The hour we spend with them is intimacy without narration, an experience without increments of measured time. The unvoiced emotions we felt, which we mention to one another later, include inexplicable tenderness, moments of soaring elation. In Antarctica, where death seems to lurk more than it does in other places, each of us is drawn strongly to anything as clearly alive as these birds. Feelings of affinity with these free animals, a sense of shared fate with them, seemed to go deeper and to come on more quickly here than elsewhere.
