AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Say hello to the penguins for me."
"I shall."
As the Zodiac skimmed over water that was as flat and reflective as a mirror, Maeve lectured her little band of intrepid tourists on the history behind their destination. "Seymour Island was first sighted by James Clark Ross in 1842. Forty Norwegian explorers, castaway when their ship was crushed in the ice, perished here in 1859. We'll visit the site where they lived until the end and then take a short walk to the hallowed ground where they are buried."
"Are those the buildings they lived in?" asked a lady who must have been pushing eighty, pointing to several structures in a small bay.
"No," answered Maeve. "What you see are what remains of an abandoned British whaling station.
We'll visit it just before we take a short hike around that rocky point you see to the south, to the penguin rookery."
"Does anyone live on the island?" asked the same lady.
' The Argentineans have a research station on the northern tip of the island."
"How far away?"
Maeve smiled condescendingly. "About thirty kilometers." There's always one in every group who has the curiosity of a four-year-old, she mused.
They could see the bottom clearly now, naked rock with no growth to be seen anywhere. Their shadow followed them about two fathoms down as they cruised through the bay. No rollers broke on the shoreline, the sea ran smooth right up to the edge, lapping the exposed rock with the slight wash usually found around a small lake. The crewman shut off the outboard motor as the bow of the Zodiac skimmed onto the shore. The only sign of a living thing was a pure white snow petrel that glided through the sky above them like a large snowflake.
Only after she had helped everyone to disembark from the Zodiac and wade ashore onto the pebbled beach in the knee-high rubber boots supplied by the ship did Maeve turn and look at the ship as it gathered way and steamed northward.
The Polar Queen was quite small by cruise ship standards. Her length was only seventy-two meters, with a twenty-five hundred gross rated tonnage. She was built in Bergen, Norway, especially to cruise polar waters. She was as ruggedly constructed as an icebreaker, a function she could perform if the occasion arose. Her superstructure and the broad horizontal stripe below her lower deck were painted glacier white. The rest of her hull was a bright yellow. She could skirt the ice floes and icebergs with the agility of a rabbit due to her bow and stern thrusters. Her comfortable cabins were furnished in the style of a ski chalet, with picture windows facing the sea. Other amenities included a luxurious lounge and dining salon, hosted by a chef who turned out three-star culinary creations, a fitness center and a library filled with books and information on the polar regions. The crew was well trained and numbered twenty more than the passengers.
Maeve felt a tinge of regret she couldn't quite understand as the yellow-and-white Polar Queen grew smaller in the distance. For a brief moment she experienced the apprehension the lost Norwegian explorers must have felt at seeing their only means of survival disappear. She quickly shook off any feelings of uneasiness and began leading her party of babbling travelers across the gray moonscape to the cemetery.
She allotted them twenty minutes to pick their way among the tombstones, shooting rolls of film of the inscriptions. Then she herded them around a vast pile of giant bleached whale bones near the old station while describing the methods the whalers used to process the whales.
"After the danger and exhilaration of the chase and kill," she explained, "came the rotten job butchering the huge carcass and rendering the blubber into oil. 'Cutting in' and `trying out,' as the old-timers called it."
Next came the antiquated huts and rendering building. The whaling station was still maintained and monitored on an annual basis by the British and was considered a museum of the past. Furnishings, cooking utensils in the kitchen, along with old books and worn magazines, were still there just as the whalers left them when they finally departed for home.
"Please do not disturb any of the artifacts," Maeve told the group. "Under international law nothing may be removed." She took a moment to count heads. Then she said, "Now I'll lead you into the caves dug by the whalers, where they stored the oil in huge casks before shipping it to England."
From a box left at the entrance to the caves by expedition leaders from previous cruises, she passed out flashlights. "Is there anyone who suffers from claustrophobia?"
One woman who looked to be in her late seventies raised her hand. "I'm afraid I don't want to go in there."
"Anyone else?"
The woman who asked all the questions nodded. "I can't stand cold, dark places."
"All right," said Maeve. "The two of you wait here. I'll conduct the rest a short distance to the whale-oil storage area. We won't be more than fifteen minutes."
She led the chattering group through a long, curving tunnel carved by the whalers to a large storage cavern stacked with huge casks that had been assembled deep inside the rock and later left behind. After they entered she stopped and gestured at a massive rock at the entrance.
"The rock you see here was cut from inside the cavern and acts as a barrier against the cold and to keep competing whalers from pilfering surplus oil that remained after the station closed down for the winter. This rock weighs as much as an armored tank, but a child can move it, providing he or she knows its secret." She paused to step aside, placed her hand on a particular place on the upper side of the rock and easily pushed it to close the entrance. "An ingenious bit of engineering. The rock is delicately balanced on a shaft through its middle. Push in the wrong spot and it won't budge."
Everyone
made jokes about the total darkness broken only by the flashlights as Maeve moved over to one of the great wooden casks. One had remained half full, and she held a small glass vial under a spigot and filled it with a small amount of oil. She passed the vial around, allowing the tourists to rub a few drops between their fingers.
"Amazingly, the cold has prevented the oil from spoiling, even after nearly a hundred and thirty years.
It's still as fresh as the day it came from the cauldron and was poured into the cask."
"It feels as though it has extraordinary lubricating qualities," said a gray-haired man with a large red nose, common in a heavy drinker.
