Free The Nature of Ice by Robyn Mundy Page B

thirty miles an hour, or thereabouts.’
    â€˜The only thing holding her in place,’ Bage said, ‘is the volume of snow banked around the walls.’
    â€˜Not this one.’ Ninnis thumped the wall beside his bunk. He was right: the prevailing wind quickly blasted away any accumulation of snow on the hut’s southern side.
    â€˜I was saying to the boys—God willing, we’re all still here tomorrow—that we could build a snow bank,’ the meteorologist Cecil Madigan said. ‘If we stack a crescent of benzine fuel cases, say, ten yards behind the hut, the wind should dump snow between it and the back wall.’
    â€˜Put the hut in a better lee,’ Douglas said. He should have thought of it himself. He left the group and pulled down the meteorological log: the day’s minimum –21°F. He lingered over the monthly averages, the figures belying the wind’s fury.
    February     26.6 mph
March          49.0 mph
April            51.6 mph
    He tried and tried again to summon memories of a world not ravaged by wind. A civilised world with freshly laundered clothes, polished fruit upon a sideboard, the softness of a woman’s hand. But even his image of Paquita had dimmed, as if the features of her sweet and gentle face, the detail of her frock, were permanently veiled by snowdrift. Through these wretched months he’d written not a word to Paquita—what, of consequence, could a letter tell? That her fiancé and his men had been reduced to trogladytes, confined to a hut entombed in snow? That he, who once had hauled a sledge twelve hundred miles to the south magnetic pole—that wandering point on the earth’s surface where the magnetic field rises vertically—knew naught of any landmark beyond the rise? No one outside this dismal realm could fathom conditions so brutal that the simplest task—retrieving a recording, collecting daily ice— demanded superhuman effort. The wireless masts lay fallow on the ground; the lower segments were no sooner raised than wind chafed the rope supports and he ordered them to be pulled down again. When he cast his memory back to his first Antarctic winter with Shackleton, he could recall the bitter cold, but never at Cape Royds had he known this unremitting fury. Here at Commonwealth Bay, the wind ripped and rent, bent and bullied; it had torn their whaleboat from its anchors and delivered it across the frozen harbour to kingdom come. Douglas shook his head. He would write no such letter lest the very act of doing so administered defeat.
    The hut quaked. Wind shrilled. Douglas totted up wind speeds for the first half of May and estimated the average at sixty-four miles an hour.
    He entered Hell let loose in the midnight record and placed the log back on the shelf. Winter hadn’t even begun.

Collecting ice from the glacier at winter quarters

A THOUSAND
RIVERS
    FREYA KICKS OFF HER MUDDY boots, opens her studio door, strews her gear across the floor and kneels beside the heater. It’s nine at night and she’s exhausted. Exhilarated. In truth, she’s also relieved to have got through the afternoon without giving in. She would not have guessed, this morning, how rapidly the weather could turn, or how a minus-thirty windchill could chew through so many camera batteries. The cold had drained her own reserves.
    This morning, they had driven out across the ice in perfect sunshine. There wasn’t a breath of wind as she and Chad McGonigal tramped around the island in silence, he sitting down a respectable distance away each time she stopped to photograph the antics of courting penguins. She followed Chad’s example and kept to herself, her novice’s delight at the sight of so many penguins held in check by the muteness of her guide. They’d stopped for lunch at three o’clock, the dissonant brays and squawks