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cough’, she said, from hiking in the cold with those sulphurous acid smells.) She stopped at the classic viewing point, to look over the rim. To the left, the east, was the lava lake, not a big red lake filling the whole crater but a patch of dark black crust with red lines running through it. Around it, the crater was littered with glossy black bombs that had been flung out by the lava, the size of a hand, a chair, a car.
    â€˜People talk about measuring the land, to get it down to size. I say no, don’t do that. I use the land to take my measure. Am I competent enough to be there, to survive there? On a calm day at Erebus nothing seems more innocent. And then it throws up bombs with no warning. Kerpow! It’s visceral. This land makes me feel small. Not diminished, but small. I like that.’
    Her description was spellbinding. I couldn’t understand why she was now prepared to bury herself in this dark building for the season. ‘I love this,’ she said, gesturing to the banks of switches and microphones in front of her. ‘I don’t know why. I guess I like feeling involved.’ But then she shrugged and gave a rueful smile. ‘I do miss being outside, though.’
    Jules Uberuaga was another of the pioneers. A diminutive dark-haired firebrand, she stands all of five feet two inches and drives the heavy equipment, the big macho snow dozers used to build the runways and dig out trenches and level platforms. You might run into her in one of the bars; if you ask her nicely (and flirt with her a little) she might offer to take you for a ride in her beloved D7, a massive snow dozer that she has dubbed Trixie.
    She will explain the best way to flatten a skiway, or dig out a building that is buried in snow without getting stuck yourself. She talks of the need to have a ‘bubble in your ass’—an instinctive sense for when a surface is level. She will coach you in the subtle variations in angle and blade that will generate a neat roll of snow barrelling in front of you. And if you can maintain the roll without letting it break for the distance Jules sets, she will take a picture of you, standing in triumph on top of Trixie’s roof.
    Jules first came down here in 1979 when she was just twenty-four. There were few women in the programme and none driving heavy machines. One of her early jobs, out on the sea ice maintaining the airstrips, was immediately threatened when she was told that she couldn’t use any of the men’s bathrooms, which is to say she couldn’t use any of the bathrooms. She was only saved when the servicemen let her use the facilities in their medical centre.
    In her thirty-plus seasons she has heard everything you can imagine about why women shouldn’t be in Antarctica in general and in a D7 in particular. But just as with Sarah, for all the men who protested there were always plenty of others ready to help her fight her corner. When she told one supervisor he was a ‘fucking asshole’ and asked if what he really wanted was to hit her, he screamed in fury: ‘Did you call me an asshole?’ ‘Yes!’ She shouted back. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it’s about time someone did!’
    Now Jules is a veteran, as essential to McMurdo as the buildings and the furniture. ‘I bet I’ve pushed more snow than any woman in the world,’ she says, not in a boastful spirit, but as a simple matter of fact. Like the forams she has thrived in a world that looked well above her weight; and you sense when you speak to her that she has survived in part by building herself a protective outer shell.
    The rest of the people here have also found their own adaptations to this strange way of living. They wear intricately crafted zipper pulls or carefully sculpted beards. They make spoof videos of classic sci-fi movies, or songs from
The Muppet Show,
exchange complex salutes, sit in the galley or the coffee shop arguing fiercely