streets of Oslo the snow was stacked up. The tramtracks were slender pencil lines on a white page. The pavements were coated in layers of sludge snow and ice, trampled down during the winter. Everyone shuffled on the ice, a city of people wrapped in winter clothes. Snow fell, white swirls from a blank sky. The mountains loomed into the whiteness. There was a castle, glazed with ice, and a port with boats lined along the quayside, secured by frozen chains. The city was smothered, the noises of the cars softened by the snow; the pedestrians were looking down, heads bowed against the wind, preoccupied with the ice beneath their feet. It was a city concentrating on the mechanics of motion, where everyday activities had become absorbing and difficult. I walked from the central station in a cold wind, wet snow falling onto my clothes, into my eyes and mouth.

  I slid away from the city centre, over fields and along summer footpaths transformed into a ridge of packed-up snow. The frozen ground stretched up a hill flanked by ice-trees. A dim sun was drifting towards the horizon. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of the pasty waters of Oslofjord, glinting in the afternoon semi-light. Nansen’s beached boat was an hour’s walk across the Bygdøy Peninsula, a spit of land curving away from the city. It would have been a gentle stroll in any other weather conditions, but I was wishing I had packed crampons, instead of shabby notebooks that weighed me down. I passed slowly up a hill, breathing in cold air, shuddering into my coat. I walked through streets of perfect wooden houses, with elegant old Norwegians sliding past on their daily circuit; glad of the cold, they skied slowly through the tranquil afternoon. The buildings on Bygdøy were the homes of the affluent and influential: ambassadorial residences with security gates, flying Norwegian flags like recent settlers.

  Nansen’s boat was kept under a roof—a tight-fitting canopy, built above the masts. When I arrived I saw what looked like an enormous icy tent standing in a car park, with the pallid fjord on the other side. Across the fjord container ships were waiting at Oslo’s city harbour, while passenger ferries turned slowly to head for Sweden and the Baltic. The Kontiki Museum, a memorial to the resilience of Thor Heyerdahl, stood next to the icy tent. A few families were walking through the doors.

  The white compound housed the low-slung hull of Nansen’s boat. Pushing inside, feeling the coldness of the room, I saw a boat with its sides swelling outwards, a creation of curved wooden planks, immaculately painted in red and black. I stared up at the relic, a boat cleared of barnacles and debris, its neatness emphasizing its obsolescence, dried out, never to be launched again. And I thought how Nansen had planned the ship, how he had stalked across its polished boards, galvanizing his crew against the long polar night. He named her Fram—meaning ‘forward’ in Norwegian. It was a challenge—forward into the onslaught of the elements, beyond the land of Thule to somewhere still more distant and strange. Fram was fitted for Arctic exploration alone. The tub-shaped hull, the hulking thickness of the sides, had been lovingly crafted by Colin Archer, a Norwegian-Scot, on specific instructions from Nansen. It was the physical weight of the ice that had obstructed previous attempts to reach the Pole, Nansen thought. ‘Everywhere the ice has proved an impenetrable barrier, and has stayed the progress of invaders on the threshold of the unknown regions,’ Nansen told his audience at the Christiania Geographical Society in 1890. At the time, he had just returned from making the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap, and he was generally regarded as something of an expert on jagged vistas of ice. Despite the overwhelming evidence that it was impossible to reach the Pole
by ship, Nansen thought it was worth continuing to try.

  Nansen saw the history of Arctic exploration as an epic quest for knowledge. He laced his own exploration with a sense of myth and mystery. ‘Unseen and untrodden under their spotless mantle of ice the rigid polar regions slept the profound sleep of death from the earliest dawn of time,’ he wrote. ‘Wrapped in his white shroud, the mighty giant stretched his clammy ice-limbs abroad, and dreamed his age-long dreams. Ages passed—deep was the silence. Then, in the dawn of history, far away in the south, the awakening spirit of man reared its head on high and gazed over the earth. To the south it encountered warmth, to the north, cold; and behind the boundaries of the unknown, it placed in imagination the twin kingdoms of consuming heat and of deadly cold.’

  He wrote in unapologetically baroque prose, spilling out references, everything wrapped in poetic phrases. ‘When our thoughts go back through the ages in a waking dream,’ wrote Nansen, ‘an endless procession passes before us, like a single mighty epic of the human mind’s power of devotion to an idea, right or wrong—a procession of struggling, frost-covered figures in heavy clothes, some erect and powerful, others weak and bent so they can scarcely drag themselves along before the sledges, many of them emaciated and dying of hunger, cold and scurvy; but all looking out before them towards the unknown, beyond the sunset, where the goal of their struggle is to be found.’ Ignorant of what they might find, they cast illusions onto the silent ice, patterning the unknown regions with dark fantasies, expectations, dreams of grail treasure.