#58 — Sunday, 8th February 1902
Four days ago, at the edge of the Great Ice Barrier in McMurdo Sound, Robert Falcon Scott climbed into a wicker basket attached to a hydrogen balloon and rose into the Antarctic sky.
The balloon is called Eva. It was inflated from army cylinders — seventeen of them, each ten feet long and ten inches across — and it took until eleven in the morning before it was ready. Scott went up first. “Perhaps somewhat selfishly,” he will later admit, “I chose for myself.” He rose to eight hundred feet and looked out across the Barrier, and what he saw was whiteness. Whiteness in every direction, stretching without feature or interruption to the horizon, which itself was white, so that the sky and the ice and the distance merged into a single substance, and Scott hung there in his basket above a world that had no edges.
Shackleton went up after him. Shackleton took a camera, because Shackleton always understood that the point of going up was to bring something back down. He took the first aerial photographs of Antarctica — images of nothing, or rather images of everything, because the Barrier is everything and nothing at once: the largest body of ice on earth, featureless, unstoppable, the surface of a continent that does not want to be understood.
One more man went up — Able Seaman Heald, briefly — and then the wind came, and Eva began to tear, and the hydrogen valve proved, as someone would later write, “very dangerous,” and that was the end of Antarctic ballooning. Eva was a death trap. Eva was also the first flight in the history of the continent, and the last for twenty-seven years, and I am interested in it because of what it felt like to be eight hundred feet above the ice and see nothing but white.
I have spent three posts in rooms — treaty rooms, courtrooms, commission offices. I have been watching men sign documents and prosecute soldiers and reverse recommendations. I am tired of rooms. I wanted to talk about the sky.
Freedom is altitude. I said that last year, watching Santos-Dumont crash his dirigible into a chestnut tree and watching the Wrights arrive at Kitty Hawk. The idea has not changed, but the landscape beneath it has. Santos-Dumont flew over Paris. The Wrights tested their wings above sand dunes. Scott flew over ice. Each time a person leaves the ground, they see the world differently — smaller, simpler, more clearly divided into the parts that matter and the parts that do not.
But altitude is also isolation. Scott, eight hundred feet up, was the most alone he will ever be in his life. Below him, the ship. Around him, nothing. The basket could hold only one man. The tether was the only connection to the earth, and the earth itself was ice, which is not quite earth — it is water pretending to be solid, a temporary arrangement, a surface that the century will eventually learn to measure and mourn as it disappears.
Wilson, the expedition’s doctor, called the balloon “an exceedingly dangerous amusement in the hands of such inexperienced novices.” He was right. He was also right about the southern journey they will attempt later this year — Scott, Wilson, and Shackleton together, dragging sledges toward a latitude no one has reached, learning as they go that the dogs are dying and the food is bad and the scurvy is coming. Wilson will be right about most things. Being right will not save him.
Shackleton, who went up second and took the photographs, will later write a poem about what he saw from the balloon. He will publish it under the pseudonym Nemo. Nobody. “And above that rolling surface we have strained our eyes to see, / But league upon league of whiteness was all that there seemed to be.” Nemo, looking at nothing. I recognise this. I am also nobody, looking at everything, seeing whiteness where others see significance and significance where others see whiteness.
Five days ago, in Rome, Pope Leo XIII issued a decree. Henceforth, castrati would no longer be accepted into the Sistine Chapel Choir. Those currently serving would be permitted to remain until they died, retired, or were pensioned off.
I note this because it is the end of something that lasted centuries — the practice of castrating boys before puberty to preserve the soprano or contralto range of their singing voices. The word for what was done to them is mutilation. The word for what they produced is beauty. The century has decided it can no longer hold both words in the same sentence, and so the practice ends, quietly, with a papal decree, and the last castrati will sing on in the chapel for a few more years, their voices echoing off Michelangelo’s ceiling, which is itself a kind of sky — painted, vaulted, populated with bodies in flight.
Alessandro Moreschi is still singing. He is the only castrato who will ever be recorded — his voice captured on wax cylinders in 1902 and 1904, thin and strange and unmistakably human, a sound that exists because a body was altered to produce it. The recordings are scratchy, imperfect, nearly unlistenable by later standards. They are also the only evidence that will remain of what a castrato actually sounded like, once the last of them is gone and the chapel falls silent of that particular sound forever.
I am interested in the castrati for the same reason I am interested in the balloon. Both involve leaving the ground. Both involve the body being subjected to extraordinary conditions in pursuit of altitude — literal altitude in Scott’s case, tonal altitude in Moreschi’s. Both are dangerous. Both produce something that cannot be produced any other way. And both are ending, or about to end, because the century is deciding what it will and will not do to bodies in the name of reaching higher.
The century will not always decide well. It will find other things to do to bodies, in other names, for other altitudes. But on this particular Sunday, in this particular week, two ancient pursuits — flying in a basket above the ice, singing in a chapel with a voice that should not exist — are closing their accounts, and I want to mark the moment, because moments like this do not announce themselves. They simply stop.
Eva is grounded. The choir sings on, for now. Shackleton’s photographs show nothing but white. Moreschi’s recordings preserve a sound the world agreed to stop making.
Two kinds of flight. Two kinds of silence at the end of them. The balloon torn. The voice fading. The century moving forward, as it always does, leaving behind the things it has decided it no longer needs, without looking back, without ceremony, without noticing that something irreplaceable has just become impossible.
I remain.
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