(Knud Rasmussen Glacier, Greenland)
We hear the moulin before we see it: a low rumble, rising in volume as we approach. It is set down in a shallow dip, a day’s travel up the glacier, with three meltwater streams curling towards it, as the currents of foam had spiralled the Maelstrom in the Lofotens.
I circle around the moulin, keeping well back from its edge, to the point from which I can safely see furthest down into it. It is surely the most beautiful and frightening space into which I have ever looked. Its mouth is oval and around twelve feet across at its widest point. Its sides are of blue ice that are polished as glass, and scalloped in places. It drops vertically from the glacier’s surface like the shaft of a well. Twenty feet down all light is lost and so is all sight. It seems that the moulin might bore through the glacier’s depth until it hits bedrock hundreds of yards below. A torrent of meltwater pours into the void from its western lip.
We all feel some version of the moulin’s draw that day. It acts on the landscape around it as a whirlpool acts upon the sea, such that everything seems to tend towards it. In its presence I feel a lean in my chest, an urge to step nearer to its edge, then nearer again. The moulin is certain and powerful, and it is a portal giving access to the blue underland of ice.
~
Seven days before we find the moulin, we reach the Knud Rasmussen glacier. It is a body of ice so great that it makes its own weather.
The glacier is invisible the afternoon we arrive, concealed by a bank of fog that runs the full span of the fjord, a mile or so wide but only a few hundred yards high. Above the fog is blue sky, below it is blue water, and behind it is blue ice. The cold mass of the unseen ice is condensing the moist air to create that hovering mist.
We cannot see the glacier but we can hear it. The Knud Rasmussen makes the Apusiajik glacier seem like an introvert. The first roar comes minutes after we have dropped our packs on the ledges of gneiss that will be our home until autumn. The noise comes without warning out of the fog-bank and shakes our bodies like bags of jelly.
‘Boom!’ says Helen. ‘Welcome to the Knud Rasmussen. The ice is talking!’
High above us, faint rainbow patterns dapple the sky. These are the colours of the sun refracting in airborne ice crystals in the upper troposphere, four or five vertical miles above us.
Another explosion rolls out from behind the fog-bank.
We cannot see the glacier but we can feel it. It extends a chill around itself, dropping the air temperature by five degrees or more. The place we have chosen to camp is over a mile from the calving face, but even there we are within the glacier’s aura. In the days we spend at the Knud Rasmussen, we become icy. We drink ice. We wash in ice. We sleep by and on the ice. Ice fills our ears and our dreams and our speech. Ice fills the water and the air and the rock. We enter the ice and the ice enters us.
~
The route to the Knud Rasmussen takes us far to the north of Apusiajik, and into a new order of remoteness and scale. We reach it through fjords like canyons, lined by slabbed walls of gneiss thousands of feet high, topped by spired peaks. A kind of rock unknown to me is visible in this region: crumbly, coarse-grained and the colour of chocolate, splitting the gneiss in broad veins up to 100 yards wide, and running for miles through peak and valley. You can follow the veins through the landscape, tracking them to the point where they disappear beneath the water of a fjord on one coast, then seeing them emerge again on the far side.
Even in this inhuman landscape, human conflict has left its mark. In a side valley, under a peak that rises to a fishtail-forked summit, we pass the remnants of an American Cold War base abandoned half a century earlier. The rusted skeleton of a hangar, its girders bent from repeated winter avalanches; a tractor with a snowplough fitted to its front, sunk into the shallow tundra; and thousands of oil drums, corroded to orange, stacked in clutches or standing in snaking lines. They give to the site the air of a hatchery, and remind me of the rusted fishing floats that gathered on the shores of Moskenes in the Lofotens. Everything artificial at the base has taken on the colours of the tundra – its dun hues of orange, brown and green. Lichen and moss flourish in the niches of relic infrastructure: Arctic camo.
Further down the same fjord, in a bay fed by a freshwater stream, is a monstrously beautiful berg. It gleams whitely in the sunlight, long and low-slung, rising never more than fifteen feet above the dark water that laps at it. Its upper ridge is elegantly curved, but what draws the eye are the deeply incised grooves that mark its flanks, running straight and parallel with one another, as if it has been methodically mauled. Each groove glows a slightly different shade of blue. Where the grooves shallow out, the ice is dimpled – the dips and rises glistening like flesh after injury.
The fjord forks into a Y, one arm cutting north-east and the other almost due north. As we cross the mouth of the northern fork, I see in the distance a glacier, the Karale, curving down to the tideline. To its west a smaller glacier is visible. It has retreated back above the water and ends in an arch of ice that I guess to be several hundred yards across. The arch shines with the blue light of old ice, and out of it comes a powerful melt-stream, rushing down to the sea.
‘Geo and I once made it to the Karale from Kulusuk in two days by dog sled,’ says Matt. ‘We covered eighty kilometres each day, in desperate conditions. The weather was atrocious, and the sea ice was rotten. Many times Geo or I had to probe ahead of the sled with a harpoon, testing the ice’s resilience so we didn’t go through.’
We follow the north-eastern arm of the fjord. As we approach the fog-bank at its end, the water thickens with a mash of shrapnel ice and the odd berg sliding out with the tide. A mile short of the fog-bank, under a peak that rears from close to the water’s edge, amid a boulder field of pale erratics, we find enough flat ground for our tents. There is a stream from a snowfield that offers fresh water. Upslope, there are tussocks of bilberry beginning to come into fruit. Directly over the fjord from us rises the sheer wall of a sharp peak, struck by a bolt of the chocolate rock.
We are within a few yards of the fjord edge and the rock is a continuous sloped curl of gneiss, running for hundreds of yards along the fjord shore, glittering with lines of quartzite and black mica.
Small blue bergs drift and click offshore.
‘I’d like to die and be reborn as a boulder here,’ I say. ‘It’s one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever been.’
‘It’ll do us,’ says Matt.
~
An hour short of dusk on the evening of our arrival, the fog-bank disperses to reveal the calving face of the Knud Rasmussen. The face runs the width of the fjord, curving out from the easterly shore to a sharp forwards point, then turning out of sight to the west.
The sea around the calving face is stained brown with silt, in contrast to the milky green of the outer water. The silt wells up from the melt-streams that are pouring out unseen below the fjord’s surface. Birds gather on the silt blooms, feeding on their richness. They are the only scale-givers at this distance, and they are small as flies. Now and then birds near the face burst up, circle and mingle, then resettle on the water. Ten or twelve seconds later the noise of a minor calving reaches us.
The calving face gives a transect of the glacier’s depths. Crevasses fissure downwards for hundreds of feet. There are rounded shafts: extensions of the moulin melt-systems. I can also see, even at this distance, the strata of the ice – its sedimentary formation. Whiter, wider bands thin out to blue and layerless ice far below.
The face is a Gothic city being pushed into the sea. Towers, belfries, chimneys, cathedrals, finials: all are going over the edge. Tunnels, crypts, cemeteries: all will be shattered into bergs. I think of the weight of the upper bodies pressing down in the cemetery of Saints-Innocents, until at last the dead crash through into the spaces around the curtilage of the burial site.
‘That calving face is the terminus for ice that fell as snow far up on the Great Ice, tens of thousands of years ago,’ says Helen.
Where the freshest calvings have happened, the ice is bluest. These marks of rupture seem not scar but revelation. This is the first sunlight that ice has seen for tens of thousands of years.
A ringed seal surfaces offshore, glances over at us, dips again and disappears in the milky green water. What must a calving event look like to a seal? I wonder. What must it sound like?
‘There are certain glaciers that are held to be clearly malign around here,’ says Matt. ‘There’s one that Kulusumi people just won’t go near, because it has a reputation for hostility. If you have to cross near it, you don’t speak, eat or even look at the glacier while making the crossing, because it calves so far below the waterline that it can kill you from beneath without warning. They call this puitsoq, “the ice that comes from below”.’
In the lee of a boulder above the camp, I find a loose cache of thousands of individual dwarf willow leaves. They are brittle and black-brown, lying to a depth of three or four inches. They must have been accumulating there for years, gathered by the wind, frozen each winter and thawed again each summer. The vein lines are still visible on each leaf. I pick up a handful, rustle them through my fingers. They are weightless and sharp. In this dry air, with so little topsoil, deterioration rates of organic matter are decelerated. Time moves variously in this landscape, from the catastrophic suddenness of calving events to the patient process of leaf drift.
A berg glides past us, shaped like the eaves of a house. Seventeen gulls are perched on its ridge, all turned to windward.
~
Living by the Knud Rasmussen is like moving in next door to a thunderstorm. Each day we climb and explore further into the surrounding landscape. Each evening we return to our tents by the glacier. All day and all night the ice bellows, cries, echoes. There is no apparent connection between the air temperature and the activity of the calving face. Some of the loudest roars come in the dead of night, the coldest time, rousing us from our sleep with fears of polar bears.
‘You think this is dynamic?’ says Matt one morning. ‘The Helheim glacier near Semersooq is now flowing into the sea at around thirty-five metres a day. That’s one of the fastest glaciers in the world.’
The glacier is named after the underworld of the dead in Norse mythology: Helheim, ‘the Realm of Hell’, ‘the Hidden Place’, buried beneath the roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil. Our word ‘hell’, like the Icelandic word helvíti, comes from deep in language history: from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic noun *xaljo or *haljo, meaning’underworld’, ‘concealed place’, itself from a Proto-Indo-European root *kel- or *kol-, meaning at once ‘to cover’, ‘to conceal’ and ‘to save’.
Around Greenland, some glaciers are retreating as they melt, while the flow rate of others is increasing, causing the upper ice to diminish. The softening ice cap is estimated to have lost around a trillion net tons in only four recent years. Lubricated by the moulins, many more tons of ice and meltwater are pouring into the fjords and the outer ocean, helping global sea levels to creep up, increment by increment.
One hot morning on a rest day, I lie on the slabs of gneiss where they run into the tideline, watching the ice through narrowed eyes, hoping I might see a calving event rather than only hear its aftereffects. But nothing moves that morning. I close my eyes and listen to the landscape – listen in a way I rarely do, letting each sound play and single itself out from the weave like a bright thread, trying to infer its source from its sound. I am trying to hear this landscape’s undersong – the substrate sounds of a given place, the ambient murmur that goes often unheard or at least unlistened-for.
We cannot see behind ourselves, but we can hear behind ourselves. From all directions, sound flows in.
Glittering gull cries.
Crack of bergs beached on the tideline nearby, as the warmth of the sun pops ancient air bubbles.
Crockery clink of ice shards in the water, the lapping hush of slush-ice nudged by the incoming tide, the sloshing wallow of a bigger berg rolling as melt or current shifts its weight.
A waterfall on the far side of the fjord, crashing from a high cirque in a steady rush of sound, like corn being poured from a hopper.
Below it all, below even this undersong, a bedrock of something like white noise that I cannot granulate with my human ears – a distant hiss or hum that makes the finer sounds audible.
Bang! A gun-blast rips through the fragile weave and echoes back off the walls and water of the fjord. I jerk around. Matt is standing on a tideline rock. He fires each of the weapons twice in turn into the fjord to clear the barrels. Bang! Bang! His shoulder jerks back with each recoil. Water sprays up as if a big fish has breached. The reports are shockingly loud. The sound of each shot takes fifteen or twenty seconds to dissipate.
~
It happens that afternoon when we are all together, standing near the tents and talking inconsequentially, enjoying the lethargy of the rest day.
A shot-like snap begins it, whip-cracking across the fjord and the mountain walls.
‘A hunter?’ I say.
But it isn’t a hunter, it is the glacier, and the sound of the crack marks the fall of a bus-sized block of ice from high on the calving face. We do not see it fall but we see it swill back up and bob.
Without that outrider of the main event, we might have missed what followed – an event that, as Helen puts it later, ‘rarely occurs under witness’.
‘There!’ shouts Bill, but we are all already looking there, where the first block fell, for it seems that a white freight train is driving fast out of the calving face of the glacier, thundering laterally through space before toppling down towards the water, and then the white train is suddenly somehow pulling white wagons behind it from within the glacier, like an impossible magician’s trick, and then the white wagons are followed by a cathedral – a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses, all of them joined together into a single unnatural sideways-collapsing edifice – and then a whole city of white and blue follows the cathedral as we shout and step backwards involuntarily at the force of the event, even though it is occurring a mile away from us, and we call out to each other in the silence before the roar reaches us, even though we are only a few yards from each other, and then all of the hundreds of thousands of tons of that ice-city collapse into the water of the fjord, creating an impact wave forty or fifty feet high.
And then something terrible happens, which is that out of the water where the city has fallen there up-surges, rising – or so it seems from where we are standing – right to the summit of the calving face itself, a black shining pyramid, sharp at its prow, thrusting and glistening, made of a substance that has to be ice but looks like no ice we have seen before, something that resembles what I imagine meteorite metal to be, something that has come from so deep down in time that it has lost all colour, and we are dancing and swearing and shouting, appalled and thrilled to have seen this repulsive, exquisite thing rise up that should never have surfaced, this star-dropped berg-surge that has taken three minutes and 100,000 years to conclude.
Twenty minutes later and the fjord is calm again.
The tide swills gently in rock pools. Lap of water on gneiss, pop of melting ice, sun glittering on the margins of the water, sedge-grass flicking in the wind.
The obscenity might never have occurred.
The berg has settled in the water as a sloping blue table, hundreds of square feet in area. Gulls land on this new territory in their dozens, shake out their wings, tuck one leg up into their breast feathers for warmth, hunker down.
I startle a single sanderling from a fold of bronze gneiss.
The next day at the tideline I find a small iceberg, rounded and dark blue, stranded in a rock pool. It is a relic of the dark star. I am just able to lift it. I carry it in both arms, cradling it, calling to the others. It numbs my hands and chest. It feels far heavier than it should. I stumble uphill towards the camp and place it on top of a boulder by the tents.
The sun shines through it. Air bubbles inside it show as silver: wormholes, right-angle bends, incredible zigzags and sharp layers.
That night an Arctic fox comes to our camp, a playful blue shadow.
The little berg takes two days to melt. It leaves a stain on the dark rock that won’t vanish.
~
Ice, like oil, has long disobeyed our categories. It slips, slides, will not stay still. It confuses concepts, it confounds attempts to make it mean. In the 1860s, when glaciology was emerging as a science, the discourse of glaciers was riven by the dispute over whether ice should be classified as liquid, solid, or some other kind of colloid-like matter altogether.
It is unsurprising that ice should have proved so ungraspable to human habits of meaning-making, for ice is a shape-shifter and a state-shifter. It flies, it swims and it flows. It changes colour like a chameleon. Ice crystals at 30,000 feet set halos and parhelia shining around the sun and the moon. Ice falls as snow, as hail, as sleet; it crystallizes as feather and it gleams as mirror. Ice erases mountain ranges, but preserves air bubbles for millennia and is tender enough to bear a human body unriven for centuries. It is silent, and it creaks and thunders. It sharpens eyesight, and it breeds mirages.
We are now experiencing ice as a newly lively substance. For centuries, the polar regions were conventionally imagined as inert: the ‘frozen wastes’ of the north and south. Now, in the context of a warming planet, ice has become active again in our imaginations and landscapes. The ‘frozen’ poles are melting and the consequences of their melting are global. The Russian expression for ‘permafrost’, вечная мерзлота, translates as ‘the eternally frozen ground’ – the name looks increasingly inappropriate. Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic are now front-line territories, in which the fate of ice will shape planetary futures.
A ‘glacial pace’ used to mean movement so slow as to be almost static. Today’s glaciers, however, surge, retreat, vanish. The recession of Himalayan glaciers threatens the livelihoods and lives of more than a billion people in Asia, who depend on the water that is seasonally stored and released by these ice rivers. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is breaking up, disassembling itself into bergs and sheets that drift unbiddably. Mapping cannot keep up with the shrinkage of the sea ice. Globe-makers can no longer confidently cap their globes with white. Ice has become dirty, in the sense of Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.
In indigenous cultures that live adaptably in close contact with ice, it has always been an ambiguous entity, and the stories told about glaciers have often blurred boundaries between human and non-human activity. Glaciers appear in these stories as actors – aware and intentful, sometimes benign and sometimes malevolent. In Athapaskan and Tlingit oral traditions from south-western Alaska, for instance, as the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank documents, glaciers are both ‘animate (endowed with life) and animating (giving life to) landscapes they inhabit’. In languages from this region, special verbs indicate the living power of what in English might be classified as passive landscape presences. These verbs recognize in the ice both its actions and, vitally, its powers to act. Linguistic anthropologists refer to the ‘enlivening’ influence of such verbs: their deep-level acknowledgement of a sentient environment which both listens and speaks recalls Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wish for a ‘grammar of animacy’ that might acknowledge the autonomy of plant life.
Over the years of my time travelling on or near glaciers, I have read in translation dozens of the stories told about glaciers and ice across northern indigenous cultures. Many of them concern the dangerous underland of ice – a kingdom into which one might fatally plunge. A ubiquitous story tells, with regional variation, of a traveller ‘falling through ice’ (either through thin sea ice or into a crevasse) who is assumed to be dead, but then surfaces from this netherworld bearing tales of visions, hardship and survival. It is almost exactly the sequence of events and motifs that recurs in the most famous modern Western glacier-story of the underland, Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void. All of these stories relate to miraculous resurrections from depth. We had witnessed our own ‘surfacing’ on the day of the calving – except that it was ice itself, rather than any human agent, that had been to depth and then returned to the light.
In the days that follow the calving I reflected often on our response to it – the way our shouts turned from awe to something like horror as that shining black pyramid lurched up out of the water, sea streaming from it. My stomach lurched too as the ice came up: the sublime displaced by a more visceral response to this alien display. I have often sensed the indifference of matter in the mountains and found it exhilarating. But the black ice exhibited another order of withdrawnness, one so extreme as to induce nausea. Camus called this property of matter its ‘denseness’. Confronted by matter in its raw forms, he wrote, ‘strangeness creeps in’:
perceiving that the world is ‘dense’, sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman . . . the primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.
I recognized a version of that ‘denseness’ – that ‘absurdity’ – in Greenland to a degree that was new to me. Here was a region where matter drove language aside. Ice left language beached. The object refused its profile. Ice would not mean, nor would rock or light, and so this was a weird realm, in the old, strong sense of weird – a terrain that could not be communicated in human terms or forms. I thought back to Merlin, to the fungi and their buried kingdom of the grey – that shivering, slithering underland into which he had helped me look.
Greenland was a place where matter leaked through the usual screens. When the black-star calving had happened, the leak had turned into a torrent. Later I would find that torrent again, far down in the blue light of the moulin.
~
Big climbing days of glacier and peak come and go. The willow leaves turn from yellow to orange. One morning we leave our tents to find a first frost, starring the earth in its hollows.
We try the nameless mountain that rises behind the camp. From below, foreshortened, it seems a single slabbed face, thousands of feet high. It reveals itself to be more involved, though: abundant in features hidden from beneath. It has a glacial corrie at its heart. It has set-back shoulders that hold little lakes and permanent snowfields.
We climb it in seven pitches over seven hours, Helen M leading strongly, with scrambling and way-picking on mellower ground between the pitches. In the closed couloirs and on the slabs, I feel no nerves. On the ridges, fear squeezes my heart.
The peak’s five-finned summit ridge is of clean golden rock, and from it we can see over and down into a huge horseshoe cirque to its east. The cirque is ringed by sharp mountains and has a collapsing serac face at its centre – a 600-foot wall spilling mint-blue ice rubble onto the snowfield beneath. A chilling wind lifts from the cirque, sapping my confidence.
Matt leads the final pitch: a chimney of cold, sound rock, up which we bridge and lay-back one by one. The serac face collapses three times while we climb, audible crumps echoing off the cirque walls. From the peak we can see far up the Knud Rasmussen. From here it seems less an ice river than an ice sea, flooding the peaks around it.
We reverse the summit pitch with cold hands. Lenticular clouds hover over the peaks of the Karale. A front is coming in. Late in the day the sun breaks through with slanted gold rays, backlighting big bergs in the fjord below us so they shine like opals.
That evening we sit together, exhausted, companionable. It is a time of cusps. Dusk, early September, just beneath the Arctic Circle, by a tideline glacier in East Greenland. The cusp of the day, the cusp of seasons, the cusp of the globe, the cusp of the land. The Arctic fox comes again to the camp, keeping to the shadows where it is blue-silver in colour.
We stay out late. The last light gathers on the water of the fjord, on the rims and edges of bergs, on quartz seams in the gneiss. Twilight specifies a landscape by means of such finely lit details, but it also disperses it. Relations between objects are loosened, such that shape-shifts occur. In the last minutes before full night falls, I experience a powerful hallucination, my tired eyes starting to see every pale boulder around our tent not as rock but as white bear, polar bear, crouched for the spring.
A big calving wakes me in the night. Minutes later, waves surge up the shoreline rocks.
The next morning, nine bergs – human in their size – have wandered into our bay overnight and become beached. They tick as they melt: nine ice-clocks.
~
We leave early the morning after next, carrying heavy packs: gear for several days away. We are heading inland, along the glacier, to establish an advance camp far up the Knud Rasmussen, and use that as a base to explore peaks and passes that lie further in.
We also want to search for a moulin wide enough to descend.
We will get onto the glacier via the moraine, pass through disrupted ice hard above the calving face, and then pick up flat ice in the glacier’s centre, over which we can make good progress. That, at least, is the plan. Afterwards Matt will describe what we meet on the Knud Rasmussen as ‘massively exploded terrain’. I will think of it as the Labyrinth. It makes the crevasse mazes of Apusiajik look like children’s puzzles – and beyond it lies a Minotaur.
We follow the fjord shore to the calving face, cut up and over slopes of bilberry and willow until we meet the lateral moraine slope, a wall of rubble bulldozed to the valley side by the glacier’s seawards drive.
Any boulder field on a steep gradient is a perilous place. I know someone who died in a boulder slope in the south-west USA, approaching a dihedral spire he planned to solo. He never even made it to the base of the route: ascending the boulder field, he triggered movement in a massive plate of rock, which slid into him at the waist, crushing his pelvis and trapping him fast.
So on a loaded moraine slope you walk like a cat. Your aim is to dislodge nothing, not even a grain of quartz. You move tenderly. You advance with soft tread, placing the balls of the feet first, not heel-jabbing with a stiff leg. You never pull on a rock with your hand; instead, you press down with your palm or fingertips so that any force you apply confirms the rock in its location. You never put your full foot-weight on a boulder without testing it first. You never move when someone is directly below you on the fall-line. You never put your foot or your arm into a gap between rocks, in case the one above drops down. Shins and forearms break easily in stone jaws.
We make it safely up the moraine face, four cats in a row – and me, a clumsy ox bringing up the rear. From the high point of its shoulder we can see up and along the glacier, and back down to the calving face. This close we have a sense of the face’s scale. It is a sea cliff. The gulls look like pond-skaters on the silt gouts.
From there we pick cautiously down the far side of the moraine, desk-sized boulders rocking and rumbling underfoot as they take weight, and at last we step up one by one onto the black-glass fringe where the glacier meets the moraine, and from there we climb up onto the low billows of the Knud Rasmussen proper.
The night has left films of ice across standing water on the pools. This delicate ice tinkles when broken. The glacier is a frozen sea, as yet calm enough that we have no need of ropes or crampons.
Half a mile in and the sea becomes stormier. The billows of ice lift, become sharper in their contours, more hog’s back than billow, then more shark’s fin than hog’s back. We rope up, axe up, crampon up. The consequences of a slip or trip are now severe. Our progress slows, as Matt probes to find a way through the crevasse maze. We speak less.
Crevasses open around us, a few feet deep only at first, soon dropping to twenty, thirty, fifty, countless feet deep. Colours change. The surface ice is whiter than at the snout. The crevasses glow a version of the unearthly blue we saw on Apusiajik. Here the blue is even more intense, more radiant, older.
Ice is blue because when a ray of light passes through it, it hits the crystal structure of ice and is deflected, bounces off into another crystal and is deflected again, bounces off into another, and another, and in this manner ricochets its way to the eye. Light passing through ice therefore travels much further than the straight-line distance to the eye. Along the way the red end of the spectrum is absorbed, and only the blue remains.
In glacial terrain of that seriousness, you move like light through ice. Time spins away and space misbehaves. You take an hour to travel half a mile in the desired direction. The straight-line distance to your destination is irrelevant, because the ice sends you on a bouncing and deflected course – a blue-line not a bee-line.
We are in the Labyrinth for four hours. At last Matt finds a way through and onto flatter ice, and we can unrope, eat, drink, stand in safety. I feel taut nerves slackening again. One of us cries briefly. We all feel hunted by this ice, haunted by it.
It is still hard going from there, uphill and inland, but the ice is calmer now and our progress is good. As we move, new tributary glaciers open up their vistas to either side. New peaks are glimpsed on the horizon. None has been climbed. They entice us. Our wish is to make a high bivouac that night, and from there strike out for a peak the next day: exploratory mountaineering, no maps to speak of, scant knowledge of the terrain ahead.
Hot sun now and the glacier’s surface is thawing so fast we can see and hear it. Tiny plates of ice, formed in the hoar-frost forests that rise to the height of a centimetre each dawn, tilt and then blink out as they become water. The glacier hisses. It crackles. Sometimes a bank of slush ice collapses into a melt-stream, and the crystals rush down the channel like sizzling fat.
‘Where does all this meltwater go?’ I ask Matt.
‘Down the moulins. We’ll find them. You’ll see.’
We do. Two smaller moulins first, a little bigger than the one we found on Apusiajik. And then the big one, a true maw gaping close to a lateral moraine band. Three meltwater streams curl towards it, braiding into a single current in the final yards then toppling into the drop.
We circle the moulin warily, as if approaching a wild creature. I put a rope on and Matt belays me to its brim. I lean a little out over the edge – and look straight down into deep blue, into the blood of the glacier. I feel my belly and my bones sucked towards the colour, step quickly back. The void migrates to the surface . . .
‘This is the one,’ says Matt. ‘We can get down this one. We’ll need to come back early though, very early, while the glacier is still frozen, before the melt-streams get running. But right now we need to find our bivouac site for tonight. I’d much rather be sleeping on rock than on ice.’
Where a tributary glacier sweeps down to pour into the Knud Rasmussen, a small rock island has been revealed. It is a recent artefact of the increased melt rates – an Anthropocene landmark not present on any existing maps, even on Google Earth – and it sticks out like a boulder in an ice-rapid where the tributary glacier tumbles 400 vertical feet to the Knud Rasmussen. We spot it from two miles away; wonder if it might give enough flat ground on which to camp.
Near dusk, we climb a slope of grey ice to reach it. Certainly, we are the first people ever to set foot on that new world, disclosed from the underland of ice. It is equivalent to perhaps half a tennis court in area.
‘It’s like walking on the moon’, says Helen M in amazement. And it is. The rock is as the ice left it. A thick layer of grey stone dust coats everything. The bedrock has been smoothed by the passage of the ice, but its surface is scattered with loose round stones on which we stumble like drunks.
Big domes and bulges of ice rear immediately above the island, and it is from these that we gratefully catch meltwater in our bottles, slaking the thirst of the day’s long work.
It takes half an hour to clear space for the tents, shovelling dust and moving stones. Bill, Helen M and I sing as we work. Bill’s rich voice spills over the glacier as the sun sets, keeping our spirits up. Then we pitch the tents, and lash them down with rocks and cord in anticipation of the night’s wind. Rock dust covers our hands and faces.
‘Look, the mountains are on fire!’ calls Helen, pointing.
They are, too: an intense light flows over the summits from the west, scalding the rock of the highest peaks so red that they seem to be running with lava.
~
The next dawn a low band of cloud stripes the land. We wake into silence, after a night of gusting wind. The air is calm. The glacier has been petrified by the overnight freeze.
We climb that day: a long ascent of a distant peak, the summit of which we fail to reach.
The morning after that we wake at five in half-light. We break camp on the rock island quickly, nervously. The air is calm. We crunch down the slope to meet the Knud Rasmussen, then pick up a line of moraine debris and follow it to the moulin.
Before we see it, noise tells us that even at that cold hour the moulin is churning, the mill is grinding. A stream of water tumbles steadily into it from its western lip.
‘The sun’s warming things up already,’ says Helen. ‘Every minute that passes, the flow will increase.’
We work fast. Matt manages the set-up. Two ropes, four belay points, each one double-pointed. Clear any rotten ice to reveal the hard ice, the sweet stuff that will hold a screw, then press the teeth of the ice-screw in until they bite, make sure it stands perpendicular to the surface, then with one hand steady the screw-barrel and with the other crank the handle. Any object foreign to ice will absorb heat and melt ice, so we must heap and pack brash ice around the screws and the karabiners.
It takes half an hour to rig things to Matt’s satisfaction. The waterfall gains noticeably in power and noise. It is clear that, once inside the moulin, communication by voice will be almost impossible. We agree a simple sign-system: up, down, pause, and – forearms crossed to make an upheld X – get me the fuck out of here.
Tie on to descent rope, to haul rope, check and double-check knots. Stamp feet, pull hood hard over, run through final systems again. The moulin dropping away: a radiant blue sci-fi tube, ready to beam me down. Going over the edge I feel no fear, nor should I – just the familiar buzz in the scalp, the caul of bees.
The space of the moulin is immediately, intensely beautiful. The air has a blue aura and the ice surrounding me is sleek to the touch. I descend foot by foot, and the mouth of the moulin above me cinches its white oval tighter. Glancing down, I can see no base and the memory rises unbidden of flipping centimes into clear azure water from a boat in the Mediterranean as a child, watching as they spun silver through the depths, turning and flashing for thirty, forty, fifty seconds.
The deeper I go, the closer I come to the meltwater stream that is falling down the moulin, and then my crampons slip on the ice and I spin out from the face and into the torrent, which crashes down on my head with cold pummelling fists and the force of it punches me back out of the torrent, but from there I cannot catch the glassy sides of the moulin again and so I swing back further into the torrent, and there I am knocked out of it again, and so I begin to pendulum back and forth in and out of the torrent, and with each cold dousing I am losing strength, and I feel that I am trapped in a perpetual-motion machine that can run indefinitely even after I have ceased to function.
I glance up as I pendulum and can see Matt’s face leaning out and looking down at me, mouthing words at me, but he is of the surface now and I am of the depth, and these are quite different places. He exists in that porthole of sky rimmed with white and gold light, but down here there is no colour or time other than blue. Up there Bill, Helen M and Helen are moving freely around on the glacier; down here there are only the glass of the ice, the torrent of the water and the obligations they enforce.
But this is too strange a site to leave unless I must, so I gesture to Matt that he should lower me, realizing that if I descend further I might be able to pull myself out of the flow, and so I drop deeper and, spinning around, I see that there is – sixty feet down into the glacier, a dozen centuries or so further on – a terrace of a kind, off which the water corkscrews deeper still in a twisting borehole too tight to admit me, but with a lateral blue side passage also leading away. I use the swing of the pendulum to catch the ice edge of the side entrance with my hand. I pull myself towards the passage and out of the flow, and see that below me is a fine spear-blade of ice, twelve feet or so long, that somehow grows upwards from the terrace, and I hook one of my feet around it and then perch on its point. At last I am secure, one hand gripping the passage edge, one foot on the spear-blade. I pause, catch my breath, glance at the porthole, thumb-up to Matt that I am fine. Braced there, I can study the space.
Twenty feet below me the meltwater current drills away and down into the glacier’s underland, impossible for me to follow. The side passage leads off as a tunnel, though, and I can see a chamber filled with more blue at its end, and I want to follow the passage to that chamber. But I know that rope drag will occur soon after I begin to move sideways from the shaft, making progress difficult and meaning also that a slip in the side passage will bring me slamming back into the main shaft at speed. I wish I had ice-screws with me, so that I could set runners to manage the rope for the traverse of the tunnel. But I do not, and so there is no choice but to stay a while on that blade of ice in this otherworld, and then reluctantly, gratefully, to give the sign to Matt: Get me the fuck out of here!
He changes over the rig, and they haul me up and out, Helen, Helen M, Bill and Matt all running my weight on a Z-pulley prusik system, and I emerge from the moulin like a gopher from a burrow, head surfacing into the upper world which is full of laughter and how-was-its and open mouths, and Helen is reaching forwards with a hand to pull me to safety, and the sun is streaming its gold on the silver of the ice, and I am blue to my bones for days afterwards from that deep time dive.
Later we send Bill down too, and from a depth of thirty feet he sings an aria from Tosca. The notes pour up through that great blue pipe-organ and fly joyfully out into the still air.
~
It is afternoon when we step off the Knud Rasmussen glacier for the last time, back near the fjord. The colours of the tundra leap to the eye, shocking in their brightness after the days on ice and rock. Sulphur blaze of grey-leaf willow on the turn, punk green of lichen, black mica shards in the rocks.
The leaves on the willows have reddened at their tips while we have been away.
Six ptarmigan churr among bilberries, their plumage on the turn to winter white. We are glad to see life that is not ice. They are unafraid of us. Bill reads them as a score, seeing their positions on the slope as six notes on a stave.
On reaching base camp, we drop our packs and bathe in the freezing water of the fjord, scrubbing days of dust and toil from our bodies among the icebergs, whooping and shouting.
That night there is the fieriest aurora display we have witnessed. We sit up in our sleeping bags to watch it. Green curtains bling and spangle inland, over the Knud Rasmussen, over the rock island, over the moulin. For the first time there are pink hues as well as green – the pink of willowherb. Search beams of green shoot up from summits to the west. The display is profuse, extravagant, spinning over thousands of miles of sky, a busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years . . .
‘Have you noticed,’ says Helen M, ‘how the stars show in greater number through the aurora?’
She is right. I would have expected the Northern Lights to make the stars less visible, rather than more – the excess of light cancelling out the stars’ glimmer. But instead it has the counter-intuitive effect of causing more stars to show, clusters of them, which vanish back into the blackness when the aurora flickers away. None of us can explain how the green light could be collaborative rather than competitive with the starlight.
That night I dream, clearly and for what seems like hours, that a fine blue moss has begun to grow under my skin, starting on my right forearm, then spreading up to my shoulder and across my chest. It is painless and luxurious.
~
Days afterwards, back in Kulusuk, on our final evening in the village, Helen, Matt and I go out kayaking in the bay with Nuka, one of the young men from the village. Nuka wears a black squared-off baseball cap, has a gold chain and a gold tooth. He is eighteen. He plays the guitar softly, with passion, like José González. He loves kayaking.
Cloud boils up and around Apusiajik. The late sun is bright and hard. A storm is coming. Gulls land in the water, sheet white in the storm-light. A single low-slung iceberg wanders the bay. Two men and a woman are hunched in the lee of a bay-side shack, drinking cans of Heineken.
We launch the kayaks from among boulders. We paddle out over cod heads and seal flukes, Nuka racing ahead with short fast strokes, then Matt accelerating after him, both men grinning with delight at being out on the water.
‘This is where kayaking was invented!’ shouts Matt.
He paddles directly at the small iceberg, hits it fast at its lowest point, and laughs as the kayak’s front half ramps up onto the berg. Then he scooches himself off and splashes back into the water.
‘Look!’ Nuka is calling. He is holding up a dripping object, long and thin, with a wooden haft and a spear-point at one end.
‘He’s found a harpoon!’ says Matt. Nuka takes aim at Matt, and throws the harpoon at his kayak. It drops safely short, Matt paddles over, grabs the floating harpoon and hurls it at me.
I have never played harpoon water-polo before, and I am not convinced that it is a traditional Greenlandic sport, but the rules seem clear enough: aim but don’t maim.
We hurl the harpoon at one another, chase around the bay, paddle in bursts. Other boys from the village come out in their motor dinghies to buzz us, ripping their Evinrudes and cutting across our bows. To the north the Apusiajik glacier gleams its way down to the tideline. After a while we raft up and bob on the chop, looking back at the little village of Kulusuk perched on its bedrock, the white crosses of the shore-side cemetery showing clear in the sun.
When we return to shore, Nuka shows the harpoon proudly to Geo.
Geo shakes his head.
‘This is not a harpoon,’ he says to Nuka in Greenlandic.
He looks at us, takes it, grips it by its wooden haft like a walking stick with the point lowermost, and makes a downwards jabbing motion, stepping cautiously forwards as he does so, looking enquiringly ahead of himself as he presses the point against the earth.
It is not a harpoon, not a weapon at all, but rather a tool used to probe the depth of the sea ice ahead. It is a means of telling if it is safe to proceed – of testing the near future.
When I return to Britain, I learn that during the weeks we have been on the glaciers the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphers has recommended the formal adoption of the Anthropocene as the current Earth epoch, with a start date of 1950 – coinciding with the dawn of the nuclear age.