A GOOD VINTAGE Iain Smart Madeira wine improves in flavour when carried around the world in the hold of a ship. So is the memory of a good expedition if allowed to rock around for a few years in the bottom of your mind. The original experiences grow or diminish in relative importance and achieve a balance unsuspected at the time when they were being harvested from the ambient universe. The immediate account of an expedition is the new wine drunk fresh from the bottle, sparkling and immediate. The beaujolais nouveau for the 1985 summer expedition to Petermann Peak in north east Greenland has already been provided by Malcolm Slesser (SMCJ, 1986, xxxiii, 177, 283-287). As expeditions go it was a good vintage and what follows is a flagon drawn from the same cask ten years later. It seems to contain endless glasses unequally filled and obviously poured from the bottle of the mind by a shaking hand. Since few readers reach this remote corner of the Journal, maybe one every twenty years, now that you are here, why not relax by this little campfire in the wilderness of time and savour a glass or two of vintage '85 while I enjoy your company. Moveo ergo sum The weather in August 1985 was perfect for travel, the sun shone day after day and their was no wind. The big fjord leading north, however, was filled with heavy pack ice. After a day or two of pushing floes apart, we made it as far as a little island in the sun that lay a few miles off shore, the top of a drowned escarpment of red columnar basalt an acre or two in area. We landed in a minute bay on a few yards of dark sand. From a nook at the top of its northern cliff we watched the surrounding ice for signs of movement. The hours passed and merged into days. The sun circled the horizon. The pack drifted to and fro with the tide but didn't loosen. The island meanwhile started to make itself felt. It was a colourful, intricate place. Little terraces led off from a central basin of red gravel patched with grey, black and bright orange lichens, white and yellow flowers, light green willow and dark cassiope. It was like living on the palette of an artist confident with primary colours and bold forms. From the centre of the magic island the outside world was invisible except for the bright blue sky. The patterned terraces led the few yards to the sea and the sight of the surrounding hills: the jagged Staunings, the distant profile of Ella Island and the long horizon of Traill Island, fifteen miles to the East. A peace began to descend on the mind. The magic of this island was unused, very different from the more experienced magic of a Hebridean island. Ideas started to stir. A month spent here would be an interesting educational experience. This led to questions. Was all this desire for movement merely an excuse to avoid thinking? Were we missing the point? We had maps of everything ahead of us, aerial photographs too; others had been this way before. Were we passing the time playing a hands-on computer game in real time in a sort of actual reality instead of trying to do something original? This island suggested there were unexplored territories on offer to a mind not preoccupied with movement. Intellectual vistas on the other side of the backdrop of the apparent scenery kept opening up for attention. This would never do; people were fidgeting and pacing about restlessly. We were getting nowhere fast. We must set off and at least try to accomplish something; otherwise we would have no story to tell, no slides to give a show with, no achievement to show our worth, no sense of fulfilment, no story to sell. As we loaded the boat I had a wild urge to throw out a few foodboxes and say, "Pick me up on your way back". If I had I might have done some original journeys into wild and wonderful new territory. It was very tempting to snatch such an opportunity for original exploration but, alas, I had not the strength of character to bring off so bold an act. I got into the boat reluctantly, the last to do so. I had to go: I was supposed to be the leader. Quinquireme of Nineveh The south side of Ella Island presents a wall of near vertical rock rising straight from the sea for four thousand feet. A water fall at its centre bounces once or twice on the may down. The rock looks good, a prize ascent for some lucky climber of the future. We sailed below it in a matronly fashion in an underpowered inflatable boat towing another smaller one behind and making about four knots. We were also grossly overloaded with ration boxes crammed with food from half the world: pineapple from Hawaii, spices from the Indies, royal game soup from Fochabers; we had high-tech tents, sleeping bags of the finest feather and clothing of such oversophistication it was almost chic; we had jerry cans of refined fossil fuel and the complex engineering to transform it into movement; we also had a state-of-the art radio with which to talk to the world and a rifle to neutralise the local wildlife should it become too uppity. We chatted urbanely about the hundred and one exotic places we had visited at one time or another. We read sophisticated novels, some of us indulged in the affectation of playing liar dice to while away the time. From time to time we looked at the view through the portholes of our minds. And so we crawled along the foot of this beetling cliff like a caddis fly grub, our soft parts armoured against the world by a carapace of material and psychological comforts or, more vaingloriously, (and why not) we sailed like a quinquireme of Nineveh our five banks of oarsmen rowing rhythmically within our engine like genies in a bottle bearing us along with our cargo of apes and peacocks, cedarwood, sandalwood and sweet white wine. Respect for the professionals As you travel the empty coasts of northeast Greenland you come across good camp sites and find that someone has been there before you. The most humbling of these are low walls of stone and turf with a lintelled doorway, the winter houses of an Inuit population that survived here for a few hundred years, dying out last centuries just as Europeans reached this area. Scoresby described their empty settlements. A small band was seen once in the middle of last century and then no more: maybe they were the last of a population that once numbered a few score the maximum this bare land could support. These were the professionals and one ought to tread deferentially in their empty homeland. Their minimal technology was of such a high standard that they were able to survive entirely on the thin resources of this indifferent land. The only import they had was driftwood from the Siberian rivers delivered by the sea currents. All other materials were of local origin: bone, skin, sinew and a stone or two. Even in what might pass as good times, North-east Greenland is borderline survival country even for an Inuit band. It is a chastening and therefor beneficial exercise for the summer visitor to pause for a moment and in his mind switch off the daylight and imagine the vulnerability of life here in the winter dark at the absolute zero of human ability to survive. An oil lamp under a low roof with a squalor of meat and blubber represented security for the foreseeable future. In this minimal condition they created some sort of psychological home to protect their souls from the stark pressures of an uncertain, ungenerous land; they told stories, made jokes, sang songs, made poems, carved toys for their children. Sooner or later a hunter did not come back from the ice and his dependants died, for in hard times the remaining hunters, if there were any in the area, could not take on the demands of someone else's widows and orphans. It was of no great moment anyway because death was only the process you had to go through before rejoining your ancestors in a generous hunting ground in the sky where their was no cold and hunger; such a place certainly existed because those who had gone before held parties up there that were so wild they could be seen in this world as the northern lights. Or then again the dead might wander about in the cold moonlight, malicious and restless and envious of the living. More prosaically premature death by accident or hunger depleted a dangerously small gene pool so diminishing the ability of those remaining to cope with a borderline existence. Nansen survived one winter in an underground house with a skin roof but he shot enough animals in the Autumn to leave a pile of meat and blubber outside the door sufficient to last till Spring. Steffansson speaks of the "friendly arctic"; he lived off the land for three years but in a much more prosperous part of the Arctic than this. Both Nansen and Steffansson had guns, steel knives, matches and other locally irreplaceable artefact. Also they had companions as resourceful as themselves who didn't get killed or incapacitated to leave the survivor frighteningly alone or worse still lethally burdened with an invalid. Most importantly they didn't have families of vulnerable children to maintain; without these, individual survival is of no biological value. Mighty men though they were, they were essentially visitors from another planet living on imported psychological and material reserves. Our expedition by these standards was a summer holiday or at best an educational tour for aging yuppies long past their arctic shelf life. Play boys of the western world We entered the shadows of Kaiser Franz Joseph's Fjord towards midnight. It is a lonely, forbidding place at this shadowy time, a narrow slit, steep-sided and filled with unstable icebergs calved from the glaciers at its head. The event I remember so clearly is the occasion Slesser and I had our turn in the small boat. Unloaded and powered by the spare outboard it could get up on the plane and scoot around at ten or twelve knots. We did this occasionally as a relief from the sedate progress of the stately quinquireme. We skimmed away into the shadows and slalomed among the icebergs which rocked decorously and dangerously in the wake. We paused a couple of miles away on the smooth black water out of sight and sound of our material support. The bergs caught what little light remained and glowed spookily in the gloom, dimly teetering around their centres of buoyancy as the universe worked out the mathematics of whether they were going to topple into the here and now or remain ghostly metaphors of uncertainty. As we all know there is a wild delight in voluntarily playing under the paw of the great cat, putting a toe over the line and imagining what it would be like to cross it without the possibility of coming back. We, of course, were playboys and kept well on the safe side of the line. After frightening ourselves for a little we returned to the mother ship and rejoined our lumbering capsule of protective artifacts. A sense of place.- We emerged from the narrow part of the fjord into the broad waters at its head just as the light was improving. This is a magic time in the Arctic and it coincided with reaching the inner sanctum of this mountain fastness. Awe is an unfashionable word and it has lost most of its emotional charge from overuse. However, the feeling it used to describe is still to be experienced in places like this if you are that way inclined. Here there was space and silence, a wide sea filled with icebergs and reflections of icebergs and all around were mountains of light and shadow and great valleys leading into a mysterious interior. Emotionally it was a bit like crawling out of a window in your mind and finding yourself exposed on a high smooth face without a hold in sight while the mind rummaged around for a metaphor to chock into some crack to provide the semblance of security. I think the trouble was that we had passed a psychological barrier and had entered territory not yet appropriated into our scheme of things. This was not a place you could walk back from either on foot or in your mind. Maybe I was alone in this feeling but I think the rest of the party was also a bit subdued. Holiday camp Half a day after our arrival we had tramped down a platform in the emptiness and were well secured with psychological belays. Our tents were pitched on a sandy platform a hundred feet above the icebergs. The sun shone; there was no wind; it was very hot; we sunbathed in our underpants. It was a moment of detente before back-packing into the interior. Slesser to show how at home he was in the Arctic lay around starkers reading a racy novel. Pat set up the radio aerial and after unfankling a wandering muskox from its coils chatted urbanely to the Danes in Mestersvig; he also recorded the sweet twitterings of Horneman's redpoll. Phil tootled endlessly on his penny whistle, cogitating on his future. Roland remained quiet; he was lean fit and self sufficient; he had no need to do anything else. I continued to investigate who was in charge of this remote area. Thus each of us was making a statement, some more amusingly than others. The room at the top.= One day we did get to the topmost rocks of Petermann Peak by two routes of modest difficulty. It was a magic day of light and cloud shadows. We were on the highest point for 600 miles; it was all there below us: mountains and glaciers, receding eastward into the mysterious inland ice. This was the fourth ascent but we were so bemused by all the ambience that we quite forgot to scrubble in the cairn for any record left by previous visitors. In order to achieve this remote position we had exercised a fair amount of organising ability, physical effort, determination in the face of adversity and frank mountaineering competence. These virtues are already the stuff of a thousand climbing narratives and their further consideration here would be boring. The uniqueness of our situation was that we had a special freedom denied to most other expeditions in the sense that we were self-financed. We had no need to do science; we had no need of success or disaster to enhance the sale of a book, no obligations to have something interesting happen to entertain future audiences with slide shows. There was untrammelled room at the top of this particular mountain and the freedom to be conscious in the present without past or future strings. The scale of it all We had travelled the 125 miles from Mestersvig to the head of KFJ Fjord at an average speed of 4 to 5 knots. This is equivalent to putt-putting from Oban to say the head of Loch Torridon by the Sounds of Mull, Sleat and Raasay at a time when Scotland was emerging from the ice age. No human artefact would be lying around in this proto-Scotland except for maybe the ruined camps of some dead nomadic hunters who had arrived before the country was really open for business. The Staunings, like the Cuillins, rise straight from the sea but are well over twice the height and cover several times the area. The fjords were anything from two to twenty miles across; some were narrow passages with steep walls, others were bordered by musk ox pastures. From the head of the Arctic Loch Torridon we relayed our food and equipment for 35 miles inland, say from Inveralligan to Beinn Mor Fannich elevated to three times its height. I am not telling you all this to solicit your admiration. This type of journey after all, if you watch your step, is a lot safer than driving from Blairgowrie to Glasgow. I think I'm trying to make myself realise what a high privilege it was to travel in this vast unpopulated wilderness. The hunting band The experience of being a member of a small free-travelling band of competent equals exploring new territory is satisfyingly atavistic. It was what the much maligned male version of the human mind is good at. There are, alas, no longer any unknown oceans to navigate or Bering land bridges to be crossed into unpopulated worlds. Failing the real thing we are driven to do something unusual requiring skill and nerve. It is apparently something to do with mate selection. To do something bold and original with a bit of violence thrown in shows you have plenty of biological reserves at your disposal and so demonstrates that you are the possessor of a genome with spare capacity for the competitive game of life. Some biolgically aware female may trefore select you for matrimony after which your biological competence is utilised for supplying the resources for raising a family of dynamic offspring. Thereafter the demonstration of exploratory prowess for its own sake becomes socially taboo. The various substitutes on offer, such as beating a commercial opponent into the ground or its somewhat more respectable analogue, namely, ram-raiding a shopping mall with a borrowed Range Rover are both said to be pretty good but they can't possibly be as satisfying as the real thing. The present journey through the wilderness of East Greenland with self-reliant companions was a homeopathically diluted version of the fulfilling of our basic design and gave a vestigial feel of what the Real Thing must be like. The chocolate mountain On our return journey we made a side trip along a sound running to the north into a curiously different landscape. Its western shore was dominated by ruined mountains shaped like ziggurats, the highest about four thousand feet, they presented a striking horizon when silhouetted against the setting sun. The other shore, the one we followed was steep to and made up of loose contorted strata of browns yellows and whites. Some of the strata were wavy and as thin as biscuit; others were monstrous layers of flaky pastry. We reached a small bay which marked a transition to a stepped hillside cradling little lochans in its treads. Above this stepped pedestal there was a mountain of chocolate coloured rock, steep but disintegrating. One of its hanging glaciers had pushed a steep frontal moraine of chocolate rock onto a grassy meadow; you could see the bright greensward disappearing under the rich brown jumbled blocks as if they had toppled on to the fresh green grass the day before. I showed a photograph to a world famous glaciologist who also found its origin mysterious. Whoever constructed this area had unconventional ideas about mountains. Being here broadened the mind. This area was actually brilliantly original, a virtuoso performance in the art of orogeny, free of repetition and without a single orographic cliche. The iceberg in the distance We camped that night at the little bay on the east side of Ymir's Island looking west across to the ruined ziggurats of the opposite shore. The sound was three miles across here. Maybe a score of icebergs were scattered around. If a big berg coups the wave it creates can be substantial and in a narrow fjord its front is throttled by the walls and a tsunami can flood thirty vertical feet up the shore. We were safe here in calm wide open water so we moored the big boat to the shore by its bow keeping its stern out with an anchor. Nevertheless, from force of habit we pulled the small boat twelve feet above high water. After supper as we sat communing with the work of the Great Artist one of the distant icebergs slowly keeled over and its new summit spire metronomed against the dark opposite shore. Thank goodness it was such a small one and so far away. So we could relax. Then there was a roar. Sound travels slower than light of course. Then there was this wall of water coming at us. Help! Get the boat further up. We had moved it a few feet when the wave hit carrying the boat and ourselves still further up the shore. The bigger boat lifted its stern anchor off the sea floor and give a mighty twanging tug at its bow rope and then almost crashed against the bottom of the bay as the wave receded. That was the worst over; the subsequent tsunamis scaled themselves down progressively. It was only a small iceberg as icebergs go - about the size, say, of Edinburgh Castle, well at least the size of Stirling Castle, certainly as big as St Gile's Cathedral and we were at, say, the bottom of Calton Hill or the Abbey Craig. A bit bigger and we might have been bereft of everything, facing the winter without even skin, bone or sinew, well not as bad as that but we would have been very humbled by our carelessness, particularly if the magic, all-singing-all-dancing radio had been silenced. This was not a place you could walk back from. Personal Glimpses Phil was wont to tootle endlessly on his penny whistle as he worked out in his mind the next decisions in his life. The tootlings were semi-competent renderings of folk tunes . One day Roland picked up the whistle and played exquisitely a fragment of Mozart with all the twiddly bits . He then put the flute down and made no further comment. Phil seemed to miss the point and continued his tootlings unabashed. Leading an expedition with my good friend of more than fifty years Malcolm in it is a complicated business. Things have to stratified into several levels with minimal intermixing. Occasionally leaks occur. At one time I heard him remark with some irritation, "There are decisions being taken in this expedition that I don't know about". Pat was a man of many talents: internationally acclaimed birdsong recordist, technically competent in many fields from tram-driving to hawking, afficionado of Haydn quartets and possessor of vast stores of arcane lore; on the downside, alas, he had lost the original lenses in both eyes due to cataract; nevertheless he drove sports cars and motorcycles and had retained his pilot's licence and was proficient in aerobatics. Roland was wiry, superbly fit and utterly competent, a widely experienced mountaineer. Without him and Phil we geriatrics would never have made it. He flew aeroplanes, too, from microlights to his own up-market monoplane. In the former, specially adapted to carry a variety of sensors he surveyed territory in third world countries and in the latter went week-ending from his home in North Italy to Crete and Malta. An intended member, a friend of Malcolm's, who couldn't make it at the last moment was the former Italian ambassador to Argentina during the Falkland's war. His presence would have enhanced the texture of the group by another magnitude. So we had to make do with what we had. Sunset Song North of Ella Island five sounds meet and at the centre of their wide confluence is a flat looking island with a rounded hill on it. The map indicated its height was 530 metres. As we emerged into the confluence from Antarctic Sound on our way home it looked like a good place to camp with a view point for an after dinner stroll. We approached over a calm sea amid lengthening shadows. The form of the island became more complex; the level base was a barren expanse of dark jumbled rock, the hump a fin of steep unstable slabs. The coast presented a line of low fractured cliffs with a few black sandy beaches. We landed on one and tried to break in to the interior. There was no level ground for a tent, only jumbled rocks. There was also an atmosphere of hostility. The place had an aura. This was one of these islands that didn't like to be visited, at least in its present mood. We coasted the southern shore to the far end where we found that the edge of the fin came down to the sea. We landed again in the shadows of a narrow strip of cold gloomy beach. I sensed that we were not welcome. Fortunately we had people with us who were able to handle situations like this and we began to climb the revolting unstable rocks. The beginning was a series of steep loose gullies. Perseverance lead on to a ridge of stable rock which took us by pleasant scrambling to the top. We made it in under an hour; we were fit by now. The summit of this shadowy citadel was paradoxically a bright friendly place like the top of an iceberg emerging into sunshine from gloomy submarine depths. We were above the horrors in a still evening of soft colours with the sun just about to descend below the northern horizon. It would take too long to describe the total experience: the colours, the silence, the feel of air so clear the furrows made by a family of eider ducks were clearly visible on the smooth sea far below, the mysterious Vega and Sofia Sounds leading easterly to the bear-prowled outer coast, the sunny unexplored northlands and the dark, sunless south whither we were bound. We reached Ella Island later that night and rounded its eastern cape deep in the gloaming, feeling our way along the dim shoreline, bumping into a submerged rock with a resounding jolt but nothing worse. We camped at the head of a bay. A driftwood fire made a little globe of yellow light on the edge of the immense darkness to come. Thank God we didn't have to face a winter here using skin, bone and sinew to win sustenance from a bare land so far beyond everything that the northern lights flicker in the southern sky. A few days later we were back in Scotland, one of the better-off residential estates of the world, living among intellectually well-to-do friends who weren't stuck for the odd sirloin steak and bottle of good claret. By and large, balancing this against that and taking one thing with another it is really not all that bad being a playboy; there are worse belays on the Eigerwand of life. Thank you for joining me. I'm sorry I've rambled on so long; you may be the only person ever to reach this unfrequented recess of the Journal so I have had to make the most of it, particularly as I feel that if you have read so far I would like to have known you when I was alive.