It was still remote. Getting to the Almost Unknown Country was a major problem. I made calls, and the quotes reached thousands for flights and helicopters, because the regular coastal ships stopped south of Thule. I tried to track down scientific research ships; I tried to persuade the US Military to fly me there in a B-52. But there weren’t any B-52s flying to Thule, they said. I began to lose impetus. The city was sliding out of summer. People began to button up their coats as the sun grew paler, as the wind gusted around the streets. I was beginning to think the trip was off, the season was too late, but I still had an urge to get to this Janus-Thule. Following more and more implausible leads, calling up people who failed to disguise their confusion, I finally found an independent scientist who said he might be able to help.
He told me to meet him at his house in Hampstead. It was a house in a quiet street by the Holly Bush pub, its windows covered in dirt, ivy crawling up the walls. I arrived early and the door was opened by a man wearing dungarees, who led me into a small room and told me to wait. I sat shivering as a cold breeze rattled the panes. Scratched wooden shelves lined the walls. There was a woman sitting at a desk in the corner, reading, who nodded brusquely as I walked in. She wore a starched white blouse and half-moon glasses on the bridge of her nose. She was staring at me over her glasses. I glanced at her immense pile of books. The Behaviour of Reptiles. The Analysis of Plants.
I picked up a book from the shelves, flicked through a few pages, and meant to put it back on the pile. Then I dropped the book on the floor, and as I leant to pick it up I caught her staring at me again with an expression of fixed irritation. I smiled apologetically and began flicking through the pages again, conscious of her glare upon me. She did not want to leave me alone. She was like a missionary of an uncompromising church, and when I looked up again she was almost waggling her finger.
Someone arrived to fetch me, a thin man with a coat as shapeless as a shawl, slung around his shoulders. The house was full of inexplicable people. The woman sighed as I stood, as if mourning the loss of the fight, and stared me out of the room. I followed the thin man through rows of books, and reached a double door standing ajar. The man wafted me up an unswept staircase, where there were dustballs as big as my fist in the corners of the steps, and intricate cobwebs fastened to the banisters. He walked with downcast eyes, responding in monosyllables to my attempts at small-talk. Nice weather. Yes. Nice staircase. Yes. You work here a lot? Yes.
At the top of the dust-stairs was a map of the Arctic Ocean, the countries curving around the top of the planet, sliding towards each other. The map was decorative; there were pictures of significant explorers stuck to a few of the patches of white—Nansen’s head poking out of Greenland, Robert Peary pinned to the North Pole, and Amundsen with an airship. Greenland was a vast country in the shape of a bloated slug, with the word THULE stamped on its north-western coast.
A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head appeared, wearing a tired expression, and an arthritic hand gestured me into the room. The light was dim; a heavy writing desk squatted in the centre. Dwarfed by the desk was the fossilized scholar, slouched on a chair, wearing a tattered suit. He shook hands, but he stayed on his chair, and he murmured so softly I could barely hear him. Andrew was a patched-up relic, living off his early research. The walls were covered with shelves, the shelves strewn with books and files, the desk crowded with papers. It all looked staged, like a film set, and Andrew looked as if he had been deposited there that morning with instructions not to leave. Andrew had been intrepid many years ago; he had spent a while with the Inuit in the far north of Greenland, at Thule. But the years had battered Andrew into his room and now he slumped behind the desk.
He screwed up his face, and whispered into his collar: ‘In Greenland the fabulous becomes real. Greenland is the meeting of the real and the fabulous. A super-reality, a hyper-existent image of truth and destiny. In Greenland object and subject are elided. In Greenland we ask ourselves what am I? What do I mean?’ And he smiled.
‘In Greenland the stars meander through the heavens, forecasting, predicting the future. Everything swirls—the lights, the snow in the wind, the waves as they wash across the bergs. It is a place both beautiful and ghastly; yes, it is a place of contrasts. Only the flexible of mind can understand this immensity; only the immense of spirit can swirl with the beauty of the stars, the ravenous motions of the wind. Rasmussen named his settlement Thule because he understood immensity.’
Andrew slouched in his chair, his head emerging out of the antique folds of his neck, his hands like leather. His chin was almost under the desk. He talked and talked, without pauses, his voice almost inaudible and unhurried. ‘Imagine what it was like for the Inuit when the Americans arrived in the 1950s. There are books about it, by a Frenchman. I will find them for you.’
He meant a writer called Jean Malaurie, who had written about the Greenlandic Inuit, in books with titles like The Last Kings of Thule. Malaurie had been staying in the first Thule when the Americans arrived. He had gone over to visit the American base, and found snack bars and barracks buildings and a host of courteous soldiers, a cinema, a powerhouse, telephones, a baseball centre, a radio tower, a restaurant and a hospital. He wandered around, over excavations and networks of piping. Back in the village of Thule, he had watched the helicopters and icebreakers, a ‘formidable Armada, ’ bringing more occupants to the base. The ships were filled with ‘bobby-soxers of Thule,’ boys from Harvard and Berkeley, who wanted to see the Arctic by working at the base. They streamed across the ice to the Inuit village, swapping cigarettes, axes and footwear for souvenirs.
‘And do you think—’ I began. Andrew held up his hand.
‘Some of the Inuit thought they would be sent away, some thought the Americans had magical powers to control the weather, to make a constant summer. And people were worried; they thought with the Americans came things like the atomic bomb. Really, they were right on that. The Danish government pretended it was not true, but we know that the Americans kept nuclear weapons at Thule during the Cold War. Without the knowledge of the Inuit, of course. But also I think from what was said at the time that somehow the Inuit felt that their place, their Thule, had always been unusual, and now here was the proof, because the great power of America had found them out, even in the remote north.’
Thule Air Base was established on a barren patch of rock. The creation of a permanent military base at Thule had been approved by President Truman in 1950. The agreement was ratified with Denmark as part of the newly formed NATO defence programme. A NATO area was established, called the Greenland Defence Area. Thule Air Base was constructed in secret under the code name Operation Blue Jay. Construction began in 1951 and was completed two years later. US ships appeared on the Greenlandic coast, bringing thousands of men. The Americans banged out a base: 82 miles of road, in a country with virtually no roads, 10 hangars, 122 barracks, 6 mess halls, a gym, a service club, an officers’ club, library, post office, a bakery, a theatre, a chapel and a hospital. There were warehouses, power plants, heating plants, a thousand-foot pier constructed from barges towed from the Gulf of Mexico.
The US Military stacked up supplies at Thule. They brought in anti-aircraft guns, surface-to-air missiles and nuclear warheads. Thule became a secret place in Greenland; access to the US Military base was forbidden to those without clearance.
In the spring of 1953, the inhabitants of the Greenlandic village of Thule were moved sixty-five miles to the north, to Qaanaaq or the second Thule.
‘And do you think—’ I continued.
‘It was as if the Americans wanted to pluck the secret from the . . . from the . . .’ Andrew lost his train of thought. He picked up a pencil with his gnarled fingers, toyed with it for a moment and then dropped it again.
‘And do you think—’
‘You know, I went in the 1960s, to Thule Air Base.’ Andrew slumped further into his chair, his head pressed so firmly down into his chest that it seemed he woul
d never raise it again. He was almost inaudible as he spoke, and I leaned further across his desk, trying to understand these faint sentences.
‘I was young. You weren’t born, of course.’ He tried to lift his head, but the effort was too great. It dropped down again.
‘By the 1960s, it was a big place. Thousands of soldiers there, waiting for the nuclear war, for Russia to attack. You have no idea of the paranoia that existed. They were spending so much money, so many millions. They had flown everything from America, of course. You don’t find dynamite and metal and vast quantities of wood in the north of Greenland. You don’t find telephones and buses and ha! ha!’—a faint rustling sound was coming from Andrew’s throat, which I identified as a laugh—‘baseball bats. Not many of those in the north of Greenland. Not many such things at all. They brought it all over. They were nicely set up when I saw them. The soldiers seemed happy. You’ll probably find the same, when you go. They even had refrigerators in the houses.’
‘And—’ I interjected. The trembling hand again, like an ancient policeman directing traffic. I raised my voice: ‘And do you think—’
Andrew whispered more insistently. ‘I must say that I think it was really millions and millions that they spent. You know they only had two months when the sea was not frozen, only two months to bring everything through to the base. It was an astonishing feat of organisation.’
He was old and frail, but Andrew knew how to deliver a monologue. He skipped around a little; he wasn’t strictly chronological. But he was determined to finish. I wondered if he was often alone in this room, talking softly to himself, sinking slowly into his chair, waiting for the knock on the door, a reason to draw his head upwards.
‘Yet you could say that there has always been something strange about that base, because of its name, because it became Thule Air Base. It gives a different atmosphere to the place I think. I felt it even when I was there. The American soldiers did not want to know their environment when they arrived. They wanted to sit in their gyms and phone home to their parents. But it seized them. I thought even the most obedient soldier came to be in awe of the vastness of the rocks around them. In this respect they were weaker than the Inuit, who understand the antiquity of the stones. Many people disagree with me,’ Andrew said, spreading his hands on the desk. ‘But I am glad the Inuit kept the name of Thule, so it wasn’t just the Americans who had it.’
After this I was given a handshake, told to take a pile of thermals and to be sure to write—and then I left.
Standing outside the tall house with its windows thick with dirt, I felt a strange sensation that Andrew had been laughing at me, laughing at everyone. It was odd that I—who had long been obsessed with the Arctic regions, and with this old tale of Thule—had a moment not really of hesitation but of startled pause. For a moment I felt that I wasn’t going to the most northerly island but that I was setting out for the centre of the earth.
The ship’s name was Aurora Borealis. If it kept afloat on the ice seas, it wasn’t thanks to the captain, who had crashed the ship two weeks earlier, holing the bow on a piece of shore. They had repaired the ship, but the captain feared the worst when he returned to the south. So he was in pre-emptive mourning for his job, though he tried to be cheerful during the voyage.
The ship was a smashed-up icebreaker. The passengers lolled in the saloon, smoking in the afternoons; they drank, they ate, they dozed, they read bumper books about Greenlandic wildlife. Total wilderness, everyone said all the time, it was a chant coming off the boat. It was like a moving convention, devoted to the worship of absolute vacancy. We were heading for Thule, the real-time Thule—the name shared between an Inuit village and a secret US Military base, hidden in the far north of the island. A dark comedy, this dual personality Thule.
The sea route to Thule passed along the western coast through multi-form bergs, cracked and twisted, rising to sharp points, drifting with the waves. Waves curdled around the base of the icebergs, coiling into the gaps in their surface. The haggard grey coasts were empty; the ship moved past black rocks, which looked like sloppy stacks of crumbling charcoal, spilling into the sea. At midnight, the spectral autumn version of the Northern Lights appeared, a sky full of swirling green and white forms, swelling from the horizon like fires. They pulsed at the corners of the sky, seeping slowly across the stars, ebbing to a silent rhythm. I stood on the deck, watching the patterns of the lights moving across the clouds.
There were orderly villages in the south, set up by the Danes. In Ilulissat, in the west, the houses were wooden, painted in bright colours. Four-wheel drives ploughed the dust from the streets and shops sold supplies. There were fields of sledge dogs, chained to rocks, and the edges of the town were a series of dirty wooden shacks, interspersed with rubbish dumps, piles of broken-down cars, engines from boats—junk-yard collections, stacked in people’s gardens. There was a Rasmussen museum in Ilulissat, celebrating the life of the Dane who brought the word Thule to this ice island. The museum was in the small house where Rasmussen’s family had lived for a while, with a view of bergs drifting on the fjord. Born in 1879, Rasmussen grew up speaking Danish and Greenlandic Inuit; his mother was of partly Inuit descent, and his father was a Danish missionary. Finishing school in Denmark, Rasmussen tried out opera singing and acting, with scant success. He turned to writing, trying out journalism, and was sent on trips to the north, to Sweden, to Iceland. He met another ambitious Dane, Mylius Eriksen, and they decided to follow the Viking tradition, the Viking sailor Erik the Red, and sail to Greenland. It was a conscious imitation of their historical forebears, forebears known only through mythologized accounts: The Saga of Erik the Red, The Saga of the Greenlanders. It turned out badly for Mylius Eriksen, who later suffered a frozen death in eastern Greenland. His body was lost for decades, the details of his death known only because another member of the expedition left a note on the ice explaining what had happened. Rasmussen became a writer, sending back reports from northern Greenland, naming the Inuit settlers he found ‘the Thule Culture,’ and making Thule expeditions across Greenland and into Alaska.
When Rasmussen set up camp at Thule in 1910, the country was still unknown in many places, its frozen coast attracting polar explorers looking for a last camp before they set out further north. Peary had based himself up in the north-west of Greenland, in the area around Thule. He sold the Inuit guns, and left his descendants in the villages of the far north. In 1910, Greenland was inhabited, but its inhabitants were subdued by the enormity of the rocks, the storms raging across the cliffs, the darkness of the winters. For centuries, they lived in turf huts, indistinguishable from the moss rocks. Rasmussen suggested that the remote place he named was an ‘Ultima Thule’ in the superlative sense, an Ultima Thule of blasted cliffs, an Ultima Thule of ice islands. He had found the Ultima Thule of northerly places, the most extreme and bleak and compelling. His naming had nothing to do with Pytheas, he hardly referred to the musings of Strabo and Pliny and Pomponius Mela. Rasmussen used Thule as it had come to be understood, as a literary term, a piece of scene-setting myth.
It drew together the beauty and terror of an immense ice-plain, it seemed to fit with the strange clash of disconsolation and euphoria I felt in Greenland. Greenland was a beautiful series of cliffs, and then it was a vast uninhabitable ice-plain, the ice crushing 90 per cent of the land. An ancient land, its rocks ravaged by ice, in places nearly four billion years old.
It offered an absolute and unyielding sort of silence. Its physical vastness was matched by its antiquity. Greenland was an enormous plain of ice, the largest island, the most ancient rock in the world. In none of the other places I had been had the concerns of the human world seemed so small. Others had understood this feeling; Herman Melville had encapsulated the strange presence of the empty ice: ‘And as for solitariness, the great forests of the north, the expanses of unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice-fields, are the pro-foundest of solitudes to a human observer.’ The solitude of the ice, the solit
ude even of the deck, the vast rolling ocean, the ship heeling like a drunk, the blank sides of the mountains, the ice cap glinting above.
In Ilulissat there were glacier tours, lines of boats circling the ice-towers in the fjord. There were queues of tourists watching the sea forming into smashed sludge, admiring the pieces of pancake-ice colliding and splitting. There were scattered rags of ice lying on the water, pushed by the wind. There were masses of ice rising out of the sea, stern and solitary, the waves swirling around their bases. The mountains stretched behind the ice, pale in the sun, with contours like muscles along their sides, coloured red with moss. The ice-fjord was mesmerizing: so much ice, and it was only the tattered overspill of an immense glacier, and the immense glacier only a small fragment of the ice cap. It looked idyllic as the boat moved out of Ilulissat. The ice castles were blue and white, the sunset added a rich bloodied shade to the piles of drifting ice, and the bergs made a fine slapping sound as they bounced on the sea. The lights of the small town shimmered on the hills; the inland ice stretched beyond, a white snowfield, glowing red under the sky. The boat moved slowly through the congealed sea. The ice lay in the water; the clear sea showed the submerged forms of the bergs; the blue ice sparkled beneath the surface. At night everything was still, the wind dropped, and the moon rose, large and round. In the north there was still a narrow strip of evening light. To the east, the mountains lay stacked up along the coast, dark against the dusk sky. The bergs floated alongside the ship, forced by the pressure of the waves into fabulous shapes. There was one with stalactites and stalagmites around a great hole, like the mouth of a semi-submerged sea monster, roaring as the sea poured through the gaps between its teeth. Another was like an ice sculpture of a pyramid, its sides smooth and perfectly planed. They were infinitely diverse, thousands of chunks from the ice cap, the oldest bergs a deep blue, their colours reflecting onto the sea.
The Ice Museum Page 25