When will you read this? It is written by candlelight in a cabin on the isle of Kerguelen. Clapboard walls - tired grey planks of Norwegian pine, thirsty with age, warp beneath peeling paint. The rusty iron roof is patched with tin, nailed down roughly where ripped in a century of gales.
Maybe another is on its way. Mending a hole in my window with gaffer-tape yesterday, I stared over the shingle at a racing sea, purple with cold. Under a wintry sun young penguins, not ready to surf into the Southern Ocean for the winter, were playing on the rocks. Great petrels wheeled around.
There are many rooms in this long cabin, filled with narrow bunks too short for modern men, all, like the building itself, prefabricated in Norway and brought with hundreds of workers in the steamer Jeanne d'Arc in 1908.
Accounts from the handful of visitors who ever came here describe a merry, crowded place. They had a gramophone and played the Merry Widow. Small, tattered indications of conviviality persist. "By Royal Warrant to HM King Edward VII" says a tinplate poster nailed to the wall, advertising cigars "on sale in waiting rooms in all stations on the South African Railways".
Beneath each window-pane lie the ruins of ancestors, smashed into tiny shards by the wind. The doors are nailed up, except for one, its doorstep a crumble of what were once Norwegian firebricks. Yet the building is substantially intact: witness to 70 years of makeshift running repairs.
Nobody has lived here and nothing has happened since before the Second World War, but this broken dream of a place is not forgotten and her owners, now the French, have never quite let her go.
This was a whaling station, Port Jeanne d'Arc. Through my window in the moonlight swing the rusting remains of three great blubber-boilers; beside them the clinker from furnaces into which, when they ran short of coal, they threw penguins for fuel. Once a considerable enterprise, it was abandoned in the 1930s, the last significant attempt to exploit Kerguelen. This Anglo-Norwegian concern was the one commercial venture which ever prospered here, but only for a few years; only by a
brutality which raised eyebrows even in those robust times; and only in the destruction of the resource it relied on. The wholesale massacre of whales, penguins and then, when whales ran out, elephant seals, for Danish margarine, was a wretched tale.
Prices dropped, whales disappeared, elephant seals became scarce, and the sheer isolation of Port Jeanne d'Arc told upon its accountants' patience and its workers' morale. In the end they departed, leaving everything - steam engines, machine room, tins and bottles - abandoned in an exit as final as, on the other side of the island at Port Couvreux, a pioneering sheep station's failure was complete. I have visited the cemeteries of both: tiny plots in
deserted coves. A few splintering crosses mark anonymous graves.
Unfamiliar stars wheel above the resting places of those whose descendants in Europe today are perhaps ignorant of where their ancestors lie.
Captain Cook named this island Desolation when he found it, called it "sterile" and said the French, who saw it first, could keep it. Kerguelen, though, is not worthless. It is weird. I found this as I walked from my home in the modern French base to Port Jeanne d'Arc: not a port, but a mangled jetty by the neck of 300 square miles of wild mountain peninsula, all of it empty.
I shall return by boat. But you never know a place from the ocean, so when three volunteers invited me to join their planned walk here I leapt at the chance: 50 miles overland without a path. On this page some weeks ago we left you - my comrades Remy, Renaud, Sylvestre and I - in the middle of that expedition, having found our way out of a snowstorm and made it to shelter for our second night.
The walk did not get easier after that. The next day we walked for all ten hours of daylight, crawling up ridges, scrambling down escarpments, wading through icy rivers and slithering over rocks. By nightfall we were still far from the 12ft x 6ft steel container which was to be our shelter. We knew where it was, though: on the opposite shore to the long Bossiere fiord.
But was this the fiord we had reached? Bossiere, never more than a few hundred metres wide, winds ten miles into the interior. Hard to distinguish from innumerable lakes, these fingers of sea mean safety on Kerguelen. They place you, they are sheltered, accessible for rescue, warmer than the land and its freshwater lakes. No ice around the edge of this water: a helpful sign. Chapped lips tasted anxiously. Salt!
Now there was an hour's walk around the fiord in the dark, passed in a silence broken by the lapping of small waves and the distant roar of an immense waterfall. All the stars were out. Renaud and Sylvestre went ahead to look for the hut. Remy stayed behind with me, limping badly from a damaged left heel. We saw waving torches. They had found the hut.
Two memorable days. We had wind and snow but also sun, high gorges with cascading streams, "meadows" which were green, boot-sucking icy sponges. We strode - I limped - over flat rock plateaux, saw Fulgineux albatross nesting, photographed snow-covered Mount Ross, 6,000ft high in a suddenly clear sky. Remy carried my video camera and we made it, all together at sundown on our fifth day, to the long cabin at Port Jeanne d'Arc, where I now write. Renaud even
filmed us opening the door: perhaps the least interesting moment of the trip, but you have to remember that sort of thing for television.
Will the things that matter come through the lens, though? Will it look - feel - as it has for us? Will something elusive which I struggle to convey here, pass the lens?
The landscape's stature, its majesty, must come across, I'm sure. The terrain is staggeringly vertiginous: a maze of blind valleys, mountains, cliffs, plateaux, tremendous rock ramparts, snowfields, ice-sheets, lakes, beaches, bogs and
fiords where there is neither
road nor track nor path nor even a cairn.
Or are there? Cairns there are in Kerguelen, but untouched by human hand. An epoch when it rained rocks has left piles of stones on
every skyline: little towers, constructed with apparent intelligence,
mocking the eye just as the apparent towers and many-chimneyed chateaux mock us in silhouette from high ridges. Just as the plumes of smoke, clear white in the distance, mock our approach: to find gravity-defying waterfalls whose volume is being blown skyward in columns from the lip. Just as the thick, mossy carpet on which we tread mocks us - quivering like a mattress, then sinking: not ground at all, but a raft floating on mud deeper than we
are tall.
This is not Planet Earth here, this is a decoy planet, a virtual Earth, a moon, a hollow laugh. "Sterile" was a cruel word of James Cook's, but there is something cruel in the allure of this beautiful, fruitless place. The lakes look Scottish - but they are barren, no fish here, none. Is that a forest? No, it is a
patch of mountainside black with basalt; here there are no trees. Penguins, seals, albatross - yes, but nothing lives here; they just
call in.
The earth looks firm - and bounces when you walk. You peer into perfect ponds laced by foliage - empty: just clear, acid water; no dragonflies, tadpoles, amphibians; no reptiles at all. There is no insect with wings here, no bees, no flowers. You lift a rock - and there are no worms or grubs beneath: nothing scurries away.
You hear children calling: a scream, a whimper, a laugh. They are seabirds. You see men huddled or strutting on the shore; they are penguins. You see a long, straight road across the distant hillside; it is a single stratum of rock, traced by snow. You wake in your sleeping bag as the ground throbs with a deep base noise. Ship's engine? It is the force of the water hurling on to rocks from that clifftop across the cove. The sun blazes - but the blaze is heatless and a blizzard is
minutes behind. Even lulls are eerie. Away from the shore there are no smells, nothing seems to rot. Nobody gets colds, coughs, flu. Even infection is banished by the glittering silver light. I never thought I would miss the buzz of a fly.
And there are rainbows, sometimes double-rainbows, once a triple-rainbow, the most vivid I will ever see. No, this is not Earth but a taunt, a teasing mirage; and I think it might dissolve, breaking into a hundred refractions and leaving me, like Prospero, like the disappointed adventurers of the last century, to my homebound ship; and I would sail through Kerguelen as though the Flying Dutchman, hard and light and bright as nails, yet you pass slap-bang through her and she won't engage, dissolving into mocking laughter.
