The Two-Headed Whale by Sandy Winterbottom

Author:Sandy Winterbottom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

6

El Fin del Mundo

After our landing on the Antarctic Peninsula, we crossed back over the Bransfield Strait to the westerly end of the South Shetland Islands, first visiting a giant cinder cone the colour of paprika with splashes of sulphurous turmeric. As we crested the high crater rim, we looked down to find a smaller cone within. Standing on the edge, we had a fisheye-lens view right around the island: budgerigar-blue seas lapped at its feet under a sky full of lenticular clouds. It was a landscape Dali would have been proud to envisage.

We moved on to Greenwich Island, beaching the Zodiacs on the isthmus at Fort Point, a skyscraper-tall pinnacle of rock blotted by ochre-red guano and raucous gentoo and chinstrap penguins nesting on its flanks. As we walked, stepping-stone-sized pebbles rang hollow beneath us. Each tumbled smooth by waves, the pebbles nestled together in a perfect mosaic, uniform and dull when dry, but gleaming on the wet shore: jet-black basalt, speckled grey granite and greeny gabbro sprinkled with chunks of translucent ice washed ashore. It was testament to the pent-up energy in these seas – the bigger the pebbles on a beach, the fiercer the storms that shaped them. I could only imagine the monumental surf that had sculpted those stones.

At the land end of the isthmus, a wide glacier front towered above the tideline, and we sneaked as close to its edge as we dared, its roughened and precarious front liable to drop tons of ice into the sea at any time. It felt thrilling to be so close, like tiptoeing past a sleeping dragon, but we might never again see such a huge glacier snout up close. The top stretched almost half a mile along the shore, domed and featureless, but at its front, contorted barcode bands of snow and rockfall catalogued the glacier’s life as it had groaned its way across the island.

On the adjacent beach we found debris from an old sealing boat, a wooden mast weathered smooth and pale, and, nearby, a modern-day plastic fender lost from a ship. Even these remote islands were not immune to flotsam and jetsam.

As we reboarded Europa, a humpback whale and her calf drifted into the bay. We’d spotted few humpbacks on our trip and flocked to the bow rails to see them, cameras glued to our faces. She swam right to us, sticking out her nose for a better view, calf close by her side.

Humpbacks are arguably the most beautiful of the whales – shorter, but rounder and plumper than the rocket-sleek fins and blues. And such long elegant pectoral fins, laced in barnacles. Wafting through the seas, the merest undulation of the spine turns them; the slightest flick of the tail gathers speed. They can be showy too, diving in a slow roll of dripping flukes or leaping, testing the gravity of their bulk in the thinness of the air, slapping down palm-flat fins then rolling just below the surface to look up into the bright blue above.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.