Water, Ice & Stone. Bill Green

he said. “It’s just too immense. Too damned hostile looking.” He was pointing up to the map, inscribing a big circle in the air. “There is no language for this.”

      He moved to his bunk and lay down, his face over against the wall. “I’ll tell you what’s out there,” he said. “Nothing. Nothing that I can understand. Nothing that you can understand either, even though you pretend.” He fell silent for a minute. Then he turned over and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t say anything to Mike and Walt and the others. They wouldn’t understand. I’m not sure I do.”

      Varner turned toward the wall again. His plaid shirt picked up the light filtering through the map that covered the window. “Do you know what light does to our body’s sleep cycle?” he asked rhetorically. “Do you know how unnatural twenty-four hours of daylight is?” He was speaking in a very low voice, so that I could barely hear him. “We’re meant for light and dark. Not for this. We’re not meant to be here at all.”

      I didn’t know what to say, so I let it go. He’ll get over it, I thought. It’s early. Things will change. He’ll find the words he needs. I let my eyes drift back to the map. I became more interested in thinking about the continent in other ways, about how it had come to be here, so isolated and ice-filled, so remote from our history, almost invisible. It was immense, as Varner had said, almost too immense to have drifted here into these latitudes, undiscovered and nameless until so recently. Until just last year, you might say.

      I ran my finger in a clockwise circle, whispering the names that appeared over the background of the ice: Queen Maud Land; Wilkes Land; Marie Byrd Land; Ellsworth Land; Palmer and Graham Lands, curving off toward Argentina. Outward from the Pole, I traced my finger over the coasts: Princess Martha Coast; Princess Astrid Coast; Princess Ragnhild Coast; Ingrid Christensen Coast; Queen Mary Coast. And over the ice shelves: Ross, Ronne, Filchner. And the capes: Darnley, Elliott, Goodenough, Adare. And the seas: Weddell, Ross, Amundsen, Bellinghausen. Name after name, kings and queens and princesses, explorers and statesmen, ordinary seamen and scientists—I spoke them aloud, as my finger traced the disk of continent, traced its 5.5 million square miles (as large as the continental United States and Mexico combined!), its circling geography of plateaus and ice-buried mountains, its indented coastlines, like cockles and scallops, until I felt dizzied by it all. This naming, what did it mean? Could you possess this? And once you did, what would you have? A handful of water. Better to bless yourself.

      The shape on the bed rolled over. “You forgot Varner Land and Cape Varner and the Varner Massif,” it said. I laughed, took out a pen. Stood up and moved the few feet over to the map. I drew a line through the word Ross and above it wrote Varner. The Varner Sea. What did it matter? Varner smiled, rolled back to the wall, trying to sleep.