One must, of course, be prepared to suffer for one's art but to be swallowed by a bog seemed to be taking professionalism too far; and besides, that was never my intention. I had walked into the bog only for a stunt.
Having trodden already on the edge and felt the ground quiver, I thought: "Let's do this again for Channel 4." Make the ground quiver, I mean - not fall in.
Benoît pointed the camera as, rucksack on back, I approached the dodgy patch of moss a second time.
These souilles (as the French here on Kerguelen call them) are extraordinary. Imagine a great pit, depth unknown, filled to the brim with freezing mud the consistency of runny custard. Then top it with a thick skin of moss and small ferns, rooted in the slime yet floating upon it like a great lily pad. Now extend that verdant carpet to the surrounding terrain, for such is what covers the whole hillside, including those parts safe to walk on. The camouflage is perfect. You have a man-trap. But I was not to be trapped, not me. I would step on to the very edge for just a moment - long enough to show the camera how splendidly it wobbled - then back.
I didn't realise I had passed the edge. Showing off, I had advanced too boldly. The bog tricked me by failing to wobble until I was right in the middle. Then all at once the ground beneath my feet was ground no longer, but a sort of green trampoline, bouncing up and down. I lost my balance and tumbled to my knees.
Then I felt my knees start sinking. I was on all fours and the trampoline was breaking beneath me. My feet were floundering into the moss and I felt my fingers dive into slime as hands, too, began to sink. The other two, Geneviève and Rémy, were helpless with mirth, and Benoît was busy videoing what might prove a filmic moment of some importance in the history of television reportage (or snuff documentary): actual death of the presenter.
I realised I would have to be my own rescuer. Rolling quickly over I crawled out with more speed than dignity, on stomach, hands and knees. And we walked on, laughing. My friends said they would have rescued me once the mud had reached my neck. Neither the high nor the low point of our 60-mile expedition from the south to the northwest coast of Kerguelen, this was undoubtedly the most comical.
The low point had come two nights before and was (for me) genuinely scary. Our route had taken us from a lake, Armor, near the ocean, to the little iron container by a waterfall at the end of the Bossière fiord. I knew this overnight shelter already, from my last expedition. Next morning we struck north towards the Cook Glacier, and terrain unfamiliar to us all. Soon we were in massive glacial valleys flanked by towering ramparts of basalt cliff. A hard ten-hour walk from dawn to nightfall brought us just before dark to the Vilars Cave.
I have never slept in a cave before. This one, perched halfway up a mountainside of fallen rocks, was a cruel scramble to reach, but what a view from the mouth! The cave was huge, high and wide as a house, 50 yards deep, dry inside: Kerguelen is full of habitable caves and there are no bats. We penetrated deep enough for shelter from the wind, ate pot-noodles and watched the rock cliffs across the valley glow amber in the setting sun. Though snug in the sleeping bag, I slept fitfully.
We could hardly have started earlier the next morning - it was scarcely dawn - so nobody is to blame for what happened. But the climb up the mountainside was slippery and unrelenting. Rémy fell, bled a lot and did not complain - and the march along the ridge took half the day. A distant glimpse of the terrifying Cook glacier was followed by an appalling hands, feet and backsides descent (alongside, and sometimes in, a stream) down a 1,000ft gully of wet rocks; then a frozen lump of bread and cheese; then a march along another valley.
But a dangerous snow-slope and a glacial lake slowed us, and as we squelched urgently down another deep and immense valley, the black walls of cliffs to left and right oppressed us into silence. It was getting dark. And we were to climb that wall? How? Yet the hut where we planned to overnight was in the valley parallel, Val Travers. As the first stars flickered in the vault above us we realised this was silly. We must stop.
But we had no tents. What if it rained? Well, we did have those tinfoil-like "survival" sheets they give you after the London Marathon. Geneviève identified a hut-sized boulder suitable as a wind-break, against which we could sleep. Valleys are wind-tunnels but there are only two ways the wind can blow. No drystone-waller, I remembered watching others in Derbyshire, and built a crude wall of rock extending in an arm from our boulder. We ate a little, burrowed into sleeping bags with all our clothes on, covered ourselves in our futuristic tinfoil sheets, and, glancing nervously up at the stars, hoped for a dry night. A modest gale blew down the valley. The survival sheets ripped immediately.
Within not many minutes our campsite was a noisy flap of tinfoil pennants in the gale, like some mad moonlight version of a Tibetan temple. And we slept a bit. None was warm but nobody froze.
At what hour I was awoken I had no idea, but it was snowing. Raising my head I peered through the fluttering tinfoil tatters at a sleeping bag already encrusted in white rime. All my laziness, all my preference for staying at least as snug as I was, fled in the realisation that this would not do. We must get moving. Soon we were all up and lacing boots, brushing off ice, stuffing things into rucksacks. And luckily it was nearly dawn.
The snow stopped as we squelched towards the valley wall we had to climb, sodden moss sucking at our boots. A cold sun was touching the tops above us.
As spirits rose we perceived that the ascent was possible, just as Geneviève had thought, by climbing up heaps of fallen rocks. It took an hour, and for almost the first time in Kerguelen my heart was too much in my mouth to use the video-camera, but we made it. Over the top lay a bitterly cold, frozen lake, ending in another 1,000ft drop. The map had shown nothing like this, and there was no way down. "Let's divert via the Vallée de Merveilles," said Remy. "Just one more little ridge."
Truth to tell, I had had enough of marvels and too much of ridges, but I bit my lip and trudged.
It was worth it. For the first time I saw the Kerguelen cabbage - the vegetable which saved Captain Cook's men from scurvy - growing in profusion.
Raw, it proved delicious; like English mustard, which explains why, since Cook, British sailors have maintained that the cabbage is palatable, while the French have pronounced it disgusting.
Then we saw the Cook glacier, now much closer, through sunshine and swirling fog, 3,000ft rising towards the horizon . . . awesome.
But, patient reader, how much awe can you take, and how many marvels? For here comes another: this mountainside was strewn with broken rocks inside whose rind, like smashed pomegranates, lay the pale, sparkling teeth of myriad crystals, row upon row. Some were almost clear, others white, some amber and a few pale blue. They were lying around everywhere in lumps, splinters and whole rocks. Black stone had split open to reveal cream glistening within. Among these stones lay what looked like the shards of broken pottery from some ancient world: white clay enamelled in orange or green. In fact, they were crusts of white stone coated with vivid stain, whether mineral or vegetable I cannot say. I was exhausted, but carried away a few tiny samples.
And again the question recurred: is this Planet Earth, or a decoy? Was this place trying to mock us - offering us now jewels too heavy to pick up?
It was not long after the quagmire, by that mossy mirage of solid ground.
And I sense I may be testing your credulity. Dare I test it further by telling you about the ascent of the Col de Soufflerie, which seemed impossible except that a tremendous following wind blew us up the slope, blowing a nearby waterfall upwards too? Shall I tell you about the hot river we passed, steaming in the dark? Or how we spent the next night, too, under the stars, having missed the cabin after sundown and despaired? Or how our sleeping bags froze stiff and our boots froze too hard to get our feet into?
Or about how beautiful that clear dawn was, with the sky leaching from black purple to the coldest lavender, then gold?
Or about the long morning walk by a still lake, fording its neck where it tumbled into the sea? Or the last, gruelling hike down a great arm of Kerguelen? Or our grateful descent at dusk from a lake without a name, after five days walking, to the wooden shack at Port Couvreaux: the failed sheep station once France's intended beginning to a new Falklands in the Southern Indian Ocean, abandoned now for 70 years? This was a sad, touching, homely place.
Or, beguiled by too many marvels, have I lost you?
