The Ice Museum (38 page)

The dream of Thule—a virginal untouched land—could never breathe and sweat as a crowded hopeless city or a history-strewn landscape could. Knowledge littered the landscape, changing everything, but it added a world of explorers and travellers and writers and poets to the empty rocks, as well as wars and violence and destruction.

It was easy to look nostalgically at the explorers, with their single goal, the emptiness around the North Pole. They had sailed, skied and flown, Nansen had set off in
Fram
, Amundsen had set off in the
Norge
, determined to discover, to shade in the blanks on the maps. It had driven them mad, this sense of something out of sight, something they didn't know. Nansen had written it out in
Farthest North
—‘Why?' he had asked. ‘Why did we continually return to the attack, to the land of darkness and cold, the shore of corpses. To what end?' He answered his own question: ‘It was simply to satisfy humanity's thirst for knowledge. Nowhere, in truth, has knowledge been purchased at a greater cost of privation and suffering. But the spirit of humanity will never rest till every spot of these regions has been trodden, till every enigma has been solved.' The explorers would not settle for the fantasy version, the mythical imaginary version, the utopian version of the lands in the far north. Women with beards, unipeds, griffins and Hyperboreans were all very well, the explorers thought, but they wanted to find the real north, whatever it was. They were prepared to lose the old myths in order to discover what was really there. And Thule had changed, as part of this process. Thule had begun as a real place, but Pytheas's account had been lost, and Thule had become a rich fantasy about the north, a word expressing a dream of remoteness and simplicity. Now the lands of the far north had been mapped, sometimes colonised, sometimes used for resources, sometimes for tourist retreats into the wilderness, Thule was something different. It contained imperfection and degradation within its borders. It expressed compromise and experience. Still, the longing for silent spaces, for the unusually empty, for the thrill of the solitary trail, continued to send people to the farthest reaches of the earth. The story would change and change again.

The whir of the engines changed pitch, and we were descending towards the archipelago of Svalbard. Svalbard was a Norwegian colony, once called Spitsbergen, and it was a strange combination of worlds: it was a wilderness, everyone told me, but it was kept clean by tough edicts and restrictions, regulated, divided into national parks, maintained by a strict governor, a person placed by the Norwegian government, granted far-reaching powers to prohibit and restrict. It was my last stop on the Thule-trail, a trip to a place which mingled pragmatism with idealism, wilderness worship with the unsentimental use of resources. And Svalbard was where a colony of scientists fashioned theories about the coming earth, the future of the far north. From Svalbard, these scientists had tested the waters of the Arctic Ocean, and suggested that the physical composition of the ice might be changing. They had predicted the melting of the frozen sea.

 
 
Under a soft and tentative dawn, the land of Svalbard emerges below. A landscape of ice and rock, rising from a white sea. Zebra-striped with snow, the mountains are a succession of sharp ridges and dark crevasses, with clouds swirling around their peaks. Further inland, the mountains are flat at their highest points, their slopes like immense ladders, layered with sandstone and slate.

The plane loses pace across the runway, another slender Arctic runway perched on a patch of flat land. When the doors open, the wind blasts into the cabin, rustling the magazines and newspapers. There's no bus, no arrival gate; I step down from the plane and walk into the silence of the valley.

Svalbard is a grandiose and barren place; the mountains like vast crumbling sphinxes covered with patched blankets, their folds falling heavily to the valley floor. The glaciers rise into blank blue walls, spilling ice into the sea. Rock and ice mingle in a two-tone frieze, the granite dark against the whiteness. Seals bask on the icebergs. The sun casts an orange glow across the sea. There is a broad valley that stretches for miles, and reindeer graze in the far distance. Kittiwakes and guillemots gather on the cliff tops, screeching and crying. The dappled patterns of the mountains emerge above the line of the mist, bright against the clouds, their slopes streaked with ice.

The houses of Longyearbyen look out across the fjord, and the fjord is as smooth as a sheet of glass. Across its smoothness show the reflected forms of the mountains. Longyearbyen was created as a coal town in the early years of the twentieth century, and the skeletal shapes of mining equipment are still scattered on the mountainsides. A small graveyard lies outside the town, its crosses coated with ice. I walk along Longyearbyen's main street, past the bright orange and yellow rows of houses. A polar bear skin has been slung over a balcony, claws drooping towards the street. Reindeer shamble through the streets, grazing on the brittle grasses at the edge of the roads. The few tourists sit in the pizza restaurant, eating whale-meat pizzas; they wander into the shops selling piles of seal fur; they flock past the skins and antlers, the mournful stuffed bears and foxes; they stand in the street, watching the evening fall slowly across the mountains.

In Longyearbyen, I watched the sun shining across the water and I thought about the Ancients and Vikings and poets talking and toasting the dream of Thule. Permanently squabbling, locked in a dispute across the centuries. None of the classical geographers had been to Svalbard, none of the poets or philosophers. The Vikings might have come here, but it was uncertain: there were Viking reports of a land called Svalbard—meaning cold coast—discovered in the last years of the twelfth century. This was why the Norwegians had renamed the islands Svalbard, though they had earlier been called Spitsbergen.

At three in the afternoon everything was blurred by dusk, and the shadows crept out from under the buildings. At the hotel the tourists filed to their rooms, where the curtains were flung open. The hotel was a mock hunting lodge, a place of wooden ceilings in pale pine planks, one more stuffed polar bear standing in reception, with the evening's luggage stacked around him. The windows of the Nansen dining room faced towards the shore, where the ragged rocks fell into the fjord. There was an antic feeling to the hotel: in the Nansen dining room the guests were pushing fish steaks around their plates, drinking slugs of Nansen cognac, having just stepped off a cruise ship called the
Fridtjof Nansen
. Nansen had been here at the end of his attempt on the North Pole, after surviving a winter in the ice. He came to Svalbard and found it was changing fast—that was in 1896, after a steamship had started coming to the place, bringing visitors. Even Svalbard, he had muttered, has become a tourist colony. He had watched the tourists at the Svalbard Post Office. Now Nansen was a brand in Svalbard, a label attached to the wilderness experience. He was smiling and waving, beckoning everyone through the entrance gates, turning his mournful eyes towards them.

It was a land a little like Thule, standing before the ice ocean, at the edge of the world. Glaciers covered two-thirds of the land, but the Gulf Stream made the archipelago milder than most places at 80° N, and the summers were sometimes nearly warm. Svalbard had most of the elements of Thule—the midday darkness of the winter, the midnight sun of the summers, the frozen ocean lurking off its coast. The inhabitants lived in their perfect small settlement of Longyearbyen, where there was no crime, where the only menace came from the Arctic winter, the freezing fjords and the sudden storms.

They all wanted to welcome me into the church, the devout adherence to the rules, so I walked with a few trekkers along the valley, and camped under the glacier. We walked in silence, staring at the thick turrets of stone, carved and smashed at their heights. The mountains were like cathedrals—baroquely patterned, with great stone ramparts and intricate friezes carved in the rock. The snow was stacked into the crevasses, shining on the slopes. There were mountains like shards of ice on these islands, rising into vicious peaks, but the mountains around me had been smoothed by the weight of glaciers during the last Ice Age.

It was dark at the camp so we lit a fire, the orange flames gaudy against the night. The crackling of wood and the whining of dogs were the only sounds. Everyone was cold, and the frigid air kept me awake through the night. I felt the blasts of the wind through the holes in the tent; the chill swirled into my sleeping bag. The sledge dogs whined, the temperature slumped, and the wind wailed around the tent. We had guns stacked by the entrance, in case a polar bear shambled into the camp. But nothing disturbed the night, except the dogs dragging at their chains and kicking up dust. The only presence was the icy breath of the cold, sidling up to me, curling itself around me. I shivered, I listened to the rhythmic sounds of breathing, and then I gave up on sleep and dragged the sleeping bag out of the tent, towards the smouldering remains of the campfire. There was a small patch of warm air directly around the wood, and I huddled towards it. Sitting up, propped against a pile of food bags, I watched the fire dwindle, listening to the silence of the valley. After a few hours even the dogs were quiet, heads into their fur, coiled onto the rocks.

The darkness lingered long into the day, and we cooked up porridge on a campfire, huddling at the edges of the flames, trying to stay warm. The others were all silent in their windproof jackets, watching the flames crackle through the wood. Later we walked slowly along the ice, sliding on the rocks, carrying something like a packed lunch. The sun was low in the sky, dwindling quickly, turning the sludge sea orange. It was hard to get a good look at the other people because the light was always fading, casting shadows across their faces. Some of them were new recruits to the wilderness; they had wanted this for years, the silence, the frigid blasting wind. They were the ones with a spring to their step, bouncing across the rocks like children, picking up ancient fossils, ice-smashed bits of basalt.

Later, we left the camp by the glacier, walking the short distance back to Longyearbyen. The scientists shook hands and waved goodbye, stepping back into their hotels, taking each other for pizzas in the small restaurant shacks. I walked down to the docks. The shore was a field of mist, a few motorboats were stranded there, their decks empty.

On Svalbard the governor reigned benevolent over everybody. The governor's civil servants, environmental experts, tourism consultants hardly dared breathe when he let his eyes fall on them. It was a place where the rocks were protected, and occasionally mined, depending on what the governor decreed. The governor threw edicts and boundaries across the land, keeping everything plain and empty. The rocks were tagged with rules, enforcing a state of innocence. The island could not be used for the purposes of war: since World War Two, when Svalbard was bombed and occupied by the Germans, all fortifications and naval bases, secret military sites, missile defence systems were prohibited. Much of the land was cordoned off, kept clear of tourists. The unrestricted use of the island, which nearly wiped out the walrus and the reindeer, had been replaced by a system of national parks, plant-protection areas, bird sanctuaries.

The governor was an autocrat with a fat rulebook. He demanded that travellers remain in official tour groups, that they confine their journeys to the appointed tracks. The rules were pasted to the walls of the hotels and bars: ‘Do not disturb animals and birds. Remember, you are a guest. Do not pick flowers. Do not go into the wilderness without asking permission from the Governor. Do not damage or remove cultural monuments. All traces of human activity prior to 1946 are cultural monuments. It is illegal to search for or to attract the attention of polar bears.' The wilderness was too pristine for random hiking strays to wander across it; the polar bears were too fierce for the uninitiated to set off alone. It was the governor's request to the visitor to travel with the herd, to stay on the authorized cruises, the authorized helicopters, the authorized buses. The trailblazer was outlawed from these ice islands; the governor would have politely escorted Burton, Nansen or Amundsen off the rocks. Everyone was asked to leave untouched the untouched glacier, to stay in the settlement of Longyearbyen or to take the official tours.

The edicts were so strict that Svalbard became an invented reality, with something slightly odd at its edges. Still, the governor had environmental necessity on his side, sacrificing the interests of humans to the abiding beauty of the rocks. The visitors became obedient subjects, following the governor's decrees. They had come on their own grail quest, looking for the almost unspoilt and almost empty places of the north, and they hardly wanted to wreck the cold mountains and debauch the fjords. They deferred to the governor, joining him in his enterprise to keep this land pure. For a few days, I relaxed into the forcibly innocent world of Svalbard, innocence decreed by the omnipotent governor. The governor was out of town when I arrived, but I learnt a lot about him. He was the fixed subject of nearly every conversation; half of Longyearbyen loved him like a father, and the other half cavilled violently. Yet they all obeyed him.

Though the governor was trying his best to balance it all, there was little he could do about the creeping processes, the chemical reactions in the atmosphere, the traces of climate change. There was a team of prophets on Svalbard, casting their cards at the future, a regiment of scientists deployed in a small colony called Ny-Ålesund, north of Longyearbyen, north of every other settlement in the world. The scientists were offering up predictions about the coming earth, the warmed earth of the future. They were trying to lasso the indeterminacy of the future, drag it towards the present.

Far below these notables, the resident mine owners seemed to occupy a blank spot in the governor's vision. There were still mines on Svalbard—Norwegian and Russian-owned, like relics from earlier centuries, when the trappers and the furriers and the whalers swarmed on the beaches, in their blubber camps, or in their huts stacked ceiling-high with hides. The coal companies were still allowed to bang away at the rocks; the governor called it cultural heritage, because there had been coal mines in Svalbard for a long time, but really the coal mines were commerce, old-fashioned exploitation. Svalbard was a rich cold coast: the ice-mountains were seamed with minerals, the rocks filled with coal, gold and diamonds. The history was hardly pretty—the preceding centuries showed a line of determined humans, trappers hiding out in the snowstorms, knives poised, guns ready, miners coming to blast the rocks, piling up dynamite. Armies of pragmatists, hardly interested in old dreams, taking what they could from the islands.