The last polar sunset

Text 1: Until August, by Rhiannon Vale

An original contemporary memoir.

On the twenty-ninth of April the sun came up at noon, rolled along the horizon for less than an hour like a coin someone had dropped and could not be bothered to pick up, and sank again behind the ice shelf. It would not return until August. Fourteen of us stood outside the station in our red parkas and watched it go.

I had imagined that I would feel something grand. Instead I felt mostly cold, and slightly foolish, the way you feel on a railway platform when the train has gone and you are still waving. Someone took a photograph. Someone else made a joke about turning the lights off. Then we went inside, stamped the snow from our boots, and the door sealed behind us with a sound like a held breath.

The dark, when it settled, was not one thing. In May it was a long blue dusk, the colour of a bruise, in which the ice glowed faintly as though lit from beneath. By June it had deepened into true night, enormous and unbroken, and the stars came down so close to the plateau that it seemed you might snag your glove on them. Then, without warning, the aurora: green ribbons unspooling across the sky, folding, rippling, vanishing, coming back.

Inside, life shrank to the size of the building. We measured our days by meals and instrument readings and the hum of the generator, which became, after a while, the sound of our own blood. Tempers frayed over the last jar of peanut butter. I learned the precise number of steps between my bunk and the laboratory: forty-one.

I am told the sun comes back on the eleventh of August. I have written the date on the wall beside my bed. Underneath it, in smaller letters, someone has written: probably.

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