The Ice Museum Read Online Free Page A

port with boats lined along the quayside, secured by frozen chains. The city was smothered, the noises of the cars softened by the snow; the pedestrians were looking down, heads bowed against the wind, preoccupied with the ice beneath their feet. It was a city concentrating on the mechanics of motion, where everyday activities had become absorbing and difficult. I walked from the central station in a cold wind, wet snow falling onto my clothes, into my eyes and mouth.
    I slid away from the city centre, over fields and along summer footpaths transformed into a ridge of packed-up snow. The frozen ground stretched up a hill flanked by ice-trees. A dim sun was drifting towards the horizon. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of the pasty waters of Oslofjord, glinting in the afternoon semi-light. Nansen’s beached boat was an hour’s walk across the Bygdøy Peninsula, a spit of land curving away from the city. It would have been a gentle stroll in any other weather conditions, but I was wishing I had packed crampons, instead of shabby notebooks that weighed me down. I passed slowly up a hill, breathing in cold air, shuddering into my coat. I walked through streets of perfect wooden houses, with elegant old Norwegians sliding past on their daily circuit; glad of the cold, they skied slowly through the tranquil afternoon. The buildings on Bygdøy were the homes of the affluent and influential: ambassadorial residences with security gates, flying Norwegian flags like recent settlers.
    Nansen’s boat was kept under a roof—a tight-fitting canopy, built above the masts. When I arrived I saw what looked like an enormous icy tent standing in a car park, with the pallid fjord on the other side. Across the fjord container ships were waiting at Oslo’s city harbour, while passenger ferries turned slowly to head for Sweden and the Baltic. The Kontiki Museum, a memorial to the resilience of Thor Heyerdahl, stood next to the icy tent. A few families were walking through the doors.
    The white compound housed the low-slung hull of Nansen’s boat. Pushing inside, feeling the coldness of the room, I saw a boat with its sides swelling outwards, a creation of curved wooden planks, immaculately painted in red and black. I stared up at the relic, a boat cleared of barnacles and debris, its neatness emphasizing its obsolescence, dried out, never to be launched again. And I thought how Nansen had planned the ship, how he had stalked across its polished boards, galvanizing his crew against the long polar night. He named her Fram —meaning ‘forward’ in Norwegian. It was a challenge—forward into the onslaught of the elements, beyond the land of Thule to somewhere still more distant and strange. Fram was fitted for Arctic exploration alone. The tub-shaped hull, the hulking thickness of the sides, had been lovingly crafted by Colin Archer, a Norwegian-Scot, on specific instructions from Nansen. It was the physical weight of the ice that had obstructed previous attempts to reach the Pole, Nansen thought. ‘Everywhere the ice has proved an impenetrable barrier, and has stayed the progress of invaders on the threshold of the unknown regions,’ Nansen told his audience at the Christiania Geographical Society in 1890. At the time, he had just returned from making the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap, and he was generally regarded as something of an expert on jagged vistas of ice. Despite the overwhelming evidence that it was impossible to reach the Pole by ship, Nansen thought it was worth continuing to try.
    Nansen saw the history of Arctic exploration as an epic quest for knowledge. He laced his own exploration with a sense of myth and mystery. ‘Unseen and untrodden under their spotless mantle of ice the rigid polar regions slept the profound sleep of death from the earliest dawn of time,’ he wrote. ‘Wrapped in his white shroud, the mighty giant stretched his clammy ice-limbs abroad, and