Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

My god , he thought, even in the midst of his desperation. It’s beautiful. And peaceful.

“Mikel!” he heard reverberating around him. “Mikel are you alright?!” Siem’s calls shocked him back to reality. Mikel yelled back with every ounce of strength left in him that he was fine. He was told that they would set up a rig to hoist him up but it might take a few minutes. Mikel imagined how Siem’s blood must have been running cold right now. He could not be the replacement for one presumably dead colleague and lose another the day he arrived.

Silence came again, vast and embracing. Mikel looked around at all the blues layered like petals, the vertical striations of the ice and great fist-sized nubbles extruding from the walls. He noticed one horizontal slice—a ledge. He could fit half of each foot on that he thought. Gently, so gently, he swung himself inch by inch closer to the wall, as the Ski-Doo turned above him. His toes reached the protruding corner and he managed to grab two nubbles, first with his fingertips, then, once balanced, with his entire hand.

When he felt secure he let go with one hand and pulled his ice ax from a pocket on the leg of his salopette. He thwacked the stainless steel tip into the ice as hard as he could and it stuck fast. Now he had three secure points. He looked down again at the cold, crystal cathedral vanishing into darkness below him.

Without thought, Mikel unstrapped his helmet, took it off, and refastened its strap with one hand, holding it still against the wall with his chest. He slung the helmet back on his forearm out of his way, reached up, and pulled his fur-lined hood over his head. Then he rested the side of his head against the wall of ice and just breathed. He heard nothing—a total absence of sound. But on the wall, right at eye level, a drop of liquid water caught his attention. Covering his mouth to make sure that he wasn’t melting the ice with his breath, he peered closer. There were a number of drops.

The Adur , he thought, not entirely in jest. And as he stared, he realized with a jolt deep in his gut that he was witnessing the droplets of water slowly trickling upward , like rain blown against a pane of glass. He held his breath and remained very still to make sure he wasn’t causing the motion. The droplets continued to travel up.

He peered below him and saw nothing but blue upon blue. He certainly couldn’t feel anything through his layers of cloth. Staring at the drops again, he almost willed them to stop in their tracks. If they somehow did, it would make his life simpler.

Flora would be angry with that , he told himself. “Mysteries are clues,” was her constant refrain.

A rope descended from the small, distant sky and the clamp on its end thwacked against Mikel’s hood, then his shoulder and back. Siem shouted for him to attach himself to the cable, then detach from the Ski-Doo connection.

Mikel looked down again. How many of Flora’s “clues” lay deep in that abyss? Maybe none. Maybe the water was full of sun-seeking microorganisms, colonies of them. Or maybe the cause was wind stirred by something otherworldly. How had the Old Testament described the force that opened the Red Sea? “A blast of God’s nostrils” or some such?

Regardless, right now, by ascending he risked giving up everything—not just important data but his very concept of what it meant to be a researcher, a scientist, a member of the Group. What if he left and couldn’t return?

“Are you all right?” Siem called down.

Mikel pulled an ice screw from a pocket and tapped it into the wall of ice. When it was secure, he detached from the Ski-Doo rope and reconnected—not to Siem’s line and certain rescue, but to the crevasse.

“Hey! What are you doing?” Siem cried out.

Maybe Mikel had just sentenced himself to an early death, but maybe before he died he would find out what, below the surface of Antarctica, caused water to flow uphill.

Dangling in the crevasse, Mikel pulled spiked crampons from his backpack one at a time. He heard Siem calling down to him, his voice echoing like a distant foghorn, but Mikel did not answer. He was too busy concentrating on the task at hand. Carefully, he latched the crampons to the soles of his boots knowing that dropping even one of them would end the journey before it began.

Hooks on, he arranged his ropes, then pushed away from the ice wall and down. For the next few minutes, Siem continued to call out to him. Then silence. Mikel looked up at the tiny bright hole to the world and it was empty. He thought he could hear muffled noises over the ridge, but with his next swinging descent that sound disappeared and Mikel heard only his own rapid breathing and the rasp of the ice as he thrust his spikes into it.

He felt that he could be mesmerized by all the shades of blue in the ice but losing focus might cause him to lose his grip, his life. So he focused on the water droplets instead. There were never many of them, but always enough to confirm that their upward motion was neither temporary nor a fluke.

Soon he had descended deep enough so that the darkness of the crevasse forced him to fish the headlamp from his backpack and turn it on. Mikel was not enamored of flashlights. They were necessary things but they limited his view and threw off the true colors of a surface. They illuminated dust particles, flecks of ice, and other distractions. Just now the shifting circle of light made everything pop from the surrounding darkness, like it was all pressing in on him. The place felt even more claustrophobic than it was. The creak of the rope seemed like a voice and the shadows seemed to creep.

Damn it.

He stopped moving and took a deep breath. Now was not the time to start imagining things. The crevasse was daunting enough as it was.

Focusing again on the tears running up the ice, Mikel became aware that the cold was not one of his challenges. The temperature certainly wasn’t balmy but at this depth he should have had to crack some hand warmers at least. Instead, the air felt about as cold as the surface and no more.

He tugged at his rope to test the latest ice screw, then pushed out and down.

The Brunt Ice Shelf was only one hundred meters deep on average but this crevasse seemed deeper. As if to confirm that, Mikel reached into his pocket for another ice screw and came up with nothing. He checked all his pockets hopelessly, knowing he’d put all the screws in one place. With a very strong grip and cautious movements, he held his backpack open while he searched through it. No luck. He was out.

A wave of anger swept through him. He shoved his backpack over his shoulders again, dangled in the air a moment, then kicked at the wall, hard. Cursing, he spent the next minute jerking his stuck, spiked foot back out of the ice. Then as he tugged his balaclava down for a breath of fresh air to clear his head—he felt it. A subtle, gentle, but unmistakable breeze.

The propellant for the water droplets.

Excited by his discovery, Mikel Jasso did something incredibly stupid. He used one ice ax as an anchor, reattached his ropes to it, descended, and used the other ice ax as another anchor descending as far as he could go into the darkness.

Literally at the end of his rope, he peered down into the maddening hole. His flashlight beam disappeared into nothingness. He glared at the ice, the running water , looked down again—and caught his breath. He’d seen a flash of green.

Tiny, just a spark, but familiar—he slowly swept his headlamp over the diameter of the hole. Then he stopped sharply. There it was again, and not just any green. If he was extrapolating correctly through the yellow of his light, this was olivine green, the same as the crystals in the last stone he’d picked up for Flora, the stone that caused them so much trouble.