Under Antarctica Extract

Have you ever wondered what really happened to Oates on Scott’s fateful expedition to Antarctica? Well, we believe we may have found out, more than seventy years later…and completely by accident. My name isn’t important, my profession tedious, but a frozen piece of paper miraculously stored in a bottle − fatefully discovered in a drill sample − has shot me and Antarctica into the public eye.

I have seen penguins casually walk towards desolate mountains and their deaths, and icebergs the size of Sicily, but nothing has had more impact on me than this seemingly innocuous scrap of paper, the following words of which are eerie in their suggestiveness, frustrating in their briefness, but utterly beguiling and wrapped in a shroud of mystery. Read it, make your own mind up, and wonder what really lurks beneath the ice of our ‘forgotten’ continent.

‘I write this in haste and despair – though I thought despair had departed me in my lifting of the tent-flap. My illness is forgotten now I am here, and my sacrifice meaningless, though part of me wishes I was face down in the snow above. Such is the spectacular nature of the cave that I feel the blizzard’s numbness dissipating completely, but instead I am filled with wrongness and dread – as well as wonder. Something unholy lurks here, of that there is no doubt, and it means me death – which I’m strangely not now ready to concede. I sense it, feel it, but cannot see it, for it moves in invisibility and is cloaked in another dimension…don’t ask me why I know this − I would rather not − but its power is so extreme that it smothers me like smoke. But as yet it walks parallel to the cavern, so it cannot physically touch me, though I hear a voice whispering from the walls. I smile in recollection of…’

The next few lines are worn away, with only the words ‘near’ and ‘chasm to the left of my foot’ visible. After that, the script turns spidery and harried, as if Oates was struggling to control some fear. We just don’t know. It begins again with this:

‘…And the foolscap glitters with diamond dust. The ceiling is ripe with stalagmites, but the rock is just underneath, and you can see it has been mined. Scott would have revelled in this place. He always loved the mystery of the world, and this place is like something from Elysium. But it’s an Elysium laced with darkness, and it is a foreign darkness that is disguised by the whiteness of the ice. Already it works on me, befuddling my thoughts as I sit on a carved block, embroidered miraculously with jasper and jade. Actually worked into the ice! Extraordinary! And that’s not all. There is an underground library, with golden books I can’t pick up, and markings and arrows on the ground next to the chasm, pointing to something in its depths. That is the mystery – and it is everywhere − but the horror is the skeleton in the corner with no lower jaw, and the green book on the plinth. In there is a picture that makes me fear for humans and their future, but try as I might, my hand will not write what it is, nor my mind recall it from memory. Yes, I could go and look again, but damn! My legs are done! The cave is making me drowsy and I know the fiend is sucking me dry, but such are those who are hungry I guess. They work subtly on their prey to wear them down – like the cheetah running for miles with the antelope. In the end, persistence pay dividends, and my feeble human will is no match for the fantasy around me. I would gladly go if I could sit back, close my eyes and relish the heat of my unnaturally warm surroundings, but such a fate is wishful thinking.’