We’re heading to a penguin rookery at Gardner Island. We’re dropped at the busy ship and we walk from there to the island. There’s the groin ache again, but I cradle the pain in a limp. I’m with Dip and Julia and Kim, two biologists. We pass two Weddell seals. They’re asleep in the sun, oblivious to the drama of spilled blood beside them. The blood’s hotness has plunged it deep into the ice. The red’s etched like acid until the next fall of snow. The biologists want to find out where it’s from. It could be a fight or a birth. They approach the animals downwind then come in close and check eyes and tails and stomachs and flippers. A seal twists and snaps a bark of annoyance. Dip and I walk on. The biologists continue their busyness.

I limp. I concentrate on the back of Dip’s neck. His nape is so pretty and vulnerable. He turns and comes back to me and points to the island ahead of us. I don’t see any penguins. Then I do. Thousands, standing black and white in the twin of their background. Dip tells me to stay quiet and low as we approach.

‘They don’t like anything that’s taller than them.’

Then he’s gone.

I sit among the penguins and they peer and inch forward with a voracious curiosity. I take my microphone out of the esky. The penguins stop. Then they inch forward again and after several minutes they begin to raucously click and hoot and cluck. They’re calling for their mates. Suddenly they stop, as crisp as a choir. They stare at my microphone. I thank them. It’s an exquisite recording and I’ve fallen in love with their trust. I chatter away to them. They stare at me and then begin their honking again loudly over me.

Dip reappears over a rise and we head back down the rocks to the sea ice. In the distance is another island. A tall cross reaches into the sky. Dip tells me it’s for a man who was killed in an explosion on the station a decade ago. I remember conversation scraps. The man was extremely popular. He was about to go home. A tough season was behind them and the boat was just about to come in. There was an explosion in the power shed. That’s all I know. No-one who was in Antarctica with him wants to talk about it.

The cross sticks up stark and incongruous from the wideness of the land. Its spirituality, to me, doesn’t sit right. The spirituality of Antarctica is in the air and the stillness and the hum of the silence, it’s deep in the land.